SOURCE: Szili, József. “Poetry as Cognition and as Structure-The Views of Ransom, Rate and Brooks.” In Literature and Its Interpretation, S. Simon, pp. 113-62. The Hague, Hungary: Mouton Publishers, 1979.

[In the following essay, Szili focuses on the critical theories proposed by Ransom, Crowe, and Tate, particularly their concepts regarding poetry.]

Croce considered his own critical tenets as the new criticism, and Joel Elias Spingarn, a historian of literary criticism and student of the Renaissance, gave this title, The New Criticism, to a lecture inspired by Crocean ideas. He demanded a purely aesthetic approach to literary works and rejected every method and theory of literary scholarship which—instead of focusing on the work—focused on the life and personality of the author, the impressions of the critic, dogmatic rules and norms of poetry, or on “history, politics, biography, erudition, metaphysics”.¹ Nevertheless, the name of the school of the New Criticism did not derive from Spingarn's lecture, but from the title of a book by John Crowe Ransom, published three decades later, in 1941. The title was The New Criticism, and the author, dealing with the critical ideas of I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, and Yvor Winters, arrived at this conclusion: “I think it is time to identify a powerful intellectual movement that deserves to be called a new criticism.”²

Not everyone is satisfied with the attribute new.³ According to Cleanth Brooks, new criticism in Ransom's terminology is no more than a “neutral and modest designation; i.e. the modern criticism, the contemporary criticism”.⁴ Among the shapers of the New Criticism were Ford Madox Ford, T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, William Empson, in some respects Spingarn and the American neo-Humanists, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More and others. This type of criticism had great influence on the evolution of literature and the study of literature in England, too, but it was in the United States that it appeared as a single critical school.

Its original nucleus was formed by the “Southern Critics”. More renowned members of the group were John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Richard Palmer Blackmur, Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks and W. K. Wimsatt. In the field of theory Ransom, Tate and Brooks represent most markedly the “ontological”, “contextualist” and “organistic-formalism” of the New Criticism. Dissimilarities among the members of the group are considerable. There is also a broader interpretation of the New Criticism, covering predecessors and successors alike. In this sense we may count as New Critics also the opposition of the Ransom school, the Chicago neo-Aristotelians (Ronald S. Crane, Elder Olson, W. R. Keast, Richard McKeon, Bernard Weinberg, and Norman Maclean). It is difficult to draw a dividing line between the New Criticism and certain other critical schools of the twentieth century. For example, due to their performance as textual analysts, the “myth critics” who have a background of Freudianism, Jungianism and cultural history (Northrop Fry, Wilson Knight, Francis Fergusson, Philip Wheelwright, etc.) may also be regarded as New Critics.

Another problem is posed by the broad interpretation of the New Criticism in the form it is presented in Robert Weimann's book.⁵ Weimann uses the term “New Criticism” in the broad sense of the word, with reference to the convergent tendencies of Russian formalism, Polish and Czech structuralism, West-German and Swiss phenomenological poetics as well as to the Anglo-American New Criticism. That is, he applies a term which is as a rule used in a narrower sense to designate a broad philosophical trend of twentieth-century bourgeois literary scholarship, one that certainly deserves a more strictly qualifying descriptive term, for example “structuralism” or René Wellek's coinage, “organistic and symbolistic formalism”.⁶ The American New Criticism doubtless bears much affinity to the afore-mentioned formalist and structuralist schools. Its name is, however, no descriptive term. Its theoretical pursuits are more accurately expressed by terms such as “ontological criticism” (Ransom), “contextualism” (Murray Krieger), “analytical criticism”, “semantic analysis”. But these are liable to the same comment as Walter Sutton makes on the terms of “aesthetic formalism” and “analytical criticism”:

“But these titles do not take into account certain attitudes and theoretical assumptions that distinguish the New Criticism as something other than simply a formalist movement. It seems best to limit the term New Critics to several men associated with John Crowe Ransom from the early 1920s and to others who share their common outlook. Besides their practice of close textual analysis, the members of this group have been bound by the conservatism of their literary, social, and political views. They have been hostile toward the physical and social sciences and have avoided ideas and terms from these disciplines, depending rather upon traditional rhetorical and literary sources and their own coinages. As defenders of literature, some of the New Critics have attempted to establish standards by which the language of poetry might be distinguished from that of science. On the basis of such distinctions, they have argued that poetry or imaginative literature provides knowledge or truth different from that supplied by science. With this idea of ‘two truths’ they have contributed to an aesthetic mystique, according to which the truth of art is apprehended immediately through the contemplation of the aesthetic symbol or icon.”⁷

The American New Criticism has fulfilled a specific theoretical function as a concrete historical movement. Its theoretical system (whose systematicness and logic are very disputable) is reducible to a few general theses, but in the actual historical life of the movement these did not appear as mere generalities, but in their full range of colours, complexities and, of course, contradictions.

FUGITIVISM, AGRARIANISM AND NEW CRITICISM

Not all of the Southern Critics hailed from the area south of Mason and Dixon's line. For example, Winters came from the Midwest, and Blackmur from New England. But the nucleus of the group was established in the plantation country of the South, at Nashville, Tennessee. In the late 1910s some poetically disposed professors at Vanderbilt University began to meet regularly to discuss their poems and their views on poetry. This group, which functioned partly as a debating society and partly as a literary circle, was at its peak in the early twenties. They published a bi-monthly literary review, The Fugitive, and firmly believed that they were preparing a literary and cultural renaissance of the South in the spirit of conservative antiliberal social ideals. Walter Clyde Curry, Donald Davidson, William Yandell Elliott, James Frank, William Frierson, Sidney Mttron Hirsch, Stanley Johnson, Merill Moore, John Crowe Ransom, Laura Riding, Alfred Starr, Alex B. Stevenson, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Jesse Wills, and Ridley Wills rated as members of the group. The greatest authorities were Davidson, Ransom and Tate.

According to Ransom and Davidson their review owed its title to a poem by Hirsch with the same title. It expressed a flight from the “sentimentality” and “the extremes of conventionalism” of Southern literature, but not escapism.⁸ As they wished to update and reactivate the apology and vindication of the backward social conditions of the South, they turned away from the enervate (sentimental and pathetic) ways of nurturing the Southern Confederate traditions. Like the English imagists, or Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, they drew encouragement to develop their ideal of poetry from the style and critical remarks of the French symbolists. The “principle of irony” which, it seems, gradually became a key category of their aesthetics was emerging in their circle already at that time. They saw in it the essence of modernity, an infallible antidote to conventionalism and sentimentalism. Their modern tone which, unlike the European avant-garde, was moderated by the poetical obligations of conservative classicism and was a typical product of Anglo-Saxon compromise at the beginning of the century. It indicated, formally at least, the establishment of a synthesis between the new and the traditional. Unlike the achievement of their more distinguished fellow poets (Pound and Eliot) who gave modern expression to conservative ideas, the sham synthesis of these professor poets will hardly evade charges of academism or pedantry. (Ransom rejected The Waste Land on account of its prosodic licences and the difference of its construction from the usual treatment of the theme.)

Their poetry was erudite. Lacking a powerful social demand and spontaneous poetic mission they stood for good instead of great poetry. Their workshop practices and critiques served this aim, and practically all their subsequent activity reflected this intimate climate of workshop aesthetics. They made the excellence of the artisanship of minor masters the aesthetic standard of “true” poetry. The conscious application of “irony” (also intimating self-irony) created a semblance of moral and emotional superiority and impartiality, and this was enhanced by flashes of erudition, close adherence to formal rules, and virtuoso technique combined with economy of language, imagery and composition. The scope of their themes covered a rather narrow aspect of life. The provincialism of their poetry disappeared only partially due to their repudiation of the most conspicuous and backward forms of Southern provincialism.

The Fugitive ceased publication in 1925, and the group dispersed. A poetic anthology published by the Fugitives in 1928 elicited no response. More attention was attracted to them in the late twenties and early thirties by a dispute in which, together with T. S. Eliot, they criticized the inconsistency of the antiliberalism of the neo-Humanists. Several members of the Nashville group came out with the programme of agrarianism. A collection of essays (I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, New York and London, 1930) was published with writings by Ransom, Davidson, Tate, R. P. Warren, Andrew Lytle, Stark Young, John Gould Fletcher, Frank Lawrence Owsley, Lyle Lanier, H. C. Nixon, John Donald Wade, and Henry Blue Kline. To what they called Eastern industrialism they opposed the Southern planters' traditions. From a romantic anticapitalistic platform they criticized finance capitalism for engendering alienation and changing personal human relationships into financial relations. Their ideal was the Southern hierarchy, believed to be a patriarchal and, therefore, an organic community. Their imagination was stimulated by the same kind of traditionalistic nostalgia which inspired the conventional and sentimental Southern literature they so much despised. A new element was that they tried to look at the situation more sensibly, to allow also for certain negatives of “Southernism”. In an essay written in 1935 Tate gave the reasons why the South had produced no great literature and no lively literary culture, whereas in his opinion the Southern way of life might have been a particularly suitable basis to this end. According to Tate, the trouble was not that Southern society was built on the institution of slavery, but that the slaves, being Africans, were not soil-bound but property freely sold and bought as merchandise. This was the reason, he wrote, why no intimate relationship could develop between slave and slaveholder such as between the serf and his lord in Europe. “That African chattel slavery was the worst groundwork conceivable for the growth of a great culture of European pattern, is scarcely at this day arguable.” So much is true of these allegations that no great culture could flourish in an absurdly anachronic social system which could be morally vindicated only with utmost hypocrisy (institutionalized in the orthodox fundamentalism of Southern Protestantism). Tate virtually held the Negroes directly responsible for all this: “The white man got nothing from the Negro, no profound image of himself in terms of the soil.”⁹ The “Southern programme” as a practical programme was completely illusory. Some light of interest was thrown on its economic and social aspects by the economic crisis which the Agrarians regarded as a crisis of “Eastern industrialism”. This ideology preserved its prestige and efficiency mostly in less practical fields; in the realm of literature and the study of literature in the case of Ransom, Tate and the other critics. They reconciled the general precepts of their programme with other modern forms of romantic anticapitalism, with the reactionary and demagogic criticism of finance capitalism, or of “plutocracy”: thus with T. E. Hulme's doctrine that as a form of government, dictatorship was most congenial to modern classicism; with Pound's formula of a fascist, corporative social hierarchy; with Eliot's ideal of an orthodox religious and feudal community. Characteristic of the group's orientation was that Ransom, Tate, Brooks, R. P. Warren, Yvor Winters and Davidson, together with some of the neo-Humanists—Norman Foerster and Robert Shafer among them—and a few neo-Thomists were prolific contributors to the American Review, Seward Collins's ultra-rightist periodical. (Other regular contributors were T. S. Eliot, Windham Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton.)¹⁰

The Agrarians counted all means and manifestations of social progress among the phenomena of alienation in modern capitalism and criticized them as such. In their view it was one of the greatest sins of modern capitalism that it had created the working class and Marxism with it. They presented as a process of dehumanization the historical process of demythologization, the process of Enlightenment. They regarded as heresy the belief in human progress, and meticulously criticized explicit and implicit efforts at the secularization and rational interpretation of religion. All that they deemed, on this score, wrong and unacceptable, they imputed to Romanticism, thus following a tradition set up by the French Action Française, and then by T. E. Hulme, Babbitt, Spingarn and Eliot. They stressed the opposition between science and poetry, positivism and myth and the superiority of poetry and myth over science and scientific empiricism (“positivism”). Rejecting the idea of freedom and social progress, they referred to man's transcendental bonds and immanent imperfection, the “original sin” in theological terms. They charged Babbitt's and More's neo-Humanism with concessions to conventional (i.e. anthropocentric) Humanism through its allowances for a sort of correlation, reciprocity, and even rapprochement between the “divine” and the “natural”, the religious and the profane ideal of man. Like Eliot, they saw a dangerous tendency to secularization in the neo-Humanists' view that, through belief, people could reach perfection as laymen, unaided by a rigorous observation of religious and ecclesiastical norms. Ransom went so far as to accuse modern Christianity of a rationalist interpretation of its mythology.

In the thirties the group of Southern critics was joined by other critics professing aesthetic views akin to theirs: Kenneth Burke, who also flirted with Marxism, R. P. Blackmur (one of the editors of Hound and Horn) and Yvor Winters, who became a passionate but loyal critic of the “obscurantism” of the rest of the New Critics. The names and activities of the New Critics became widely known. In the twenties and thirties their right-wing “radicalism” conveniently counterbalanced the cultural movements of the Left. Focussed on “literariness” and the literary work of art, and picking on the biases of academic circles and university education, together with their insistent demand for a close analysis of literary works, their criticism had an important corrective function. Their university textbooks taught a new view of literature, and the erudition and exactitude of their critique, the intolerant polemic tone of their writings, their devotion to ideological issues interwoven with the cause of literature attracted ever greater attention from the lovers of literature. It was a negative aspect of their interest in modern literature that they tried to monopolize, in the name of extreme reaction, the currents of modern literature and to codify the laws of literary evolution. But they have merits as popularizers, and their critical and theoretical work is a considerable contribution to the exposition and clarification of the problems of twentieth-century literary evolution. Their theoretical activity was directed mainly against theories and practical methods which implied an alleged or real negation of the specific nature of literature. They ridiculed the extrinsic approach to literature by coining aphoristic generalities that were near caricatures. They used Occam's razor to shave off branches, buds and roots from the living tree of literature, since none of these was literature, or the tree, “as such”. As a result, they trod in the footsteps of Coleridge and others, and introduced a long list of “fallacies” into literary criticism: “affective fallacy”, “intentional fallacy”, the “fallacy of origin”, the “fallacy of denotation”, the “fallacy of expressive form”, the “heresy of paraphrase”, etc. Their reference to fallacies should not conceal the fact that the representatives of this school, its founders, do not always respect logic, and they treat philosophical and aesthetic concepts with bewildering high-handedness. In The New Romantics, Richard Foster demonstrates that the New Critics replaced logic and system with “the Rhetoric of Speculation”, a phantom of both logic and system.¹¹ What are, in Foster's view, the rhetorical instruments of the speculative procedure of the New Critics?—“Big Words” (Idea, the Good, Logos, Substance, Being, Soul, Flux, the One) whose meaning remains usually undefined; “the Rhetoric of Definition” which only imitates or suggests scientific definition; “Mixed Terms” (for example he cites Blackmur identifying language with gesture, Tate and Ransom identifying poetry with knowledge, in such a way that the meaning of the interpretative terms must be utterly changed to give sense to these identities); “Intellectual Punning” such as Tate's triplet of “extension-tension-intension”, and the “dialectic” which does not get farther than stating and combining opposites and arbitrarily reduces, from the outset, the real sphere of possibilities with an appeal to such unproved antimonies as “Poetry vs. Science, Intellect vs. Feeling, Reason vs. Imagination”; and finally “the Mystical Rhetoric of Negation”. “Negation” refers to their attempt to give verbal expression to the inexpressible with the consequence that we are told in negative terms what they talk about. As far as the essence of the questions is concerned, the New Critics are usually satisfied with paradoxical assertion, with the form or semblance of definitions and syllogisms. In the last analysis, they suggest their views by poetical rhetoric, by the magic of language, and play with the formal system of scientific explanation and demonstration.

These less sympathetic features of the school make it difficult to outline a coherent system of its theories. A common basis is their conservative view of society and the “radicalism”, that is the aggressiveness, of their conservatism. They all disparage science, the cognitive function of science, and they consider it incapable of grasping the essence of its subject. They set poetry as mythical, “ontological” cognition above it. They try to comprehend the difference between science and poetry by postulating a difference between the language of science and that of poetry. They consider the poem all by itself, as a literary and aesthetic model deprived of all extrinsic contexts, an autonomous entity, an organized whole, and, as such, the object of study of literary aesthetics. Since they deny the difference between the act and the object of cognition, what is, in their view, ontological cognition, comes down, in effect, to the cognition of the poem. This means the absoluteness of formal analysis and the negation of critical appraisal. Their theory of art is usually pivoted upon some paradoxical idea (irony, paradox, tension, etc.) with a semblance of dialectics. For standards of literary aesthetics, they use specific categories of style typology, raising to universal validity certain norms of English metaphysical poetry, French symbolism and T. S. Eliot's poetry.

Exceptional productiveness is another characteristic of the New Criticism as a whole. Even though there is no reason to deprecate the abundance of critical writings as a negative phenomenon or as Alexandrianism ab ovo, it is striking to see this prolificacy, or, in fact, exuberance, measured against the profusion and profundity of the reflections. Robert Weimann had good reason to complain that the American New Criticism “stellt dann auch den Betrachter in ein Dickicht von literaturkritischen Publikationen und Theorien; diese sind einer knapp orientierenden Darstellung um so weniger zugänglich, als zahlreiche Neue Kritiker ‘eine beinahe scholastisch anmutende Freude am Ausbau von System und Methode, an einem hochentwickelten Spezialvokabular’ (R. Stamm) an den Tag legen.”¹² And there is already a similar abundance in works dealing with the New Criticism.

In the thirties the New Critics won recognition by offering a timely and concrete alternative to the historicist approach which was (or seemed to be) indifferent to the particularities of literature. In contrast with impressionistic criticism, they claimed that criticism should be exact and “scientific”. In contrast with the meticulous and even hair-splitting pedantry rampant in the universities, they firmly represented the demand that university programmes and literary studies should be concerned with the appraisal and analysis of literary works, and subordinate all other approaches to literature to this task. Their work on textbooks was also considerable. Understanding Poetry (1938) by Cleanth Brooks and R. P. Warren had a special part in propagating the new method. In 1943 it was followed by Understanding Fiction, by the same authors; drama was discussed in Understanding Drama by Cleanth Brooks and R. S. Heilman, published in 1945. After the example of Hulme, Pound and Eliot, the New Critics re-interpreted the history of Anglo-American literature to suit their disapproval of the Enlightenment and Romanticism as well as the intents of sophisticated taste. They found a positive prototype in the metaphysical poetry of Donne and other seventeenth-century English baroque poets. They theorized about the formal elements of modern literary styles and, for a time, together with other aestheticians with retrograde views on society, monopolized the functions of the connoisseur and elegantiarum arbiter of modernity. In this respect certain biases and superficialities of progressive bourgeois and Marxist oriented criticism also played into their hands. And when the dynamism of the leftist intellectual movement of the thirties broke down, the New Criticism gained great positional advantages as the aesthetical movement of right-wing radicalism. By the early forties a situation had developed in which, according to Douglas Bush, “no department of English could count itself respectable, unless it included at least one New Critic”.¹³ Already in the thirties several little magazines were workshops of the New Criticism.¹⁴ In the forties there was hardly any university review or other periodical publication of literary studies which did not take every opportunity to publish essays by the New Critics. By the end of the forties the New Criticism had become the most authoritative and influential school of American literary scholarship. Its basic principles became critical truisms, its methods were widespread. At the universities the practice of textual analysis became the main or the only method of the study of literature, and studies in the history of literature were based on authors favoured by the New Criticism.

At the same time the movement changed in a characteristic way. Its precepts became vulgarized and its biases grew more conspicuous. Its increased influence exposed it, in some respects, to the threat of losing its original substantive characteristics. As Forster put it: “It is now impossible to identify the individual species New Critic as something distinct from the general run of competent literary academics.”¹⁵ This may account for Ransom's remark: “I do not know what is meant nowadays by a ‘new’ critic.”¹⁶ The New Critics were gaining new ground in theory as well, and in such a difficult field as the theory of the epic. It is obvious that at the start their methods and generalizations were based exclusively on lyric poetry, and it was no secret that they regarded the short lyric poem as the ideal model of the literary work. In the forties they attempted to extend their method to the problems of the novel.¹⁷ They also tried to reconcile some central theses of their militant antihistorism with a historical approach to literature.¹⁸

From the outset the New Criticism was censured for its asocial and unhistorical conception and reactionary ideology. (Hyman mentions as most remarkable a critical analysis by Alick West, a Marxist critic.)¹⁹ In the mid-forties Harry Levin wrote an essay, ‘Literature as an Institution’, to counterbalance the one-sided influence of the New Critism and suggested an aesthetic approach with an eye to the social character of literature.²⁰ At the end of the forties the Bollingen Prize was awarded to Ezra Pound who had been tried for treason and collaboration with the fascist regime of Italy, and this fact roused strong antipathy against the New Criticism. F. O. Matthiessen pointed to coincidences between McCarthyan manoeuvres and the irresponsibility of formalist criticism,²¹ while Robert Gorham Davis, in an article on ‘The New Criticism and the Democratic Tradition’, documented the close connection between the New Criticism and reactionary, antidemocratic traditions.²² The fifties witnessed a growth in the number of those who were dissatisfied with the social attitude of the New Criticism. From the end of the fifties, however, when the school began to appear more like an historical phenomenon than an actual problem, both its opponents and its defenders strove to revaluate it, and to revise and modify its original conceptions in the light of a broader, more social and more historical approach.²³ René Wellek's positive appreciation sounds like an epilogue: “The New Criticism—whose basic insights seem to me valid for poetic theory—has, no doubt, reached a point of exhaustion. In some points the movement has not been able to go beyond its initial restricted sphere: its selection of European writers is oddly narrow. The historical perspective remains very short. Literary history is neglected. The relations to modern linguistics are left unexplored with the result that the study of style, diction, and meter remains often dilettantish. The basic aesthetics seems often without a sure philosophical foundation. Still the movement has immeasurably raised the level of awareness and sophistication in American criticism. It has developed ingenious methods for the analysis of imagery and symbol. It has defined a new taste averse to the romantic tradition. It has supplied an important apology for poetry in a world dominated by science. But it has not been able to avoid the dangers of ossification and mechanical imitation. There seems time for a change.” We have to note, however, that with regard to the future of the broader current, the “organistic and symbolistic formalism”, Wellek was not pessimistic: “Today it would need a closer collaboration with linguistics and stylistics, a clear analysis of the stratification of the work of poetry to become a coherent literary theory capable of further development and refinement, but it would hardly need a radical revision.”²⁴

It is a most important positive achievement of the New Criticism that in the study of literature it has drawn attention to the work of art, the “poem”. It put in high relief the autonomous features of the literary work, and endeavoured to trace its sense and meaning, and even its value, back to them and to their internal coherence, their structure. But it is mainly the intent inherent in these strivings that compares well with those achievements which have come about as a result of an interaction between the evolution of literary scholarship and that of modern logic. The prospects opened by these achievements point far beyond the requirements the New Critics laid stress on in their demand to make the study of literature “more scientific”. And what is more, their criticism of Charles W. Morris (and, in general, of the semanticists and logicians who stressed that the precision of the language of science was a sine qua non of cognition) betrays that they were, in many respects, in opposition to the innermost core of literary structuralism, the exact description of a work of art.

They have proposed two problems of a general character which we shall discuss on the basis of the theoretical writings of Ransom, Tate and Brooks, the classics of the New Criticism. The first is a question much discussed here in Hungary, too: the relationship between poetry and cognition. The second question concerns the substance of the literary work.

RANSOM, TATE AND BROOKS ON POETRY AS COGNITION

“No doctrine is more central to the critical theory of Ransom, Tate and Brooks than their belief in literature as an essential form of knowledge”, William J. Handy states in his treatise Kant and the Southern New Critics.²⁵ His statement needs correction insofar as according to the critics he mentions, literature is not simply an essential form of knowledge but its most essential form. Allen Tate wrote in 1940: “It is my contention here that the high forms of literature offer us the only complete, and thus the most responsible, versions of our experience.” The “conviction” of Ransom, Tate and Brooks that literature offers the only “complete” version of experience is based on a negative principle, namely that science provides only partial, indirect, abstract, “distorted” experience, while in their view literature is a complete, direct, concrete and true form of knowledge. The antiscientific bias of the New Critics concedes at most that science may tell something about inanimate nature. They disapprove of the intrusion of science in the realm of the spiritual, which in their view is a property of “poetic cognition”, of “imagination”. Tate asserts that “historicism, scientism, psychologism, biologism, in general the confident use of the scientific vocabularies in the spiritual realm, has created or at any rate is the expression of spiritual disorder”.²⁶ And since, in their opinion, literature is the depository of complete experience, the greatest heresy is the literary scholar's “naturalism”, i.e. his attempt to apply to literature the results and methods offered by the progress of science. The word science means, of course, the natural sciences in the first place. Starting from the inapplicability of certain methods and analogies of the natural sciences to social phenomena, the New Critics presupposed that science was by no means capable of dealing with the life of society and man, with the phenomena of the “spirit” in an exact manner. As a matter of fact, they denied the cognizability of these phenomena when they shifted the task of studying them to “literature as a form of knowledge”.

A chapter in Ransom's book, God Without Thunder, is entitled ‘Satan as Science’.²⁷ In The New Criticism he points out that the concessions of the new criticism to science (Richards' neurological psychologism, etc.) are responsible for its imperfect beginnings. He condemns science because, as a form of knowledge, it is based on abstraction. Tate also criticized the sciences “whose responsibility is directed towards the verification of limited techniques”. He described Richards' theory of poetry as “the powerful semi-scientific method of studying poetry”. Not without reason: Richards' bold theories which needed support from psychology were backed by absolutely no scientific experiments; they were built on hypotheses. What Tate could not be reconciled with, however, was not something that was semi-scientific, but science itself, the “naturalist” (materialistic), or “positivist” (empiricist) views and methods. His outlook was in fact based on “the belief, philosophically tenable, in a radical discontinuity between the physical and the spiritual realms.”

If literature is absolute cognition, there can be no case for historical, social determination. Nor is it possible, of course, that knowledge about history or society should be the knowledge supplied by literature. “The function of criticism should have been in our time, as in all times, to maintain and to demonstrate the special, unique, and complete knowledge which the great forms of literature afford us. And I mean quite simply knowledge, not historical documentation and information.” It sounds good to say that literature is not historical documentation and information; the words “documentation” and “information” allude to the incompleteness of these media of cognition. Tate assumes that a theory that does not absolutize literature ignores its particularity. He affirms, in any case, that literature is equal to cognition, or at least “the great forms of literature”, nowhere exactly defined by Tate, are equal to it, as they provide “complete knowledge”. It becomes clear from these lines that this knowledge has nothing in common with knowledge about history. (It may possibly have, but not in the form of documentation and information.) But what do we know when we simply “know”? Tate replies to this question in the closing sentence of his meditation: “Literature is the complete knowledge of man's experience, and by knowledge I mean that unique and formed intelligence of the world of which man alone is capable.” Tate adds that this definition makes no concession to formalism or to historicism; i. e. to “art for art's sake” or to the sociological approach to literature. He always condemns any conception in which literature is but one among the forms of social and political expression. This definition of knowledge can hardly satisfy us.

The New Critics often say that a poem is knowledge, that it conveys knowledge, but they seldom tell whose knowledge it is, whether this knowledge has a criterion of truth, and if so, what it is. And if they say a word about it, they do so in the way Tate does: “It seems to me that my verse or anybody else's is merely a way of knowing something: if the poem is a real creation, it is a kind of knowledge that we did not possess before. It is not knowledge ‘about’ something else; the poem is the fullness of that knowledge. We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.”²⁸ The rational core of this enunciation is directed against the “heresy of paraphrase”. The prose variant of the poem (its “content”, etc.) is not indeed a poem. But what does all this have to do with cognition? Not much, in Tate's view, for his statement is made up of mutually exclusive propositions. The poem is “merely a way of knowing something”, but “not knowledge about something else”, yet “a kind of knowledge that we did not possess before”, and even the “fullness” of that knowledge, although this fullness is only that of our knowledge about the poem. Tate precludes the possibility that the poem is knowledge about something else: knowing as such is confined only to knowing the poem. Of this we can say either that the poem then is not knowledge, or that if poetry is the real way to the fullness of knowledge, poetry is also the most suitable way of knowing the poem. Thus we obtain an infinite series of poetic cognitions which we can profanely explain with the recipient's re-creation of the poem. Presumably, Tate has in mind only the formal symptoms of cognition—the experience of evidence, for example. But he points also to the fact that a certain (relative) unity and interaction exist between the object, the medium and the subject of knowledge. His train of thought probably implies that cognition obtains its real, physical, this-worldly form as action and experience. By these formal traits he ought to regard as cognition anything with which man enters into a spiritual, serious, intimate and experienceful relationship. In any case, he thinks that the most experienceful relationship is the most profound type of cognition. In Tate's philosophy knowledge becomes an autonomous concept, it loses its conventional meaning and, with that, also the reference to its real function. But will knowledge directed at itself be knowledge at all? If, however, knowledge is in fact not knowledge (scientific, verifiable, etc.), then of course poetry may be covered by the concept of cognition; but what is the use of regarding as knowledge something that is in fact not knowledge?

Tate argues with some Logical Positivists who claim that the language of poetry is “ambiguous”, “connotative”, or “iconic”, and as such it cannot convey real knowledge. According to Richards's communication theory, the statements of poetry are pseudo-statements compared to the verifiable statements of science. In his essay “Literature as Knowledge” Tate argues with the representatives of the semantic behaviourist conception of language, in particular with Charles W. Morris, a member of the Chicago school of Logical Positivists.²⁹ In Morris's theory of art the aesthetic sign is an iconic sign, i. e. a descriptive, representational, pictorial symbol. The iconic sign, unlike the symbols used in science, does not denote but it designates. The essential difference is that the denotatum is a real, existing object, situation, relation, etc., but the designatum is not, it may be an imaginary thing. While those suffering from a certain type of insanity, Morris contends, are unable to distinguish between designatum and denotatum, i. e. between imagination and reality, the aesthetic sign contains the trait which prompts the interpretant to make a distinction between denotatum and designatum. It is on this point that Tate locks horns with Morris. He declares that according to this theory there is just a hair's bredth of difference between poetry and insanity. He singles out Morris's remark that the act of distinction (which in Tate's view is already by itself an act of knowledge) is somehow present in the artistic sign itself. On this basis Tate contends that the poem, as it exists by itself, as a system of linguistic signs, is knowledge. He stresses that the mind capable of knowing must not be left out of cognition. That is, a passive “interpretant”, one reduced merely to the execution of mechanical responses, cannot be substituted for the cognitive mind representing active spirituality. This is true, we admit, but the cognitive mind must not be mistaken for or confounded with the symbol system. “Distinction” is an act of the mind indeed, but the motive of this act is not yet distinction. The very act of knowing is not present in the artistic sign, therefore on this basis it cannot be posited that the poem is “cognition”. (The motive of distinction is not necessarily given in the artistic symbol, it may result from the external context of the symbol or the system of symbols, from the situation, from conventions, etc.)

Tate reckons with the full reality of language; in his opinion, as he states it quoting the words of Richards who later corrected himself, “It [language] is no mere signalling system.”³⁰ This is true. It is a different matter that the New Criticism absolutized the autonomy of language, its non-symbolic characteristics, i. e. it disregarded the real conditions of language. Morris's theory of art interprets the realm of art only in relation to the sign and the designated thing, and grasps only an isolated phase of the process of cognition. Inasmuch as Morris substitutes this for the complete process, Tate rightly points to the disregarding of the “cognitive mind” by this theory. Man is really an active, creative factor of cognition. But Tate's idealistic concept of man is only a phantom of the real man who acts as a participant in social practice. Thus here the active, creative mind is in fact nothing else than the demiurge of idealism. After all, Tate considers artistic cognition as the kind of “knowledge” which coincides with the act of “creation”, of “making”, with an appropriate mode of intelligent existence.

The issue is made extremely complicated by the fact that Tate's concept of cognition ab ovo does not deal with real cognition. That is, for him the “ontological” character does not specify the concept of cognition in the general sense (potentially implying the scientific-theoretic mode of cognition or, in an even broader frame, also what is described as artistic cognition). Richards, for example, considered cognition in this light when he excluded from its scope the “pseudo-statements” of poetry, and also later, in his book on Coleridge, correcting (or more clearly defining) his former position, he conceived cognition and existence, or cognition and creation as a Hegelian contradiction, a contradiction inherent in artistic imagination. Unlike Richards, Tate wishes to set poetry as cognition above scientific cognition. He makes experience, perceptually vivid experience, a criterion of true, “complete” knowledge, and by this mixing of terms he comes to the conclusion that poetic cognition is superior to scientific cognition. He refers only very vaguely to the drawback of poetic cognition, to the trait of “distinct irresponsibility” which limits the “advantage” of perceptual representation: “It [poetry] is neither the world of verifiable science nor a projection of ourselves; yet it is complete. And because it is complete knowledge we may, I think, claim for it a unique kind of responsibility, and see in it at times an irresponsibility equally distinct. The order of completeness that it achieves in the great works of the imagination is not the order of experimental completeness aimed at by the positivist sciences, whose responsibility is directed towards the verification of limited techniques. The completeness of science is an abstraction covering an ideal of cooperation among specialized methods. No one can have an experience of science, or of a single science. For the completeness of Hamlet is not of the experimental order, but of the experienced order: it is, in short, of the mythical order.”

The declaration of a contradictory unity of cognition and existence, or of “ontological knowledge”, does not solve the problem. The possible dialectical “solution” was already implied in Kant's antinomies, and the New Critics play variations on it. Tate leaves open the problem: what is knowledge as such if complete knowledge is ontological? On the other hand, even if we recognized this particularity of literary cognition, this paradox, as it stands, would at most show the situation in relief. It would not solve the problem; it is only a formula whose solution may be the solution of the problem. But one should not stop at this point unless one is compelled to admit that thinking (one's own thinking) has come to a standstill. Tate understands the situation and at the end of his essay he declares, as an admission, that the study of the theoretical problem should not extend beyond that point: “However we may see the completeness of poetry, it is a problem less to be solved than, in its full import, to be preserved.”³¹ We may of course propose at any point of our aesthetic speculation that instead of abstract thinking we should look at the object. But to do so we do not have to indulge in speculations at all; no critical study, none of our aesthetic generalizations will ever serve as substitutes for the concrete poem, sculpture, etc.

Tate tries to look for a solution with his reference to the mythical order. Thus the question of the substance of cognition is shifted over to another plane—instead of poetry as cognition the question at issue will be myth as cognition. This is a problem not without interest, too.

Tate clarifies the concept of mythical order with Richards's words. In his Coleridge on Imagination Richards explains that myths do not at all represent escape “from the hard realities of life”, they are “no amusement or diversion to be sought as a relaxation”. On the contrary, myths “are these hard realities in projection, their symbolic recognition, co-ordination and acceptance. … The opposite and discordant qualities in things in them acquire a form. … Without his mythologies man is only a cruel animal without a soul … a congeries of possibilities without order and aim.”³² First of all, we have the impression that Richards' concept of myth is more positive, more humanistic than that which subsists upon the orthodox mysticism and radical conservatism of the New Criticism. “Myth” and “rite” may be terms which designate rationally conceivable social forms with rational meaning; Marxist scholars also use them in this sense, and in this case the juxtaposition of a “mythical order” and a “scientific order” may be a meaningful utterance. On the other hand, that kind of extrapolation, that exaltation of the mythical order which appears in the works of some New Critics—even Richards included—represents the apology of irrationalism, which makes way for a myth interpretation of very hazy (Freudian, Jungian, traditionalist, religious, etc.) motivation. Much of the practical criticism done by the New Critics nowadays is a crossbreed of textual criticism and myth interpretation. But the fact that in the course of time Ransom, Tate and other New Critics got nearer to mysticism was due to an increasing influence of religious orthodoxy rather than that of myth criticism. (In the second part of Foster's book the chapter headings describe the directions followed by the four “pilgrims” of the New Criticism. Accordingly, Richards came from Laboratory to Imagination, Eliseo Vivas from Nature to Spirit, Blackmur from Criticism to Mysticism, and Tate from the Old South of Catholic Orthodoxy.)

Ransom's theory on poetry as cognition is somewhat different from Tate's. Ransom is ready to accept scientific and theoretical knowledge as a proper type of cognition. But he, too, thinks that this type of cognition is inferior to myth, which, in his opinion, gives a more profound and more complete knowledge and is able to represent the world as a whole, without disrupting its unity and totality, or cancelling its concreteness, unlike science which surveys the world from fragmentary aspects and applies empty abstractions as substitutes for its real properties. In his book, God Without Thunder, Ransom tries to discover the myth which has been least secularized. According to him, believers in God-Man (Christ) secularize religion. And the myth of Prometheus, as interpreted by Shelley and others, is in reality the antimyth of the scientific spirit which leads to the ruin of mankind. The sciences, Ransom writes, are incapable of providing man with complete knowledge, for they can, at any one time, deal only with the specific features of things, and their abstractions do not comprehend the concreteness of objects. “This is why science can never give us an adequate knowledge of the concrete thing.” As a mathematician, he has found a rather vulgar proof of this imperfection of the science that is held to be the most exact of all. He declares that [frac13] can be approximated only by an infinite decimal fraction (0.3333 …) and cannot be precisely expressed in the decimal system.—“So a surd symbolizes the stubborn concreteness of objects.”³³ In his introduction to The World's Body he likewise emphasizes how incapable science is to grasp the world in its integrity, although poetry is capable of recognizing and discovering “the world's body”, the reality of the world composed of integral, undivided and indivisible objects.³⁴ Science offers “reduced, emasculated, and docile versions of the world”, he writes in The New Criticism and he adds that it is the job of poetry “to recover the denser and more refractory original world which we know loosely through our perceptions and memories.” In his theory of poetry he nevertheless allows a role, though a subordinate one, to this form of cognition which gives a reduced, emasculated, docile version of the world, as this comes closest to what Ransom calls structure in his dichotomic division of the poem into structure and texture. (Structure, however, has only a passive role in the formation of the aesthetic value.) Yet it is a fact that Ransom is more cautious in his rejection of scientific cognition than Tate or some other New Critics. He willingly admits that science and poetry have equal functions in cognition and complement each other: “The poetic act is an act of knowledge. The scientific and aesthetic ways of knowledge should illuminate each other; perhaps they are alternative knowledges, and a preference for one knowledge over the other might indicate an elemental or primary bias in temperament.”³⁵ Accordingly, if the dichotomy of cognition which, since Kant, has been an epistemological premise of idealistic philosophy (including the one-sided Crocean apotheosis of the irrationalistic way of knowledge) is valid, in Ransom's view we shall have a free choice, or at least a choice unbound by facts, and at most by our subjective temperaments only. In Ransom's view artistic cognition gives complete knowledge (whatever this completenes means); so either he made the choice in accordance with his temperament, or it is a fact that this type of cognition does give complete knowledge. If the latter assumption is correct, science has not much business to do in the sphere of cognition—or at least in the sphere of things that require greater concentration and “completeness”. For example, the problem of what man and the human world are like will not belong to the scope of science.

According to Cleanth Brooks, all the New Critics did was to expel science from the sanctuary of things not in its line. As he writes, “there is nothing ‘escapist’ about hostility to science which orders science off the premises as a trespasser when science has taken up a position where it has no business to be”.³⁶ Brooks also declares that “poetry, though it does not compete with science and philosophy, yet involves a coming to terms with situations, and thus involves wisdom, though poetry as such indulges in no ethical generalizations”.³⁷ Tate speaks in similar terms about the relationship of poetic cognition to its object: “Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us from them. Their only final coherence is the formal re-creation of art, which ‘freezes’ the experience as permanently as a logical formula, but without, like the formula, leaving all but the logic out.”³⁸ These statements sound sensible, even if, in some respect, they need completion, elaboration and explanation. But are the “coming to terms with situations” and the “wisdom” that follows complete knowledge? Are they cognition in the precise sense of the term, or modes of practical action, though motivated by cognition? And although the selection and the recognition of “fundamental conflicts” are genuine acts of experience, does artistic form as the “freezing” of experience or—in the words of Eliseo Vivas—as “informed substance” really mean direct cognizance and knowledge, or only a particular kind of readiness or disposition to cognition?

The answer to these questions depends on how we define cognition. If we prefer a meaning of cognition that expresses—instead of definite, clear, verifiable knowledge—the existence of a polysemous, vague imagery complex which, though essentially “free”, is suggestive of the line of action to be taken, perhaps through the indication of the main lines of force and tendencies of the situation, it is to be feared that by cognition we shall mean something else than the disclosure of the objective laws of reality. This “humane” and even anthropomorphic “cognition” is an extremely tame form of cognition, tractable and controllable by our subjective conation. It lends itself particularly well to helping us promote to the rank of cognition not only an anthropomorphous mythical order but also, however incompatible with the knowledge of reality, mysticism, and to making us accept it as “complete knowledge”. The New Critics make no secret of pursuing this aim when they place “artistic cognition” beside and above scientific and theoretical cognition.

CONTEXTUALIST MODELS OF THE WORK OF ART

In the aesthetics of the New Criticism the lyric poem is the representative type of a work of art. As a rule, the New Critics do not strive to present a systematic and methodical aesthetics of literature. Their discoveries in literary aesthetics have, of course, equivalents in the general theory and aesthetics of art. In particular the aesthetic activity of one of Cassirer's disciples, Susanne K. Langer, and of Eliseo Vivas is close to the trend represented by the New Criticism. Concentration on lyric poetry, the handling of poeticalness as language, ignorance or neglect of differences in genre point to Crocean features. But a fundamental difference is that the New Critics attributed a primarily “scientific”, “exact”, “analytic” and not an artistic, empathic, expressive role to criticism. As our earlier references show, with this idea they were proposing, at least on the premises of their own theory, an imperfect, incomplete way of getting to know the poem (“the complete knowledge”). They recognized the consequences. They emphasized that criticism can at most prepare for a better understanding of the work but cannot be a substitute for the work of art itself. We may assume that the “complete knowledge” of the work of art is made possible likewise by artistic cognition. They give hints of this in their disquisitions but do not go so far as Springarn who, echoing Croce, considered it the critic's substantial task to recreate the work of art, to re-experience—though but for a few moments—the expressive intuition.

In analysing the work of art the New Critics execute logical moves. In accordance with their epistemological conceptions their theory of art lays emphasis on the “concrete”, “sensory” and “unique” elements, the elements of objectivity, but the correlations of such elements are ultimately regulated by logical formulae. That is to say, they conceive of the order of concrete images, of their interrelations, in the form of logical relationships. They illustrate the ideal realization of this order with the example of the Metaphysical School of English baroque poetry. Although in general they explain the difference between art and science by the difference between the language of art and that of science, their theory of poetry refers to a distinct, closed, limited linguistic object. What is more, they regard the work of art as a completely “closed”, accomplished, self-contained object or process. In the case of the poem this completeness implies a limited linguistic text of definite dimensions. Its value and its meaning exist within the limits thus given. What is outside this unity does not matter—except, of course, the associations and linguistic conventions which go with the sound and the meaning of words, but which are given practically with the words themselves. All this, however, becomes living, meaningful and valuable only as the poem's text. It is understandable that in these conditions the most essential thing is the relationship of the linguistic entities within the context of the poem, or rather the totality of these relationships. Several, more or less divergent, theories and terminologies have been developed to explain and illustrate these internal, meaningful and value-forming relationships of the poem.

According to Ransom the “structure” of the poem is its “content” taken in the usual sense (its theme, subject, plot, message, its train of thoughts exposable in prose, and even the logical moves of the denouement, namely the factors of the intellectual organization of the poem). Yet, as this “structure” involves such “intellectual” elements as rhyme patterns and metre, this is not the same as “content” in the usual distinction between content and form. Ransom is, however, not very consistent in this regard and it is not clear if he draws the line in every respect between his concept of structure and the vulgar concept of content. He states, for example, the following about the structure of the poem: “This is its [the poem's] prose core—its science perhaps, or its ethics if it seems to have an ideology.”³⁹ The poem is the unity of structure and texture. Texture consists of unique, particular features which have no logical relation to the structure of the poem. Compared to the poem's subject matter, to its exposable train of thought, these are irrelevant, unimportant elements. They include the sound of words, the rhythm of verse (this does not contradict what has been said about metre, as metre is merely an abstraction of rhythm), the figures of speech, etc. Ransom made reference to the aesthetic function of such and similar concrete, sensory factors long before the elaboration of his structure-texture theory, for example in The World's Body: “A proper scientific discourse has no intention of employing figurative language for its definitive sort of utterance. Figures of speech twist accidence away from the straight course, as if to intimate astonishing lapses of rationality beneath the smooth surface of discourse, inviting perceptual attention, and weakening the tyranny of science over the senses.”⁴⁰ In his essay, Criticism as Pure Speculation, he explicitly says that these “antiscientific” sensory elements are the vehicles of aesthetic quality. “The ostensible substance of the poem may be anything at all which words may signify: an ethical situation, a passion, a train of thought, a flower of landscape, a thing.” This substance receives its poetic “increment”. And he adds: “It might be safer to say it receives some subtle and mysterious alteration under poetic treatment, but I will risk the cruder formula: the ostensible substance is increased by an x, which is an increment. The poem actually continues to contain its ostensible substance, which is not fatally diminished from its prose state: that is its logical core, or paraphrase. The rest of the poem is x, which we are to find.” He likens the “ostensible substance” of the poem, or its “logical core”, to the functional elements of a house, its walls, roofing, etc., and the “local texture” to its painting, the tapestry, etc. “The paint, the paper, the tapestry are texture. It is logically unrelated to the structure.” The “irrelevant”, “local” elements of texture make poetry richer and fuller than prose, which according to Ransom is “single-valued”: it gives the mere frame, the logical structure.

The structure-texture formula is akin not only to the distinction between content and form but also to the classicist idea that in the poem the figures of speech, rhymes, etc. serve as ornaments. Ransom, however, is to a certain extent inclined to regard the “logical core” implicitly, in the words of György Lukács, as “aesthetically assimilated content”. And, indeed, from the finished poem we never abstract anything else than the “aesthetically assimilated content”, unless we definitively quit the poem as such. At any rate, Ransom's theory is directed against the “contentism” of idealist criticism which derives the substance of the poem, its most profound aesthetic quality, from the idea expressed in it. We have the impression that Ransom takes the logical structure as a necessary evil. His discourse reveals that in the formation of aesthetic value, in “the poetic increment of the ostensible substance”, only the texture has a function (true, this function is inconceivable without the resistance of the structure). And the relationship between structure and texture cannot be examined further on the basis of this formula, for this relationship is not logical but “irrelevant”. “The intent of the good critic becomes therefore to examine and define the poem with respect to its texture and its structure,” Ransom claims. But the texture is conclusive: “If he has nothing to say about its texture he has nothing to say about it specifically as a poem; but is treating it only insofar as it is prose.”

This formula is crude enough indeed. But, in conclusion, Ransom makes a rather self-assured statement of his “discovery” and its perspectives: “A number of fascinating speculative considerations must follow upon this discovery. They will have to do with the most fundamental laws of this world's structure. They will be profoundly ontological, though I do not mean they must be ontological in some recondite sense; ontological in such a homely and compelling sense that perhaps a child might intuit the principles which the critic will arrive at analytically, and with much labor.”⁴¹

The child in question may perhaps intuit also what Ransom means by ontology. There are, however, adult critics who admit that they have no such intuition. A Cambridge professor, William Righter, writes in his book, Logic and Criticism: “The concepts used are used so loosely as to make any careful examination of them unfruitful, for except in some such vague way as I have suggested, I cannot see at all what Ransom means by ‘ontology’.” In any case, Righter formulates at least one possible interpretation of Ransom's theory on the ontology of poetry: “The language of poetry ‘exists’ in an altogether different sense: it is useful for nothing, conveys no information, exists entirely for its own sake, and is more or less a ‘thing in itself’.” According to Righter, the nature of “texture” is utterly obscure, and Ransom's examples cannot help us either, for the logic of language is not a structure of a sensual character as a building and its structure are, and the analogy of painting presents, as Righter puts it “an analogous dilemma”. He thinks that Ransom's only merit is that he used a term to direct attention to a hardly expressible and explainable quality of the language of poetry. Unfortunately, however, this term “certainly fails to satisfy any criterion which would demand of it any precise meaning or clear explanatory value. Ransom himself seems under the illusion that he has added a precise set of distinctions to critical language; he talks often (and vaguely) of logical rigour. And it is here that he is misleading. The effort to make critical language clearer or more logical has hardly been served by the addition of ‘texture’.”⁴²

Ransom in his afore-cited essay refers to the Hegelian “Concrete Universal”, and thinks that with his texture-structure formula he can grasp the organic connection of the concrete and the universal, and correct Hegel, freeing the aesthetic quality from its too close ties with the abstract idea and wedding it more closely to concreteness. As the relation—between structure and texture, or between abstract idea and concrete particularity—is not sufficiently clear in Ransom's “discovery”, so it is not clarified what reasons he thinks support the victory of the concrete and the particular. What need is there at all for an “ostensible substance”? Tate and Brooks implicitly correct their master's formula of the poem, suppress its duality akin to the duality of content and form; they see the substance of the poem exclusively in the formstructure. As Walter Sutton writes, “In his dualism and his concern for rational structure, Ransom stands apart from the other New Critics. Except for Yvor Winters, most of them consider the structure of poetry to be un- or anti-logical and the poem itself to be a unified whole. They tend to agree with Ransom, however, that poetic language provides a knowledge distinct from that of science. It does so not so much through its iconic nature, however, as through its contextual quality, the way in which it functions as a unified complex or symbol to express, metaphorically, a knowledge or truth like that of myth or religion.”⁴³

Tate's “tension theory” resembles Ransom's insofar as he also presupposes two antithetical basic factors. One is “intension”, which in logic signifies the intension of a term, and the other is “extension”, that is, the extension of a term. The word “tension” is no philosophical term, it means “suspense” in everyday language. According to Tate, this word should denote the meaning of poetry: “I am using the term not as a general metaphor, but as a special one, derived from lopping the prefixes off the logical terms extension and intension. What I am saying, of course, is that the meaning of poetry is its ‘tension’, the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it.” This verbal schizogenesis implies a quantitative growth as well as a qualitative change: the reference to logical terminology has only a metaphorical value, for if it were not so, tension would not tell us more of the poem than that it is the totality, the “full organized body”, of the intension and extension of the terms contained in it. Furthermore, the unity of intension and extension in logic is, in the final analysis, the concept itself. In Tate's interpretation it is the poem itself—not as a concept but as an object. Or is it the “meaning”, the “idea”, the concept of the poem? Tension used metaphorically is a special metaphor also because the word retains its common meaning as its connotation, suggesting the dynamic energy, the movement of the given poem, or the tension inherent in its statics. The poetically metaphorical formula of the poem, the reference to the dynamics of the poem can arouse a good deal of sympathy for Tate's theory. (Ransom may, of course, allude to the same dynamic movement, the same organical and dialectical interrelationship, if not otherwise, through reference to the Hegelian concept of the “concrete universal”.)

Tate's terms are parallel to Ransom's. Extension refers to an abstract “denotative” language (the language of science), and intension indicates concrete, connotational values. The emphasis is on tension, on complete organization. It is precisely “organization” that increases the value of tension stripped of its prefixes. And the greater the tension-cohesion between the tendencies denoted by the prefixes, the greater the value of the organization. This again may resemble Ransom's conception inasmuch as Ransom can also demand of structure the full enforcement of its inner logic, and of texture its bold “irrelevance” and an abundance of motifs. (But the elements of the “structure”, its “materials”, are neutral: their “extrinsic”, philosophical, ethical, political, etc., value has no part in the poem's aesthetic value.) “Organization”, however, is new as a value-forming element and, in comparison with Ransom's theory refers more precisely to the relation between the two poles.

Tate's theoretical comments are more interesting than Ransom's hypotheses also for other reasons. Ransom illustrated his structuralist theory practically by allusions to analogies only. Tate reckons with some of the possible objections and tries to prove his contentions by a closer verse analysis than Ransom did. Tate's train of thought is more consistent and clearer, too. He says that communication debases poetry; if the poet resorts to communication, he uses the language of the masses and employs accustomed associations. At such times the poet is satisfied with appealing in his verse to sentimental dispositions already existing in the readers. He talks of an object which in itself evokes certain feelings—virtually in a predictable manner. He uses expressions which can, through existing conventional emotive associations, rouse some feeling towards an object with which originally they had no deep, inner logical connection. This is “the fallacy of communication”. Such are, Tate says, many anthology pieces of propaganda poetry (patriotic and religious) or sentimental domestic and personal lyrics. And this is probably so. But Tate goes further: he claims that all romantic poetry is a victim of this fallacy. “The poets were trying to use verse to convey ideas and feelings that they secretly thought could be better conveyed by science (consult Shelley's Defense). …” According to Tate, poetry retreated and surrendered to science the right to cognition, knowledge and meaningful, logical expression. Thus, through the fault of romantic poetry, poetry became synonymous with obscurity, with vague expression. (Whereas, in Tate's view, poetry alone has the right to real cognition and, accordingly, to meaningful expression.)

Tate cites James Thomson's poem, The Vine, to illustrate the inconsistency of such, to him, “romantic” imagery. “Now good poetry can bear the closest literal examination of every phrase, and is its own safeguard against our irony.” Even a poor or mediocre metaphysical poem (for example, Cowley's Hymn to Light) surpasses the former type in that its denotation is faultless. Its images are no random selection which lose their effect in the very next verse or sentence, but images which preserve, in every point and in every respect, their logical connection with one another and with the whole of the poem. The imagery of Thomson's poem is far too unorganized and inconsistent:

The wine of love is music,
          And the feast of love is song:
When love sits down to banquet,
          Love sits long:
Sits long and rises drunken,
          But not with the feast and the wine;
He reeleth with his own heart,
          That great rich Vine.

Tate is right: “The more closely we examine this lyric, the more obscure it becomes; the more we trace the implications of the imagery, the denser the confusion.” Only by loosening or abandoning rational control and making a concession to the “magic” of poetry in advance, can we feel this poem to be the adequate expression of a mood. Is such obscurity perhaps suitable for suggesting inebriation? The catachresis, however, is obviously unintentional and not an essential element of the poem's deliberate effective organization.

Tate decries Cowley's priggish hymn on account of weaknesses in connotation: “This is the poetry which contradicts our most developed human insights in so far as it fails to use and direct the rich connotation with which language has been informed by experience.” He says he can give no principled reason for his verdict, he can only refer to the reader's experience, learning and aesthetic culture: “It is easy enough to say … that good poetry is a unity of all the meanings from the furthest extremes of intension and extension. Yet our recognition of the action of this unified meaning is the gift of experience, of culture, of, if you will, our humanism. Our powers of discrimation are not deductive powers, though they may be aided by them; they wait rather upon the cultivation of our total human powers, and they represent a special application of those powers to a single medium of experience—poetry.” Nevertheless, he prefers this unsuccessful work of the metaphysical poet (considering the chances of the experiment) to the afore-cited, similarly unsuccessful, “romantic” poem.

A positive example is Donne's poem, Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, or, to be exact, a quatrain from it:

Our two soules therefore, which are one,
          Though I must goe, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
          Like gold to aiery thinnesse beate.

In Tate's analysis the soul of the lovers is “a nonspatial entity, and is therefore indivisible”—this is the abstract form of the extensive meaning of the quotation, or its logic, as put by Ransom. This nonspatial entity is expressed by the image of a spatial material, gold. Since this material is (in principle) extensible to infinity, the meaning of the metaphor does not cancel its extensive meaning. “Intension and extension are here one, and they enrich each other.”

Tate regards intension and extension not only as semantic poles of a successful concrete figure of speech or of any single concrete poem, but also as polar categories of style. He thinks that the leading type of good poetry is metaphysical poetry, which in his view encompasses, very much from the side of extension, the whole range of tension, and also symbolist poetry which he accepts as the most fortunate form of romanticism. In symbolist poetry the main point of departure is intension. “Both at their best are great, and both are incomplete”, he remarks.⁴⁴

Wimsatt takes a similar view, but he does not subscribe to the restrictions of evaluation based on a typology of styles: “If we think of a scale of structures having at one end logic, the completely reasoned and abstracted, and at the other some form of madness or surrealism, matter or impression unformed and undisciplined (the imitation of disorder by the idiom of disorder), we may see metaphysical and neoclassical poetry as near the extreme of logic (though by no means reduced to that status) and romantic poetry as a step toward the directness of sensory presentation (though by no means sunk into subrationality). As a structure which favours implication rather than overt statement, the romantic is far closer than the metaphysical to symbolist poetry and the varieties of postsymbolist most in vogue today. Both types of structure, the metaphysical and the romantic, are valid. Each has gorgeously enriched the history of English poetry.”⁴⁵ In short, Wimsatt does not disparage the romantic type either; moreover, he cites as a positive example Shelley's poem which proved to be a veritable stumbling-block to the New Criticism.⁴⁶ “Neoclassic iconicity is on the whole of a highly ordered, formal, or intellectual sort, that of the ‘figures of speech’ such as antithesis, isocolon, homoeoteleuton, or chiasmus. But romantic nature poetry tends to achieve iconicity by a more direct sensory imitation of something headlong and impassioned, less ordered, nearer perhaps to the subrational. Thus: in Shelley's Ode to the West Wind the shift in imagery of the second stanza, the pell-mell raggedness and confusion of loose clouds, decaying leaves, angels and Maenads with hair uplifted, the dirge, the dome, the vapors, and the enjambment from tercet to tercet combine to give an impression beyond statement of the very wildness, the breath and power of which is the vehicle of the poem's radical metaphor.

Criticizing the central terms of Tate's structure theory, Wimsatt remarks that words like denotation, connotation, extension, intension only appear to be used by Tate in the sense they have as logical terms. He adds that Tate's associates—he cites Hulme's followers, Eliot and Winters—also practise this trick. The reason he gives as a likely explanation of this usage is that “their use of these terms does make an implicit if vague appeal to technical logic and really is a struggle to indicate more than the fairly easy and not always reliable distinction between statement and suggestion.”⁴⁷

With conspicuous one-sidedness Tate's and Ransom's theories favour only a certain type of poetry. When reading essays by Ransom, Tate, Brooks and several other New Critics, the reader may anticipate that, after some complication, the truth will be assembled out of the elements of one of Donne's poems. Sometimes they illustrate their theses with poems by modern metaphysicals: Ransom, with Tate's poems, Tate with Ransom's and Brooks with Tate's and Ransom's poems. According to Hyman, Ransom's structure-texture theory was based upon his own poetic practice.⁴⁸ And Brooks, the propounder of a theory on irony, very convincingly states of Ransom's poems that in them irony “is always present, if only as a sense of aesthetic distance. … His poems bear their own self-criticism.”⁴⁹ Accordingly, these theories were conceived in terms of a definite taste and style formula. The New Critics endorsed this type; their admission that serious and great poetry may exist beside it are for the most part hollow-ringing rhetorical phrases. The keynote is struck by such essays as Ransom's study of Shakespeare's sonnets, which decries Shakespeare (with reference to his lack of education) in every respect where, in producing imagery, he fails to meet the criteria of metaphysical poetry, of the baroque concetto.⁵⁰ Tate says explicity that tension can be created by different, not only metaphysical but romantic and symbolistic, strategies as well. Yet the standards of these strategies are the symbolist qualities of metaphysical poetry and the metaphysical qualities of symbolist poetry. In order to justify this type of poetry Brooks explains that paradox is the substance of all worth-while poetry, and that genuine poetry is—to use Richards' term—inclusive, that is, the poet's self-irony is to be found in the context (forestalling the reader's irony). True, Brooks tries to apply his category of irony also to poems by Wordsworth and Keats. But it remains a problem how far it is irony what he finds in them. Righter says that “The term has been stretched to cover almost any sort of double meaning that can be found in poetry, or any contrast in meanings.”⁵¹

In his theory of poetry Brooks relies on statements by Richards, although like every Southern New Critic, he also rejects Richards' hypothesis that the criterion of the poem's value is its capacity to establish order and equilibrium in the readers' psychic impulses. According to the New Critics' dictum this is “effective fallacy”. The critic should study the order and equilibrium in the textually defined poem and not in the reader's psyche. Brooks' preoccupation with the work of art is not entirely free from Richards' psychologism. Brooks, too, projects the impressions of an ideal reader back on the poem's linguistic structure. Richards attempted to study the impressions of concrete readers, but eventually his ideal reader was himself, just as Brooks' ideal reader was Brooks.

Richards distinguishes two basic types of the poem. One of them “is content with the full, ordered development of comparatively special and limited experiences, with a definite emotion, for example, Sorrow, Joy, Pride, or a definite attitude, Love, Indignation, Admiration, Hope, or with a specific mood, Melancholy, Optimism or Longing.” Such poems are not devoid of interest, although they are inferior, since they narrow the sphere of responses instead of broadening it. He cites as examples, among others, Tennyson's poem Break, Break, Break and Shelley's Love's Philosophy. For Richards, genuinely great poetry is represented by Keats' Ode to the Nightingale, Walter Scott's Proud Maisie, Donne's Nocturnall upon S. Lucie's Day, Marvell's The Definition of Love and Sir Patrick Spens. The difference does not depend on theme, Richards says, but on the interrelations of the impulses active in the experience. Poems belonging to the first type evolve an order of unidirectional, parallel impulses; the other type is dominated by an extraordinary heterogeneity of impulses. But these heterogeneous impulses contrast with one another, and, from the point of view of the non-poetical, non-imaginative experience, one of the contrasting groups of impulses is superfluous. It must be eliminated to let the other develop freely. The gift of imagination is that it is able to make us see these mutually exclusive opposites as one and to create a unity and equilibrium between them. The first type of poetry, the one which appeals to a single, plain, definite emotion, “will not bear an ironical contemplation”, but the other type is immune against the reader's irony, because the contrasting impulses are not excluded from it. The latter is a superior type of poetry—“inclusive” poetry. Irony is included in the elements of the poem providing the impulse; that is to say, the poem includes the opposite, the complementary impulses: “That is why poetry which is exposed to it [irony] is not of the highest order, and why irony itself is so constantly a characteristic of poetry which is.” The opposed impulses do not simply create a conflict in the perceiver—this would relate them to two different moods—while, according to Richards, the crux of the matter is that inclusive poetry, despite its heterogeneity, should create a unified mood, a complete equilibrium. “The equilibrium of opposed impulses, which we suspect to be the ground-plan of the most valuable aesthetic responses, brings into play far more of our personality than is possible in experiences of a more defined emotion. We cease to be orientated in one definite direction; more facets of the mind are exposed and, what is the same thing, more aspects of things are able to affect us. To respond, not through one narrow channel of interest, but simultaneously and coherently through many, is to be disinterested in the only sense of the word which concerns us here.” And disinterestedness is not lack of interest, but a specific type of interest: “The less any one particular interest is indispensable, the more detached our attitude becomes. And to say that we are impersonal is merely a curious way of saying that our personality is more completely involved.”⁵²

Irony as a value concept and the concept of “inclusion” mean by and large the same in Brooks' theory as in Richards' interpretation. In the final analysis all come down to the interpretation of the concepts of “disinterest” and “aesthetic distance”. Brooks interprets these concepts in a more definite way than Richards does. In his interpretation the principle of “disinterest” is directed against (left-wing, progressive) “propaganda poetry”. His starting-point is a broad interpretation of irony which enables it to be applied to the “complete” world view included in the poem. He compares this conception of irony to Arnold's conception of sincerity. In the Victorian critic's eyes, sincerity is a criterion of the “high seriousness” of poetry. “The two conceptions are almost diametrically opposed. Arnold's sincerity expresses itself as a vigilance which keeps out of the poem all those extraneous and distracting elements which might seem to contradict what the poet wishes to communicate to his audience. It is the sincerity of the conscientious expositor who makes his point, even at the price of suppressions and exclusions. Poetry which embodies such a conception of sincerity, when it is unsuccessful, has as its characteristic vice, sentimentality. For sentimentality nearly always involves an oversimplification of the experience in question. The sentimentalist takes a short cut to intensity by removing all the elements of the experience which might conceivably militate against the intensity. … The sentimental poet makes us feel that he is sacrificing the totality of his vision in favor of a particular interpretation. Hence the feeling on reading a sentimental poem that the intensity is the result of a trick.”

Much is lost from the claim to theoretical generalization given the reservations of this cautious formulation. The opposition between the two conceptions is “almost diametrical”; sentimentality “nearly always” involves an oversimplification of the experience. When does this “nearly always” occur? When this type of poetry “is unsuccessful”. Does it hold only for the unsuccessful representatives of this type? We may arrive at this conclusion from Brooks's further reservations. Many fine poems, he writes, do not belong to the type of inclusive or metaphysical poetry. What appears from most of his discourse is, however, that “the poet has been just to the complexity of experience” in this type only, and this is a result of the fact that “the poet attempts the reconciliation of qualities which are opposite or discordant in the extreme”. In the whole discourse he forgets about his reservations. It is strange, however, to find him rejecting a type of style on the grounds of its unsuccessful representatives. Isn't it the case that Brooks posed a part of the truth and then ignored that it was only a part of the truth? Even when he discusses the relationship between metaphysical poetry and propaganda poetry, he observes that “the distinction between the two types of poetry is, as Richards points out, not an absolute one; but this basis of distinction seems valid, and more than that, very fruitful”. But the word seems clears the way for making the difference absolute and making the typology of style a standard of value. This was the main goal right from the outset: “If we are interested in getting at the core of metaphysical poetry, we should not be surprised if we find that we are dealing with something basic in all poetry, poetry being essentially one. Our definition of metaphysical poetry, then, will have to treat the difference between metaphysical poetry and other poetry as a difference of degree, not of kind.” The passage is not unequivocal. If, in accordance with Brooks' intentions, we regard the “core” of metaphysical poetry as the basis of all types of poetry, then the difference between metaphysical poetry and other poetry may also be considered as a (qualitative) difference between poetry and non-poetry.

On the score of “other poetry” Brooks assails first of all the type of poetry which Ransom, and in his wake Tate, called “Platonic poetry”, the poetry of ideas. “Tate's reprehension of such poetry”, Brooks writes, “is perfectly just: it is an ‘over-simplification of life’ which is undertaken ‘in face of the immense complication of life as a whole’. It is therefore imitative of science (which legitimately and as a consequence of its method makes use of systematic over-simplification); and it lacks the inner poise and stability, the constant self-criticism of poetry of the highest type.”

Brooks accuses Shelley's poetry and the socialist-orientated American literature of the twenties and thirties (especially the anthology entitled Proletarian Literature) of sentimentalism and over-simplification, that is, of exclusion. He is right to say that “The poet … must not place an illegitimate dependence in the possible scientific truth of his doctrine.” It cannot be denied either that a definite one-sidedness characterizes the art of the poet who advocates his position openly, frankly and militantly. This is precisely the reason why it does not bear “an ironical contemplation”. This ironical contemplation, however, is not rooted in some kind of universal objectivity, but it is the product of a definite one-sidedness. This emerges from Brooks' reasoning which, in connection with the “poet's belief”, imposes two conditions: “First, the scientific truth of the doctrine enunciated will not save the poem just as its scientific falsity will not damn it … As Tate puts it, the assertions made by the poet must be ‘a quality of the whole poem’—not ‘willfully asserted for the purpose of heightening a subject the poet has not implicitly imagined’. Second, the doctrine must be one suitable to a poem which is to stand up under ‘an ironical contemplation’.” The first condition is acceptable (though we do not see why the scientific truth of a doctrine should in any way imperil the value of the poem or why a gap should exist between the scientific truth of the doctrine and its truth of life). But the second condition does not bear our “ironical contemplation”. What actually appears from the somewhat intricate phrasing is that the “ironical contemplation”—certainly not by the standard of the scientific truth of the doctrine—is, in fact, of the doctrine itself!

For some reason Brooks resents a doctrine, in particular if it rests on a scientific truth. For example, he says that, although the scientific truth of the doctrine does no special good to the poem, the “propagandist-poet” even incurs “special and positive risks”.⁵³ “Inclusive” propaganda art is of course also conceivable, but Brooks has his doubts. According to him the risk is “positive” from the beginning, the chances are predetermined. We have to think not only of superficially didactic poetry, flimsy sentimental lyric poetry, or schematic “political” poetry. As so often in the writings of the New Critics, the alarming example is Shelley. Brooks cites T. S. Eliot who in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism stated that he was unable to enjoy Shelley's poems because of the poet's “belief”. (The difference between the “belief” of Shelley and that of Eliot is well known.) In the words of Eliot, “when the doctrine, theory, belief, or ‘view of life’ presented in a poem is one which the mind of the reader can accept as coherent, mature and founded on the facts of experience, it imposes no obstacle to the reader's enjoyment, whether it be one that he accept or deny, approve or deprecate. When it is one which the reader rejects as childish or feeble, it may, for a reader of well-developed mind, set up an almost complete check.”⁵⁴ It is not clear why the reader's mind should “deny” or “deprecate” a doctrine, belief, etc. accepted (by him) as coherent, mature and founded on the facts of experience. It is, of course, no use contesting that Eliot regards Shelley's belief in progress as childish and feeble, unless we wish to deal concretely with the question of the coherence, maturity, etc. of the belief of “a reader of well-developed mind” (Eliot in this particular case).

Brooks seems to expect only the progressive poet to attach—as Tate puts it in his Introduction to Reactionary Essays—“some irony to his use of ‘ideas’”.⁵⁵ Tate recommends this in general to contemporary poets, for he holds that the ideas of modern times, ideas tainted by positivist scientism are, unlike mythological ideas, not enduring.

In his essay ‘Irony as a Principle of Structure” Brooks uses the expression “irony” to denote the semantic changes and tensions resulting from the context: “Images, words or statements in poetry, owing to their context, become so impregnated with significance that the images change into symbols and the statements into dramatic utterances. Irony, a transformation of statements due to the context, is a symptom of practically every statement of poetry.”⁵⁶ Or, in other words: “irony is the most general term that we have for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context.”⁵⁷ The phenomenon described is real, but it is not clear why it should be denoted by a technical term already in use with a more specific meaning. But in the use of terminology Brooks occasionally shows amazing “generosity”. For example, in his essay, ‘The Language of Paradox’, whose governing ideas resemble those set forth on irony, he reaches a point where he has to admit that his use of the term paradox is much too loose, one might as well say: careless. He pleads in a footnote that he wanted only to accentuate the problem and it may be that the issue is merely due to the contradictory character of “metaphor” (another of his loosely applied terms), and he did not intend to call every instance of a contradiction a paradox.⁵⁸ His intention is nevertheless to demonstrate the omnipresence of paradox (or irony), and his discourse fails to show the limits within which these terms are applicable, since irony cannot be distinguished from paradox, from metaphor, and from other cases of contradiction and contrast. If irony is just another word to express aesthetic distance, impersonality, objectivity or inclusion, the correct thing to do would be to say so. The reason why irony (like paradox) seems a suitable term instead of more general categories of aesthetic quality may be that it refers more directly to the qualities preferred by Brooks, the qualities of metaphysical and symbolist poetry. Characteristically, when he looks for an example of irony in one of Wordsworth's poems and finds something he can, with some effort, interpret as such, he claims that Donne would have made a pure instance of irony out of it. And this is all he has to say in support of the contention that all great poetry—even in the case of Wordsworth, a romantic poet—is based on irony.

Very remarkable are some negative observations, the cornerstones of contextualism. Their essence is what the title of Brooks' essay ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’ expresses, namely that there is no substitute for the poem as an intellectual or emotional experience. The New Critic is interested in the intellectual aspect of the experience, and this is the subject of Brooks' clever and profound study, ‘What Does Poetry Communicate?’. He analyses Herrick's poem Corinna's Going a-Maying, and demonstrates that what the verse says, communicates or signifies is equivalent to no paraphrase of the verse, to none of its statements expressible in prose, but it is identical with the poem itself, together with all its fine nuances: “Our initial question, ‘What does the poem communicate?’ is badly asked. It is not that the poem communicated nothing. Precisely the contrary. The poem communicates so much and communicates it so richly and with such delicate qualifications that the thing communicated is mauled and distorted if we attempt to convey it by any vehicle less subtle than that of the poem itself.” This observation of his is not new, but it does not hurt to emphasize it from time to time.

The question of communication raises the question of poetry as language. Brooks, like Tate or Ransom, attributes the difference between science and poetry to their different languages. In Brooks' opinion the difference lies in the fact that the scientific terms are not (or ought not to be) altered by the tension and semantic shift resulting from the context, but the language of poetry exists just on the basis of such tensions and semantic shifts. It is the job of the words of science to act as “pure” denotations. “But where is the dictionary which contains the terms of a poem?”⁵⁹

Richards seems to have given an orthodox contextualist answer to this rhetorical question in his study ‘The Interaction of Words’ in The Language of Poetry edited by Tate. (In the foreword Tate gave his special reasons for publishing writings by Richards in one volume with studies by Brooks, Philip Wheelwright and Wallace Stevens. He explained that Richards, too, managed to proceed from psychology to philosophy; that is to say, he no longer explained poetry by its emotive effect but regarded it as cognition.) Richards defines the “word”—emphatically for poetic usage—as “its interaction with other words”.⁶⁰ This absolute relativism cannot hold its ground even in a specifically poetic context. Words do have extrapoetic meanings. Such meanings do, of course, depend on the context both in everyday language and in scientific communication. Moreover, everyday and scientific usage exemplifies that the meanings of linguistic terms—words, sentences, texts—are determined not only by a strictly textual context. The meaning is determined or modified by the situation in which a sentence is uttered and which (for internal reasons, and in this social conventions, too, have a part to play) is practically an integral part of the text. Richards has to refute his contention by his own critical experience when he goes on to analyse passages from poems by Donne and Dryden in an attempt to clarify the paradox which he claims has defined the language of poetry. At once he stands in need of that criterion of “word” which he omitted from the definition: at every step he has to recall the lexical meaning of words and, to understand the shades of meaning, he is compelled to take into account the facts of linguistic history. And from here it would take a single step to observe the “external” correlations which place the language of poetry and the individual poem in a comprehensive historical and social context. (Richards, Brooks and the rest are, of course, cautious not to take this step.)

The New Critics' theory of language can be interpreted as Murray Krieger understands it: “While the words of a poem, considered atomistically, may function referentially, the poetic structure of words, considered contextually, prevents the individual words from so functioning.”⁶¹ But words have their context in any type of communication, including everyday language; it is an integral part of their concrete semantic function. It is difficult or impossible to study meaning in general on isolated words. Common everyday speech and the grammar of language as it takes shape in it are unlike a system of scientific symbols, nor does the view they imply correspond to such a system. This “contextual” correlation between language and life is a natural and normal linguistic basis for certain types of poetic style.

It is doubtful, however, whether this, and only this, characterizes all types. If the tendency that prevails in the language of science is to reduce to a minimum or to eliminate altogether contextual influences, an ideal poetic language would strive for the exclusive prevalence of connotation and the absolute preponderance of contextual influence. But this is not so. While scientific communication tends in fact to make words, each in an equal measure, fulfil a purely denotative function (it may of course utilize contextual compulsions and potentials to achieve that), poetry employs connotation rather unequally and often enjoys the same freedom as is accorded to the language of non-poetic and non-scientific usage. The order of “tension”, “unity” and “emphasis” points beyond the sphere of basic linguistic elements (words, their acoustics, and their denotative and connotative aspects), as it is composed of units larger than these. The New Critics who try to extend the contextual theory to the novel are compelled to consider all these circumstances, because it is difficult to discuss it (unless metaphorically) on a plane confined to relations between “the language of science” and “the language of poetry”.

Starting from Brooks' theory of structure, one may proceed to directions other than the semantic distinction. A reason for this is that the language of poetry does not exist by itself, independently of poetic communications; and poetic communications are concrete poems or other types of literary works. Consequently, the determinative factor is not context in general but the actual context—the interrelationship within the text of the given work.

According to Brooks the context of the poem is the organized structure of the poem. The substantive structure is “a pattern of resolved stresses”, not of logical ones, but “a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme … a structure of meanings, evaluations and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings.”⁶² This may be true. But unfortunately, this paraphrase of the poem's structure has been written in the language of poetry and so much so that it cannot be translated into the language of science. At all events, the issue is not only about connotations but also about meanings and attitudes. Yet it is clear that, in Brooks's view, these constitute the structure of the poem. This structure is not altogether identical with what is called form in vulgar aesthetics, but it resembles the concept of form in the dialectical approach to aesthetics. This resemblance is most deceptive, since there exists an (apparently dialectical) interpretation of forms which essentially corresponds to a classicist concept of form. The only difference between this concept and that of Brooks is that the type of style which Brooks codifies is different. Yet the fact that the apparently broad interpretation of structure implies the codification of a specific style is proved by Brooks' absolutization of the “closed” character of the work of art, its isolation and its context thus conceived. The statements of a poem are therefore only “dramatic utterances”. It is obvious that this theory prefers that type of poetry which seems to assume a disguise cultivating “aesthetic distance”, “impersonality” and “objectivity”. The history of poetry shows, however, that social and artistic conventions which compel poets to take refuge in disguise are changed by them just so that people might listen to their speech not as a soliloquy on the stage but as a public profession of faith in the historical drama of everyday life.

From the activity of the three leading figures of the New Criticism we have singled out a period, or rather a group of their works, which best characterizes the theoretical complexion of the whole school. We did not intend to outline a counter-theory. If not the solutions they offered, the problems raised by the New Critics, are far more complex and involved than to allow us to approach them with ad hoc speculation. The problem of artistic cognition is widely discussed in Marxist studies. The organic view (and possibly the autotelic conception) of the work of art is also a problem which has both proponents and opponents among Marxists. We are of the opinion that a theory which stands as a polar opposite to the aesthetic system of the New Critics—e. g. a theory based on the novel instead of lyric poetry, or artistic cognition reconciled with scientific cognition instead of artistic cognition reconciled with religion—provides no satisfactory solution.

In the socialist countries the Marxist theory of literature displays tendencies which, aware of the Marxist philosophy of history, strive to refine the methods of textual analysis and structuralism as a theoretical projection of the evolution of modern logic. We may also see attempts, in the United States too, to reconcile the achievements of textual analysis with the requirements of historicity.

Notes

1. The New Criticism. A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, professor of comparative literature in Columbia University (New York, 1911), p. 6.

2. J. C. Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, 1941), p. 220.

3. “It is a frankly reactionary movement, and the word ‘New’ must always have held for it an air of pleasing paradox.”—George Watson, The Literary Critics: A Study of English Descriptive Criticism (New York, 1963), p. 172.—’ ‘It was not until quite recently that Ransom, perhaps the key figure of the movement, accepted the term as properly designating the movement. The student of literary criticism will readily appreciate his hesitation; the movement is more notable for new emphases in criticism than for novelty of ideas. If there had existed in seventeenth-century England a critical school parallel to the metaphysical school of poetry, one might with some propriety name them ‘The New Metaphysicals’.”—J. P. Pritchard, Criticism in America (Norman, 1956), p. 231.

4. See Cleanth Brooks' foreword to Critiques and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. W. Stallman (New York, 1949), p. XVI.

5. Robert Weimann, “New Criticism” und die Entwicklung bürgerlicher Literaturwissenschaft (Halle/Saale), 1962.

6. René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), pp. 345, 354.

7. Walter Sutton, Modern American Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1963), p. 99.

8. Louis Cowan, The Fugitive Group: A Literary History (Baton Rouge, 1959), p. 44. As to the movement, see also J. M. Bradbury, The Fugitives: A Critical Account (Chapel Hill, 1958); J. L. Stewart, The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians (Princeton, 1965); Alexander Karanikas, Tillers of a Myth: Southern Agrarians as Social and Literary Critics (Madison, 1966).

9. Allen Tate, On the Limits of poetry. Selected Essays 1928-1948 (New York, 1948), pp. 272-273.

10. Cf. Albert E. Stone, Jr., ‘Seward Collins and the American Review: Experiment in Pro-Fascism, 1933-37’, American Quarterly, 1960, No. 1, pp. 4-19.

11. Richard Foster, The New Romantics: A Re-Appraisal of the New Criticism (Bloomington, 1962). See especially the chapter, ‘Criticism as Poetry’, pp. 151-189.

12. See Weimann, ‘New Criticism’ und die Entwicklung bürgerlicher Literaturwissenschaft, pp. 75-76.

13. Literary History and Literary Criticism. Acta of the Ninth Congress, International Federation for Modern Languages and Literature, New York, 1963, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1965), p. 4.

14. Hound and Horn (1927-1934), Southern Review (1935-1942) founded by Tate, and Kenyon Review (1939) founded by Ransom. In October 1944 Tate became the editor of Sewanee Review (1892-) with a program (printed on the jacket of No. 3, 1944) of struggle against the danger of paganism and positivism.

15. See Forster, The New Romantics, p. 14.

16. Malcolm Cowley, The Literary Situation (New York, 1954), p. 12.

17. ‘We are no longer able to regard as seriously intended criticism of poetry which does not assume these generalizations; but the case for fiction has not yet been established. The novel is still read as though its content has some value in itself, as though the subject matter of fiction has greater or lesser value in itself, and as though technique were not a primary but a supplementary element, capable perhaps of not unattractive embellishments upon the surface of the object, but hardly of its essence.’—Mark Schorer, ‘Technique as Discovery’, in Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction: 1920-1951, ed. John W. Aldridge (New York, 1952), p. 67. The essay was first printed in Hudson Review, 1948, No. 1, pp. 67-87.

18. See René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1948, 1956, 1962).

19. S. E. Hyman, The Armed Vision: A Study in the Method of Modern Literary Criticism (New York, 1952), p. 74.

20. Harry Levin, ‘Literature as an Institution’, Accent, 1946, No. 2, pp. 159-168.

21. F. O. Matthiessen, The Responsibilities of the Critic (New York, 1952).

22. Robert G. Davis, ‘The New Criticism and the Democratic Tradition’, The American Scholar, 1949-50, No. 1, pp. 9-19. Stenographic record of the debate following upon the article with contributions by William Barrett, Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley, R. G Davis, Allen Tate, and Hiram Haydn (editor of the review); 1950-51, No. 1, pp. 86-104, and No. 2, 1950-51, pp. 218-231.

23. See Sutton, Modern American Criticism, pp. 269-275. On the revaluation of the New Criticism see also R. H. Pearce, ‘Historicism Once More’, Kenyon Review, Autumn 1958, pp. 554-591; Walter Sutton, ‘The Contextualist Dilemma—or Fallacy?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, December 1958, pp. 219-229; H. H. Waggoner, ‘The Current Revolt against the New Criticism’, Criticism, Summer 1959, pp. 211-225; Mark Spilka, ‘The Necessary Stylist: A New Critical Revision’, Modern Fiction Studies, Winter 1960-61, 281-297.

24. See Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, pp. 359-360, 364.

25. William J. Handy, Kant and the Southern New Critics (Austin, 1963), p. 64.

26. See Tate, On the Limits of Poetry, p. 4.

27. J. C. Ransom, God Without Thunder (Hamden, 1965), pp. 110-138. (1st edition: New York, 1930).

28. See Tate, On the Limits of Poetry, pp. 47, 9, 4, 8, 15, 8, 250.

29. See ‘Literature as Knowledge’ (1941), in On the Limits of Poetry, pp. 16-48.

30. I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York, 1936), p. 131.

31. See Tate, On the Limits of Poetry, pp. 47-48.

32. I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (London, 1934), pp. 171-172.

33. See Ransom, God Without Thunder, pp. 258, 282.

34. J. C. Ransom, The World's Body (London, 1938), pp. x-xi.

35. See Ransom, The New Criticism, pp. 251, 281, 294.

36. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (London, 1948), p. 174 (1st edition: Chapel Hill, 1939).

37. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), p. 258.

38. See Tate, On the Limits of Poetry, p. 252.

39. J. C. Ransom, ‘Criticism as Pure Speculation’, in The Intent of the Critic, ed. Donald A. Stauffer (Princeton, 1941), p. 112.

40. See Ransom, The World's Body, p. 133.

41. See Ransom, The Intent of the Critic, pp. 105-106, 111, 123-124.

42. William Righter, Logic and Criticism (New York, 1963), pp. 111, 110-111, 113, 114.

43. See Sutton, Modern American Criticism, pp. 115-116.

44. See Tate, On the Limits of Poetry, pp. 77 ff.

45. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal Icon (Kentucky, 1954), p. 116.

46. Especially the phrase, ‘I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’ is cited with scorn. According to Ransom, this exclamation illustrates the negative tendency of allegorical Platonic poetry. The poet does not believe in the strength of his ideas and becomes angry at the sight of their ineffectiveness. This indignation is an example of the ‘Romantic Irony’, Ransom says, ‘which comes at occasional periods to interrupt the march of scientific optimism’.—See The World's Body, p. 122.—According to Tate, the poet is broken and driven to despair just by the demythologized, scientifically apperceived, ‘inhumane’ world he propagates. ‘This moral situation, transferred to the plane of drama or the lyric, becomes romantic irony—that is, an irony of his position of which the poet himself is not aware.’ See On the Limits of Poetry, p. 102.

47. See Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, pp. 115-116, 146.

48. See Hyman, op cit., p. 100.

49. See Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, p. 99.

50. See J. C. Ransom, ‘Shakespeare at Sonnets’, in The World's Body, pp. 270-303. In this respect Ransom's views are regarded as much too one-sided by both Tate (see On the Limits of Poetry, p. 79) and Brooks (see The Well-Wrought Urn, pp. 243-244).

51. See Righter, Logic and Criticism, p. 109.

52. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1938), pp. 249, 250, 251, 252 (1st edition: 1924).

53. See Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, pp. 45-46, 48, 50, 57.

54. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1955), p. 96.

55. See Tate, On the Limits of Poetry, p. xv.

56. In Literary Opinion in America, ed. M. D. Zabel (New York, 1951), p. 730.

57. See Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn, p. 209.

58. In The Language of Poetry, ed. Allen Tate (Princeton, 1942), p. 45. The footnote was omitted from the version of this study published in The Well-Wrought Urn. See also ‘Preface to the 1968 edition’ of The Well-Wrought Urn (London, 1968), pp. ix-xi).

59. See Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn, pp. 72-73.

60. See Tate, The Language of Poetry, p. 74.

61. Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis, 1956), p. 131.

62. See Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn, pp. 203, 195.