SOURCE: Burt, Stephen Jennifer Lewin. “Poetry and the New Criticism.” In A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Neil Roberts, pp. 153-67. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

[In the following essay, Burt and Lewin provide brief literary histories of poets and critics such as Tate, Ransom, and Warren, as well as later New Critics such as Empson, Winters and Blackmur, evaluating their poetry in light of their theories of New Criticism.]

‘Never have poetry and criticism in English been so close together’, Allen Tate wrote in 1955, as they were at the height of the largely American movement now called the New Criticism (Tate, 1968, p. 214). In the late 1920s, after the upheavals of High Modernism, some younger critics who were also poets began to explain the principles which had emerged from their tastes. These principles helped generate new approaches to literature and especially to poetry, concentrating on close verbal analysis; new journals and textbooks arose to propagate them. By the late 1940s a few of the New Critics' students had become major poets themselves, quietly fulfilling certain New Critical goals even as they rejected others.

The term ‘New Criticism’ (rarely embraced by those it covers) began life as the title of a 1941 book by John Crowe Ransom (J. E. Spingarn's 1911 book of the same name has nothing to do with the movement). Ransom's study examined the critical practices of I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot and Yvor Winters, with shorter segments on William Empson and on R. P. Blackmur; it then called for an ‘ontological critic’ who would describe the special nature of poetry and the structures of individual poems. As Cleanth Brooks wrote later, uncareful readers soon ‘assumed that Ransom was the primal New Critic and that his former students and friends were the others’ (Community 1). Writers who invoke the New Critics normally refer to a loosely allied group whose core included Ransom himself, Tate, Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, along with Empson and Blackmur. Winters worked on the group's de facto intellectual margins, as in a different way did F. O. Matthiesen both combined criticism of modern poetry with studies of nineteenth-century American writing. Others sometimes called New Critics proved important to literary theory, but not directly to twentieth-century poetry: these included René Wellek, William Wimsatt, Austin Warren, Monroe Beardsley, and the ambitious left-wing thinker Kenneth Burke. All these thinkers' ‘one common element was [their] special concern … for the rhetorical structure of the literary text (Community 2). New Critical ways of reading helped to shape the American poets who emerged in the 1940s, among them Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell.

ORIGINS, AXIOMS, AIMS

All the New Critics emerged from milieux in which, as Ransom put it, ‘young men speak up and quote Eliot pertinently on nearly any literary occasion’ (Ransom, 1941, p. 146). At Tennessee's Vanderbilt University in 1922, Warren and Tate lived together in rooms on whose walls Warren painted scenes from The Waste Land; both studied together under Ransom (himself ambivalent about that poem). Starting from the poems of Eliot, Yeats and Pound, New Critics found themselves following leads from Eliot's criticism. These included his ‘classical’ ideals and his religious thought; his attention to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century; his deprecation of the Romantics, especially Shelley; his proposition that good poems constitute ‘not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion’; and his insistence that ‘poets … at present, must be difficult’ (Eliot, 1975, pp. 43, 65). Against the passive absorptions of popular entertainment, New Critics elevated poetry whose difficulties required (in Tate's words) ‘the direct and active participation of a reader’ (Tate, 1968, p. 163).

I. A. Richards's Practical Criticism (1929) showed that subtle poems escaped the comprehension of students at Cambridge University: Richards used his ‘experiments’ there to argue that university teachers should convey both analytical skills and literary taste. Richards's other early books proposed structural and linguistic analyses of poetry while stating its effects in psychological terms. Like him, Ransom, Brooks and their allies aimed to teach analysis and taste; like him, they tried to make aesthetically oriented, intensive study of literature as academically respectable as extensive bibliographical and linguistic study already was. American New Critics, however, rejected what they saw as Richards's scientific worldview. They sought instead to defend literary experience against perceived threats from the exact sciences, from behaviourist social science, and from the industrial economy.

Brooks's Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) have become ideal-typical examples of New Criticism. Lauding metaphor, paradox and productive ambiguity, Brooks argued that ‘the difference between metaphysical poetry’—pre-eminently that of Donne - ‘and other poetry [was] a difference of degree not of kind’ (Brooks, 1939, p. 39). Robert Frost, Brooks contended, ‘exhibits the structure of symbolist-metaphysical poetry’ where simpler, ostensibly modern poets do not (ibid., p. 116). New Critical thinking accepted the Coleridgean doctrine that a successful poem creates a unified aesthetic whole, containing or reconciling conflicting ideas and attitudes. (Brooks called this attribute, perhaps misleadingly, ‘irony’; Tate and Empson both preferred ‘tension’.) In one key New Critical locution, ‘poems are little dramas, exhibiting actions in complete settings’ (Ransom, 1938, p. 249). These dramas, however, play themselves out among words or attitudes rather than among characters. In practice New Critics often wanted poems to resemble little tragedies: for Brooks, ‘The principles of poetic organization, developed to their logical conclusion, carry the poem over into drama, with the characteristics of tragedy—concreteness, dramatic ambiguity, irony, resolution through struggle—as perhaps their highest expression’ (Brooks, 1939, p. 218).

In general, New Critical taste in poetry sought, explicitly: ‘tension’, paradox, polysemy, ambivalence; central symbols; compression and verbal density; seventeenth-century models; Coleridgean unity, and strong closure. As a result, the New Critical climate favoured implicitly: difficulty, seriousness, violence, frequent allusion, complex syntax and Christian symbolism. The best poems written out of New Critical paradigms reject some of these goals to accomplish the rest.

FUGITIVES, AGRARIANS AND OTHERS

It is a grim irony that people who argued for the independence of literary art from instrumental political ends should now be impeached or dismissed for their own politics; it makes an even harsher irony that people who insisted on fine distinctions now get lumped together as reactionaries. Nevertheless, some American New Critics Southern affiliations and anti-liberal predispositions entered their literary though and (more directly) their own poems. At Vanderbilt, Ransom, Tate, Warren and poet Donald Davidson founded a literary group called the Fugitives, and published a journal, The Fugitive (1922-5). The same group, expanded, turned to political and cultural writing, reconstituted itself as the Agrarians, and published I'll Take My Stand (1930). That volume's ‘Twelve Southerners’ argued that the South should retain a traditional farm-based society, rather than accept industrial capitalism Infused by regional loyalties and by a more or less Eliotic conservatism, the poet agrarianism, Louis Rubin writes, ‘was also … a campaign for poetry and religion (in Young, 1976b).

The volume prompted well-publicized debates. After a few years of research in economics, Ransom returned in the mid-1930s to his literary interests, reluctantly supporting the New Deal. Tate retained the rhetoric of what he called his ‘Reactionary Essays’, co-editing another political volume, Who Owns America? (1936). After 1940 only Davidson remained active in Agrarian polemic, eventually defending racial segregation. An older, liberal Warren repudiated his Agrarian writings. Fiercely Marxist in his youth, Jarrell wanted nothing to do with the politics of the teacher he nonetheless admired. Blackmur, a New Englander, never joined the Agrarian clique, nor did the English, and socialist, Empson.

New Critical ideas could be forced into contradiction, and different critics followed different threads. One such contradiction set moral judgement against aesthetic disinterest; a second posed ambiguity and complexity (one value) against formal authority and control (another). These contradictions and their psychosexual freight emerged (as Langdon Hammer has shown) in New Critics' vexed readings of Hart Crane, whom both Tate and Winters had known well. Crane's allusive and densely figurative language appealed to their tastes and ideals, while his celebratory temperament, his ambitious optimism, and his homosexuality did not. (Winters, Tate and Blackmur wrote ambivalent appreciations of Crane; Jarrell later abandoned an unfinished book on him.)

Recent analysts often maintain that the New Critics sought to establish for literary thinkers a professional authority, one analogous to the religious or traditional authorities which Eliot, Ransom, Tate and Brooks respected. Demands for rigour and complexity helped the New Critics distinguish their modernism from the more populist free verse espoused by Carl Sandburg and others on the left. During the 1930s, New Critical literary models clashed with those of the Popular Front, an argument played out in poems by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, and in the New York journal Partisan Review. The New Criticism's political overtones, and its effects on subsequent academic work, have been frequently described; the story of the New Critics and their successors as poets deserves renewed attention.

RANSOM, TATE, WARREN

Educated at Vanderbilt and Oxford, Ransom (1888-1974) taught at Vanderbilt from 1914 to 1938, with three years off to serve in the First World War. His students at Vanderbilt included Tate, Warren and later Jarrell. Ransom decamped in 1938 to Ohio's Kenyon College, where Jarrell and Lowell not only studied with him but lived in his family's house. Ransom's essays insist that poetry provides us with non-discursive, particular knowledge of the world, one incommensurable with the knowledge the sciences give. A ‘poem celebrates the object which is real, individual, and qualitatively infinite’; it thus opposes ‘practical interests [which] reduce the living object to a mere utility, and … sciences [which] will disintegrate it into … abstracts’ (Ransom, 1938, p. 348). The World's Body (1938) collects his most important literary essays; later prose appeared in Beating the Bushes (1972).

‘Almost all [the poems Ransom] chose to preserve’, his biographer reports ‘were written between 1922 and 1925’, though frequently revised for later reprintings (Young, 1976a, p. 185). Ransom's poems balance his intellectual drive towards complication and paradox with the appeal of pastoral settings, formal elegance and naively beautiful subjects. Many are deeply informed by Andrew Marvell, whose stanza-forms Ransom adapted along with his attitudes. The people in Ransom's poems struggle to maintain their emotional equilibrium, to remain (in one of Ransom's titles) ‘Agitato ma non troppo’, ‘shaken, but not as a leaf’. In ‘Janet Waking’ a girl mourns her dead goose; in ‘Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter’ a cohort of careful adults mourns a dead girl:

There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.

Other significant poems describe the transience of youthful beauty, rural scenes from the Upper South, love letters, and the lifelong quarrels of difficult lovers, bound each other by their need to differ: ‘he of the wide brows that were used to laurels. And she, the famed for gentleness, must quarrel. / Furious both of them, and scare and weeping’ (‘Two in August’).

Ransom was perhaps the last talented poet in English to rely heavily on courtly beliefs about family, age and gender. His women and girls and ‘scared strange little boys’ seek orderly, beautiful or innocent lives, their elegance measured by his stanzas, while a rough masculinity—embodied by Ransom's rough metres—threatens their innocence:

To Miriam Tazewell the whole world was villain,
The principle of the beast was low and masculine,
And not to unstop her own storm and be maudlin,
For weeks she went untidy, she went sullen.

(‘Miriam Tazewell’)

Though ‘it would be wrong to suggest that Ransom is egalitarian in his sexual politics’ (Mark Jancovitch writes), neither do his poems exalt male privilege: Ransom records instead ‘a profound discomfort with the distinctions between masculinity and femininity, intellectuality and sensibility, abstraction and experience’ (Jancovitch 1993, p. 39). The protective distance in Ransom's antiquarian language gives him one way to describe events otherwise too painful, or too sexually charged, to remember Ransom's ‘Judith of Bethulia’ addresses not the biblical heroine's resolve, but the male Israelites' unease: the poem relies on the ‘tension’ between Ransom's elaborate language and the sexual violence in his story.

Such strenuous balancings link Ransom's critical prescriptions to his poetry, as his seventeenth-century models. Geoffrey Hill writes that ‘At his best [Ransom] himself a metaphysical poet’; ‘his formal grace is in a constant state of alertness again “awkwardnesses” which, even so, contrive to irrupt into the manners and measures the verse’ (Hill, 1984, pp. 133, 135). ‘Winter Remembered’ closes with a sort of me physical conceit, but the rueful self-knowledge it figures is just Ransom's own:

Dear love, these fingers that had known your touch,
And tied our separate forces first together,
Were ten poor idiot fingers not worth much,
Ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.

Allen Tate (1899-1979) grew up in Tennessee and taught at colleges there, North Carolina, at Princeton with Blackmur, and finally in Minnesota. A Catholic convert for much of his writing life, Tate remained more committed than other New Critics to drawing meta-political and meta-religious consequences from his ideas about literature: ‘The Man of Letters in the Modern World’ sees a ‘battle … between the dehumanized society of secularism … and the eternal society of the communion of the human spirit’ (Tate, 1968, pp. 4-5). Dehumanized by instrumental, or inappropriately scientific, thinking, we recover our full human natures in acts of aesthetic and moral judgement: ‘Our powers of discrimination [as readers] … wait … upon the cultivation of our total human powers, and they represent a special application of those powers to a single medium of experience, poetry’ (ibid., p. 63). Tate on occasion tentatively identified the literary symbol with the Christian Incarnation. Besides critical essays and poetry, he published biographies of Confederate leaders, and later one novel, The Fathers (1938).

Tate's poetry emphasizes confrontation and challenge, straining against its own compressed forms, and more gravely against the secular, sunny rationalism he despised. Violence can become an end in itself: ‘In bulled Europa's morn / We love our land because / All night we raped her—torn, / Blue grass and glad.’ The poetry, like the criticism, can express a violent nostalgia for pre-Enlightenment, Christian worldviews: ‘O God of our flesh, return us to Your wrath’. Elsewhere, ‘New Critical’ demands for dramatic enactment and formal composure balance Tate's tones of fury or resentment. ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead’ (1927) draws on Eliotic methods and metrics, and on the older sub-genre of graveyard poems, to make buried Rebels instruct a disoriented speaker about the omnipresence of death, defeat, sin and guilt:

Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich now.

The poem sets a proto-Christian awareness of sin against a Stoic ideal of endurance in a world where the only permanence is death, and ‘only the leaves / Flying, plunge and expire’. Tate described the Ode in his own 1938 essay ‘Narcissus as Narcissus’. Two significant later poems, ‘The Swimmers’ and ‘The Buried Lake’ (1953) began as parts of a never-completed terza rima autobiography.

Tate at his best found in strict forms and grave demeanours the poetic correlatives for the unfinished tragedy of the American South, and for a sense (a Southern sense, he might have declared) of honour, futility and original sin. ‘Aeneas at Washington’ (1933) makes its Virgilian hero into a Confederate officer, brooding on his defeat and his subsequent wanderings. Compressed and loaded with extra stresses, the pentameters of the monologue shoulder Aeneas's failures as he views his opponents' triumphalist, sterile capital:

I stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall
By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water,
The city my blood had built I knew no more
While the screech-owl whistled his new delight
Consecutively dark.
                                                                                          Stuck in the wet mire,
Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city,
I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.

Born in Guthrie, Kentucky, Robert Penn Warren (1905-89) met Ransom and Tate at Vanderbilt in the early 1920s; after a Rhodes Scholarship he taught at Louisiana State University, Minnesota and Yale. Most widely known for his novel All the King's Men (1946), Warren wrote six other novels, fifteen books of poetry, and numerous essays, plays and college textbooks. In 1986 he became the United States' first official Poet Laureate. Warren's essays (see Warren, 1989) show him attending to honor American poets like Whittier, Melville and Frost respond to political and historic phenomena like abolitionism and the American Civil War. His more theoretical writings tirelessly argue that good poetry creates vital knowledge about individual selves in historical and social contexts, imaginatively transforming lived experience into language faithful to its vicissitudes. This perspective lets Warren use traditionally literary vocabulary to address ethical and historical questions: Democracy and Poetry (Warren, 1975) claims that ‘rhythm—not mere meter, but all the pulse of movement density, and shadings of intensity of feeling—is the most intimate and compelling factor revealing to us the nature of the “made thing”’, while holding onto poetry primary obligation: ‘only insofar as the work establishes and expresses a self can engage us’ (ibid., pp. 74, 70).

The selves that emerge in Warren's poems almost invariably come to know what he appreciated in the work of Ransom: ‘the haunting duality in man's experience (Warren, 1989, p. 306). Early, poems like ‘Love's Parable’ (1936) confront a fallen world in formal terms indebted to Ransom and his metaphysical leanings: ‘As kingdoms after civil broil, / Long faction-bit and sore unmanned, / Unlaced, unthewed by lawless toil …’. From Promises (1957) onward, Warren combined his search to represent moral severity and mortality with an equally ambitious habit of grouping lyrics into sequences. These sequences mean to represent the mind exploring single incidents in multiple ways; in one such moment in ‘Mortmain’, an elegy for his father Warren imagines the elusive nature of the past: ‘The boy, / With imperial calm, crosses a space, rejoins / the shadow of woods, but pauses, turns, grins once, / And is gone.

Book-length poems allowed Warren to scrutinize these concerns in a more sustained fashion; in Brother to Dragons (1953, revised 1979) we watch Thomas Jefferson's unfolding response to a bloody chain of events surrounding an episode in which Liburne Lewis, Jefferson's nephew, vengefully vivisects a slave. Jefferson discovers a startling, repulsive human nature: ‘Listen! the foulness sucks like mire. / The beast waits’ and turns out to be ‘our brother, our darling brother’. Audubon: A Vision (1969) permits biblically inflected glimpses at many kinds of violence, from homicide to game-hunting, which lend themselves neither to easy morals nor to understanding (‘He slew them, at surprising distances, with his gun. / Over a body held in his hand, his head was bowed low, / But not in grief’). Such depictions reveal, in John Burt's words, ‘the conflict between lyric and narrative, between the stopped time in which meaning reveals itself and the progressing time in which life is to be lived’ (Burt, 1988, p. 111). Warren's fixation on poetry as a means of representing poetic struggles themselves can perhaps best be understood through his signature motif, the sunset flight of the hawk:

                                                                                                                                  His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

(‘Evening Hawk’, 1975)

EMPSON, WINTERS, BLACKMUR

The Yorkshire-born Empson (1906-84) ‘became a part of [American New Critics'] common orthodoxy but, they feared, a tricky and a subversive part’ (Norris, 1978, p. 3). Sent down from postgraduate studies at Cambridge for harbouring a woman in his rooms, Empson spent most of the 1930s and 1940s teaching English in Japan and China, later settling at the University of Sheffield. His broadest influence came through his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), begun while he was Richards's student: Empson's vigorous ‘method of verbal analysis’ showed, as he put it, how ‘alternate reactions to the same piece of language’ contribute to the meaning and force of poems (Empson, 1947, pp. viii, 1). These extend all the way from apparently trivial puns and overtones to double meanings which ‘show a fundamental division in the writer's mind’ (ibid., p. 192). Apparently an anatomy of ambiguity, the book is in fact a demonstration of how to respond flexibly and brilliantly to the hints and verbal nuances in any poem.

Empson denied poetry its own ontology, ‘treat[ing] the poem as a concentrated species of ordinary language’ (Norris, 1978, p. 25). Nevertheless, Empson's verbal analyses, tastes and terms made him part of the New Critical project; reviewing The Well-Wrought Urn, he wrote, ‘I agree so fully with [Brooks's] general position that if I were attacking him I should be attacking myself’ (Empson, 1987, p. 282). Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) expands Empson's reach to prose, including John Gay and Lewis Carroll. A 1948 summer at Kenyon College saw Empson's reacquaintance with the American New Critics and the start of his most ambitious and most abstract work, The Structure of Complex Words (1951). Milton's God (1961) and many later articles combine Empson's unmatched—and entertaining—analytic skills with a sometimes strident campaign against Christian belief.

Empson had written almost all his poems by 1940; he became the only important English poet of the 1930s not to be caught up in the orbit of Auden. Instead Empson, more than his peers could, learned from Donne. Dense with arguments and associations, Empson's poems can be spectacularly intelligent, or unintelligible. Extravagant dry wit, extreme condensation, buried allusion, submerged pathos, and fended-terrors (of death, of isolation) mark the style he forged. His best-known poem, ‘Missing Dates’, ends:

It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

Other poems appropriate modern science. ‘To an Old Lady’ brings in King Lear and the second law of thermodynamics as it instructs its readers to respect its subject (according to Empson, his mother):

Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet
Revere; do not presume to think her wasted.
Project her no projectile; plan nor man it;
Gods cool in turn, by the sun long outlasted.

Several of Empson's poems are free translations from Chinese and Japanese. In ‘Chinese Ballad’ (1951) two dolls of mud, smashed together, then remade, stand both (as Donne's ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning’) for the common substance of separated lovers, and for the tenacity of guerrillas fighting the occupying Japanese.

The New Critics' force in America is occasionally likened to that of F. R. Leavis in Britain, though New Critical pedagogy focused on close textual explication rather than on explicit moral judgements. The American figure most like Leavis was the poet-critic Yvor Winters (1900-68), who insisted that good poems' structures resemble logical arguments and convey ethical truths. Winters therefore holds up as models not Donne's school but Ben Jonson's. Winters described modern poetry provocatively in Primitivism and Decadence (1937) and In Defense of Reason (1947); Maule's Curse (1938) applied his methods and standards to nineteenth-century American literature. Winters's poems of the 1920s follow modernist modes, especially those of Williams. His later work adheres to the strictures of his criticism, marked by clarity and adherence to recognized forms and genres: ‘On Teaching the Young’ declares:

The young are quick of speech.
Grown middle-aged, I teach
Corrosion and distrust,
Exacting what I must.
A poem is what stands
When imperceptive hands
Feeling, have gone astray.
It is what one should say.

Winters taught for decades at Stanford University in California, producing there, at first, doctrinaire classicist followers; the best of them is J. V. Cunningham (1911-85), a rigorously dry epigrammatist. Winters's greatest influence on poetry came indirectly in the 1960s and 1970s, through his later students and admirers. Donald Davie introduced Winters's Collected Poems, while Robert Pinsky and Thom Gunn have portrayed Winters in their own verse.

Raised in Massachusetts and in Maine, Blackmur (1904-65) eventually became a professor at Princeton despite his lack of a college degree. Blackmur's essays ask much of his reader, both in their movement of thought and in their demanding prose style. His stiffly Eliotic and Yeatsian poems have not retained their appeal. Language as Gesture (1952) and Form and Value in Modern Poetry (1957) gather the important essays, among them appreciations of Yeats and Eliot; an early examination of Stevens; and a famous attack on e e cummings. The retrospective ‘Lord Tennyson's Scissors: 1912-1950’ rises to a fine if sombre statement of the New Critics' take on their period:

The general poetry at the centre of our time takes the compact and studiable conceit of Donne with the direct eccentricity, vision and private symbolism of Blake; takes from Hopkins the incalculable … freedom of sprung rhythm … and from Emily Dickinson takes spontaneous snatched idiom and wooed accidental inductableness. It is a Court poetry, learned at its fingertips and full of a decorous wilfullness called ambiguity. It is, in a mass society, a court poetry without a court.

(Blackmur, 1957, p. 382)

A SECOND GENERATION

Brooks and Warren's successful textbook Understanding Poetry (1938) introduced ways to discuss, analyse and appreciate difficult poems to an expanding population of US undergraduates (Understanding Fiction followed in 1943). Ransom's essay ‘Criticism, Inc.’ proposed that a ‘more scientific, or precise and systematic’ literary criticism establish itself in academia (Ransom, 1938, p. 329). He got what he wanted; by 1951 Jarrell and others complained of an ‘age of criticism’. Bringing modern poetry into the academy, these poet-critics made possible the careful, formal, American poets of the early 1950s, pre-eminent among them Richard Wilbur; they also laid the grounds for the later presence in universities of poets paid to teach the writing of poetry. The New Critics' importance as editors rivals their importance as educators: Ransom's tenure at the Kenyon Review (1938-58), which he founded, made it a major venue for poetry and criticism. Blackmur and Winters at Hound and Horn (1927-34), Brooks and Warren at the Southern Review (1935-42) and Tate at the Sewanee Review (1944-6) proved almost as influential.

Sometimes Empson, or Ransom, seems out to introduce new ways of reading poetry; at other times the same critic seems out to codify, transfer or render explicit the already-existing practices of some (best or most-sophisticated) readers. Partly for this reason, New Critics' influence on subsequent poets can seem tacit or even invisible. (Is a poet who learned to read Yeats as Blackmur would be influenced by Blackmur or only by Yeats?) Nevertheless, New Critics helped found an implicit programme and theory for the best American poets who came of age before and during the second World War, poets with common assumptions who nevertheless ‘consistently avoided stating a systematic poetic doctrine’ (Travisano, 1999, p. 4). The four major figures in this constellation—Berryman, Bishop, Jarrell and Lowell—display throughout their careers ‘elective affinities, mutual influence, and parallel development’ (ibid., 225). For all four, poems represent persons who describe and enact psychological dilemmas; good poems require closure, incorporate contrasting tones or complex symbols, suggest tragic or unresolvable dilemmas, and evoke moral sentiments only through symbols. Their early poems often adopt seventeenth-century models, whose use marks their clearest debt to New Critical thought.

Brought up in aristocratic Boston, Lowell (1917-77) left Harvard in 1937 to study with Tate in Tennessee, famously camping out in a tent on Tate's lawn. His first published work derives obviously from Tate's. The far more powerful Lord Weary's Castle (1946) takes much of its material from New England past and present, its baroque forceful style from early Milton, and its agenda from Catholic beliefs and Christian eschatology. The book made Lowell the leading poet of his cohort; to call it (as it is often called) a near-perfect realization of American New Critics' hopes should not diminish its latter-day appeal. ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’, a seven-part elegy for a drowned sailor, draws on Thoreau, Marian iconography, ‘Lycidas’ and Moby-Dick to create scenes where ‘Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids / Seaward’, ‘the [gul] go round the stoven timbers’, and ‘The Lord survives the rainbow of His will’. ‘Mary Winslow’ sets its tenderness for Lowell's dead cousin beside his rage at her social world:

The bell-rope in King's Chapel Tower unsnarls
And bells the bestial cow
From Boston Common; she is dead. But stop,
Neighbor, these pillows prop
Her that her terrified and child's cold eyes
Glass what they're not: our Copley ancestress,
Grandiloquent, square-jowled and worldly-wise,
A Cleopatra in her housewife's dress;
Nothing will go again. The bells cry: ‘Come,
Come home,’ the babbling Chapel belfry cries:
‘Come, Mary Winslow, come; I bell thee home.’

The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) used similar rhetoric in overwhelmingly sad dramatic monologues. Its speakers included a meditative Canadian nun, a New York City widower tormented by his Catholic wife's suicide, and an old New Englander ‘Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid’: where Tate's Aeneas recalled a once-graceful Troy, old man can only dream that ‘Trojans are singing to their drunken God, / Ares. Their helmets catch on fire’. Lowell would abandon the modes of his first two books in the psychoanalytic, autobiographical work of Life Studies. The lessons of his early work may be discerned faintly even in his poems of the 1970s, sometimes as rules to be consciously violated, sometimes as tropisms toward interpretative difficulty, and toward strong, sudden closure.

Berryman (1914-72) preserved throughout most of his work a liking for allusion and ambiguity, creating ever more clearly personal vehicles for those qualities. The poems of The Dispossessed (1948) sound like Yeats, or else like puzzles, as in the wintry forest of the title poem: ‘My harpsichord weird as a koto drums / adagio for twilight, for the storm-worn dove / no more de-iced, and the spidery business of love’. Berryman's major work, the series of eighteen-line poems called The Dream Songs (1963, 1968), track the psychological travails of Berryman's alter ego ‘Henry’ and a never-named friend who calls Henry ‘Mr Bones’. Emotionally tumultuous and verbally acrobatic, the several-hundred-poem sequence puts Berryman's darting, polysemous obliquities to purposes ranging from ribaldly comic to intimately diagnostic:

Henry lay in de netting, wild,
while the brainfever bird did scales;
Mr Heartbreak, the New Man,
come to farm a crazy land;
an image of the dead on the fingernail
of a newborn child.

If the Dream Songs are ‘confessional poetry’ they are also informed (like Life Studies) by New Critical senses of achieved difficulty, tension and complex form. Berryman's essays, collected in The Freedom of the Poet (1976), cover Yeats, Pound, Whitman, Eliot, Ransom and Hardy, as well as American fiction and Renaissance drama.

In contrast to her peers, Bishop (1911-79) largely avoided writing criticism, declaring in 1950 that ‘The analysis of poetry is growing more and more pretentious and deadly. After a session with a few of the highbrow magazines one doesn't want to look at a poem for weeks, much less start writing one’ (Ciardi, 1950, p. 267). Bishop's debts to Hopkins and to George Herbert, and her preference for symbol, impersonality and suggestion, all link her aesthetic to New Critical interests. Clear in her first volume, North and South, the ‘New Critical’ elements of Bishop's style reappear transformed in the contained violence of ‘The Armadillo’ (1957). The poem follows a Brazilian holiday's ‘frail, illegal fire balloons’; as some rise towards ‘the kite sticks of the Southern Cross’, others fall on an alcove of animals, setting the creatures on fire:

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,
and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft! a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.
Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and a piercing cry
and panic, and a weak, mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

Jarrell (1914-65) studied with Ransom at Vanderbilt and Kenyon, and modelled his early prose on Empson's. Notably informal and apparently unsystematic compared to his teachers and peers, Jarrell became the best commentator on the literary climate they had produced. (Poetry and the Age (1953) includes his best-known essays; ample posthumous volumes of prose include No Other Book (1999) and Kipling, Auden & Company (1980).) Jarrell found his poetic style while writing about the Second World War in which he served (though never overseas). ‘Eighth Air Force’ (1948) (which Brook examined in detail) considers the ambiguous collective guilt of the Allied airmen who bombed Europe from Britain. Watching bomber crews who ‘play, before they die. Like puppies with their puppy’, Jarrell asks ‘shall I say that man / Is not as men have said: a wolf to man?’ The taut stanzas (three rhyme twice each on ‘man’) and the disturbing conflict among allusions (barracks jottings jostle quotes from Pontius Pilate) suspend and weigh Jarrell's contradictory attitudes. Another war poem, the five-line ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’, became a classroom favourite.

Jarrell's poems present themselves less as constructed objects than as occasions of speech, by persons, apprehended in time: often they are lonely persons who hope for response. Desiderata of tension, polysemy and closure reappear in Jarrell's later work as protagonists search for terms in which to relate past to present experience and thereby imagine a coherent self. At the end of ‘The Player Piano’ (1965) an old woman comes to remember, out of her ungoverned life, one scene of ironic control and composure:

The piano's playing something by Chopin
And Mother and Father and their little girl
Listen. Look, the keys go down by themselves!
I go over, hold my hands out, play I play—
If only, somehow, I had learned to live!
The three of us sit watching, as my waltz
Plays itself out a half-inch from my fingers.

AT PRESENT

New Critical pedagogy remains irreplaceable in introducing poetry to undergraduates the label ‘New Critical’ is—unfortunately—now often pejorative, connoting ‘out-of-date’, ‘narrow’ and/or ‘right-wing’. The New Critics' own poetry can seem to lack contemporary inheritors—until one remembers Geoffrey Hill, whose metaphysical and historical preoccupations, gnarled density, allusive compression and moral and religious seriousness owe much to Ransom and Tate. Hill's major work has come in sequences, among them the book-length Mercian Hymns (1971) and The Triumph of Love (1998). ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’ (1979) packs together tightly symbolic language with religious properties: the series of poems seems meant to honour some backward-looking but brilliantly productive effort, one either (Hill preserves the ambiguity) triumphantly finished or prematurely abandoned: one of its thirteen sonnets commemorates

High voices in domestic chapels; praise;
praise-worthy feuds; new-burgeoned spires that spring
crisp-leaved as though from dropping wells. The young
ferns root among our vitrified tears.

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