I have often said that I regard criticism itself as a systematic subject, and there are systematic tendencies in the Anatomy of Criticism, particularly in the way that it tries to unite different critical methods…. But I do not think of the Anatomy as primarily systematic: I think of it rather as schematic. The reason why it is schematic is that poetic thinking is schematic. The structure of images that C. S. Lewis in The Discarded Image calls "the Model" was a projected schematic construct which provided the main organization for literature down to the Renaissance: it modulated into less projected forms after Newton's time, but it did not lose its central place in literature. The attraction that poets have felt during the last two centuries for occult and other offbeat forms of thought, while very largely ignoring the advance of real science, has always seemed to me an instructive example of the affinity to pattern-making schematism which is part of the poetic process itself. The Anatomy, especially in its third essay, attempts to provide an outline of a schema which, as I said, I hoped would serve as a guide to practical criticism. It is not a view of the universe, whether true or fictional, and it is not a reconstruction of any specific pattern in the past. It employs four seasons because that is the most convenient number for such a schema to have, not because I am unaware that "sumer is icumen in" means "spring is here." Since the book appeared, I have received enough correspondence echoing Mr. Hartman's "it works; it is teachable" [see excerpt above] to make me reasonably satisfied with its general usefulness. (pp. 136-37)

I am often told that [attempts in criticism to make the resemblances and recurring patterns in the variety of literary experience significant] detracts from the distinctiveness of the work of literature, this quality being expanded into a value only by rhetorical license, the world's worst poem being obviously as distinctive as the best. It is as though a zoologist were to insist that the differences between mastifffs and chihuahuas made the conception "dog" a useless pedantry. Mr. Wimsatt, who is not normally this sentimental kind of critic, describes my own recurring patterns as clichés [see excerpt above], meaning apparently that, even if the connections are there, it is bad form to call attention to them.

Mr. Ransom's conception of "texture" is one from which every critic has learned a great deal, but his view that structure, which means ultimately the study of such recurring principles of literature as convention and genre, is somehow less relevant to criticism, is something I have never understood. The principle that a work of literature should not be related to anything outside itself is sound enough, but I cannot see how the rest of literature can be regarded as outside the work of literature, any more than the human race can be regarded as outside a human being. When I use the metaphor of standing back from a work of literature, as one would from a painting, to see the structural principles in it, I am trying to give some reality to the word "literature," by placing the reader in the middle of that great museum without walls which Mr. Hartman has so well described as the form of understanding appropriate to our time, when technology has both unified and decentralized our relation to works of art. If Mr. Wimsatt asks who really wants to see a painting in that way, the answer is, everybody interested in twentieth-century painting, abstract expressionism being only the most dramatic of several contemporary modes of painting from precisely this perspective. Mr. Fletcher is right in connecting my interest in comedy and in utopian forms with my interest in literature as a total community, where every resemblance is a recognition scene. Such recognition scenes are, as a rule, both sublime and ridiculous, a fact which largely accounts for what Mr. Fletcher calls the low comedy of my style. This is partly because parody of convention is as frequent as taking it straight. It seems to me worth notice that the opening sentences of Pride and Prejudice and of Anna Karenina are in a convention of beginning a story with a sententious statement which goes back at least to medieval rhetoric. But the fact that this convention is being used ironically, with a playful irony in one and a savage irony in the other, is equally obvious. Other recognition scenes, such as the conventional romance pattern of the cave episode which helps to establish the literary context of Tom Sawyer, seem quasi-ridiculous to those who are unaccustomed or unwilling to think in terms of literary context. They are "irrelevant" (Mr. Wimsatt's word) only if the word "literature" is meaningless. And if it is meaningless, criticism is not a very significant subject.

Such persisting conventions come down from the past, and from one point of view my emphasis on recurring structural principles seems to go back in the past until it disappears into that inaccessible powder-room of the Muses, prehistoric mythology. For the way in which the recurring structural elements of literature (convention, genre, archetype) are held together by and in myth, I must refer the reader to the Anatomy of Criticism. I speak of an early mythical period of literature because it seems clear that there was such a period. But nobody can catch literature in the act of originating, and in one sense it is even illogical to speak of "a" myth at all except for convenience. We cannot really think of a myth apart from a specific verbal embodiment of that myth, just as we cannot think of a sonata in music apart from the embodiment of the sonata form in actual compositions. It is not the antiquity of myth but its permanence that makes it a structural principle of literature: not the wisdom hidden behind the story of Endymion but the art revealed, explicitly in Drayton and Lyly and Keats, implicitly in hundreds of other stories and poems that are based on the Endymion theme. I know that portentous language is often used about myths, and similar sound effects have been attributed to the Anatomy by Mr. Wimsatt, following Mr. Abrams; but they are not there. And if they were, a few woo-woo noises about the hoary antiquity of myths would be trifling enough compared to the dismal and illiberal impoverishment of literary experience that results from ignoring the structure into which that experience enters. It is only the individual and discrete literary experience that melts "into thin air": what does not vanish is the total vision which contains the experience.

Hence when I say that Shakespearean comedy demands a primitive response, I am not saying that our response should be similar to that of a hypothetical noble savage. My example of a primitive response is taken from Pamela: it could just as well have been taken from Dickens or Tolstoi. By a primitive response I mean an unmediated response, a response that is neither naïve, like Partridge's response to Hamlet in Tom Jones, nor so sophisticated as to be indifferent, but is the kind of direct response to the power of literature which is only possible when one stands inside the structure of literature, and is neither confusing it with life nor building an emotional barricade against it. (pp. 138-41)