Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism,
edited by Garrick Davis (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008)
ARRON URBANCZYK is a scholar, critic, and writer residing in north Georgia. He has written several reviews for Modern Age and writes frequently on the subjects of American literature, literary theory, and modern Catholic fiction.
The field of literary criticism and theory
is certainly ripe for a change, a
shift, at least something to shake it up a
bit. The one-time Yale professor William
Deresiewicz astutely diagnoses the stagnation
in literary criticism in a 2008 article
in The Nation. Quoting Louis Menand,
Deresiewicz articulates a fact of which
professors of literature across the country
are painfully aware: “our graduate students
are writing the same dissertations, with
the same tools, as they were in 1990.” The
academic study of literature is still recycling
the now-hackneyed orthodoxies of
identity politics, deconstruction, and New
Historicism, but without the sense of intellectual
excitement felt by many when the
likes of Derrida, Judith Butler, and Stephen
Greenblatt were, if nothing else, new and
provocative figures. As Deresiewicz aptly
puts it, “[t]here have always been trends
in literary criticism, but the major trend
now is trendiness itself,” and the craze for
trendiness seems in the grip of what is evidently
a terminal illness. When the most
recent edition of The Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism (a title conspicuously
lacking the term “Literary”) has an essay
celebrating the advent of “Disability Studies”
as a promising new paradigm for the
literary critic, one can say with some justice
that literary theory seems to have almost
completely forgotten its object (however
admirable its interest in matters of social
justice). In such a state of affairs, a hopeful
soul may recall the words of Edgar in
King Lear: “Ripeness is all.” Garrick Davis,
poet and founding editor of Contemporary
Poetry Review, may have had the words of
Edgar ringing in his ears when he set about
editing Praising It New: The Best of the New
Criticism. The timing for reintroducing the
New Critics into the field of literary studies
couldn’t be more opportune.
Organizing the heterogeneous crosssection
of poets, critics, and professors
lumped under the term “New Critics” is a
daunting task, but Davis is equal to it and
has succeeded admirably. Praising It New
only deals with American figures, thus one
won’t find selections from important non-
American figures such as William Empson
or I. A. Richards. His selection of essays
is, however, widely representative and
coherently organized along thematic lines.
The recognized giants associated with the
New Criticism are well and generously
represented: the volume contains seminal
essays from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen
Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters,
Cleanth Brooks, Wimsatt and Beardsley,
Kenneth Burke, and Robert Penn Warren.
Further, Praising It New performs
the great service of popularizing several
excellent critical essays from lesser-known
figures influenced by the New Criticism,
including R. P. Blackmur, J. V. Cunningham
(Yvor Winters’s protégé at Stanford),
Randall Jarrell (a student of Ransom and
Warren’s at Vanderbilt), Hugh Kenner
(Cleanth Brooks’s student at Yale), and
Delmore Schwartz.
Praising It New revolves around two
central preoccupations of the New Critics:
the need to treat literature as a distinct
mode of aesthetic expression and
the responsibility of the critic to make a
judgment of the aesthetic object according
to rational standards. The New Critics
began their rise to prominence in the early
twentieth century (e.g. Eliot published
his widely influential collection of critical
essays, The Sacred Wood, in 1920), and
they would come to dominate the field of
literary criticism well into the early 1960s.
Indeed, the measure of their success is
witnessed by the fact that the textbooks
written by Cleanth Brooks and Robert
Penn Warren (Understanding Poetry and
Understanding Fiction) became the standard
tool for generations of college English
professors in the undergraduate classroom.
Yet, initially, the New Critics took
the stance of opposition to popular criticism
and academic English studies. They
sought to create a space in universities and
colleges for aesthetic criticism (as opposed
to leaving it solely to magazine reviewers),
and believed teachers and professors
should provide such criticism (particularly
for the emerging Modernist school of
poets). Thus they strongly challenged the
two reigning forms of literary analysis in
their day: academic “scholarship” (which
was mostly historical and philological) and
“impressionistic” criticism (the critic registering
his psychological and emotional
responses to a literary work as a mode of
evaluation). Critics such as Ransom and
Tate perceived a deeply troubling state
of affairs: academic professors of English
were trained exclusively as literary
historians and actively discouraged from
writing “criticism,” while many of the
popular “critics” (i.e. impressionist critics)
were merely eloquently articulating their
psychological experiences of reading literature.
The conventional wisdom was
that real scholars didn’t trifle with treating
literature as an aesthetic object, because
doing so was unscientific. In “Criticism
Inc.,” John Crowe Ransom reports that
one of his contemporaries, head of a graduate
English department, flatly asserted,
“This is a place for exact scholarship
. . . we don’t allow criticism here, because
that is something which anybody can do.”
Further, Tate laments in “Miss Emily and
the Bibliographer” that if a young student
“goes to graduate school, he comes
out incapacitated for criticism; if he tries
to be a critic he is not unlike the ignorant
impressionist who did not go to the
graduate school. He cannot discuss the literary
object in terms of its specific form;
all that he can do is to give you its history
or tell you how he feels about it.”
While the orthodoxies have changed a
bit, this diagnosis sounds strangely like
our own era. While the “old historicism”
is out of fashion, the “New Historicism”
has risen to take its place (the ideological
study of history and culture as a matrix
of the struggle for power and domination
à la Foucault, Greenblatt, et al). In fact
the New Historicism, coupled with the
ubiquitous influence of identity politics in
graduate literary study, has collapsed both
of Tate’s vices into the modern graduate
student: he is both incapacitated for criticism
(by the New Historicism) and tends
to indulge widely on how he feels about
a text (according to race, class, gender,
sexual orientation, etc.).
Yet the New Critics were not merely
astute diagnosticians of the dearth of
sound aesthetic criticism in their day. They
were some of the most lucid purveyors of
rational principles for evaluating the literary
work of art in the history of literary
theory. The literary work of art is first of
all an object, a “form” in its own right.
In “The Formalist Critic,” Cleanth Brooks
observed with remarkable clarity that
“form is meaning” in literature, and that
form is the proper concern of the critic.
Thus the literary critic must begin with his
object, and not such extra-literary issues as
authorial intent (see Wimsatt and Beardsley
on “The Intentional Fallacy”), emotional
response (Wimsatt and Beardsley on
“The Affective Fallacy”), or literary biography.
Praising It New includes numerous
seminal essays wherein the rational principles
of formalist criticism are articulated
(e.g. Pound’s distinction of poetry into
melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia in
“How to Read”; Eliot’s famous doctrine
of the “objective correlative” in “Hamlet
and His Problems”; the “dissociation of
sensibility” in “The Metaphysical Poets”;
and Warren’s doctrine of “pure poetry” in
“Pure and Impure Poetry”). Yet literary
criticism, like all forms of praxis, is best
learned through watching the masters at
work. On this score, too, Davis has chosen
wisely, for Praising It New contains not only
works that are primarily theoretical, but
also numerous essays containing the type
of “close readings” (primarily of poetry)
that made the New Critics famous. It is
a delight to read Randall Jarrell’s analysis
of Housman, Cleanth Brooks’ magisterial
study of Eliot, R. P. Blackmur on American
religious verse, Eliot on the Metaphysical
poets, and the many snippets of close
readings peppering the essays throughout
the anthology. Such intelligent, eloquent,
and precise literary criticism is a refreshing,
though rare, commodity in the groves
of academic “scholarship” these days.
The New Critics also vociferously
insisted that aesthetic criticism is not only
the proper job of the critic—it is in fact
his moral obligation. Tate and Winters
insisted upon this obligation so strongly
that one gets the impression that not to do
so, in their eyes, was a type of betrayal of
humanistic learning itself. Yet the moral
judgment of the literary work is not the
type with which we are acquainted today.
For decades ideological theorists and critics,
giving in to the impulse of the social
engineer, have denounced the racism, sexism,
homophobia, classism, and other such
real or perceived faults in literary texts.
If the professor can ferret out the alleged
“-isms” in great (or not so great) works of
literature, the hope is he can reprogram the
minds and hearts of his students according
to his ideological code. The concern,
much like the Marxism that inspires most
of these readings, is with changing society,
not with understanding literature.
The New Critics’ notion of the judgment
involved in literary criticism has its
roots in the very origin of literary theory
itself (which is to say, in Aristotle). In
“Miss Emily and the Bibliographer” Tate
speaks of the critic’s “obligation to judge,”
and the failure to render criticism of the
literature of the day he calls the “Great
Refusal.” Indeed, the unwillingness to be
attentive to literary form was an indication
to Tate that the literary establishment
of his day, much as our own, “no longer
believe[s] in literature” or its vital connection
to culture.
Further, in the selection from The Anatomy
of Nonsense, Yvor Winters insists literary
criticism is inherently “an act of moral
judgment,” yet moral in a specific fashion.
Winters is no naive moralist, suggesting
the critic should applaud “good” deeds in
art and deplore “wickedness.” Rather, he
returns literary theory to the context of
Aristotle’s Poetics. Winters reminds us that
the critic must evaluate literary form in
the broad context of anthropology (hence,
his evocation of Aristotle and St. Thomas
Aquinas). Is the crafted literary form, what
Winters would call the “adjustment of feeling
to motive” in language, doing justice to
human nature as it really is? In the face of
such a question, the critic must judge, and
his judgment cannot but be “moral” insofar
as the approximation to human nature
is involved. Thus we find deep in the heart
of the New Criticism a re-emergence of
Aristotle: literature is imitation (or mimesis),
and what is imitated through language
is human action (and Aristotle never tires
of reminding us that it is action that manifests
human nature). The critic must not
only judge the technical virtuosity of the
literary form, he must also accept the invitation
to and obligation of moral criticism:
he must judge whether the aesthetic object
does justice to human experience and the
truth about human nature.
Perhaps Praising It New will mark the
beginning of a renewed interest among literary
scholars in the criminally neglected
work of the New Critics. Perhaps this volume
may be instrumental in a renascence
of aesthetic criticism among professors and
critics. Or perhaps this volume will simply
rescue the brilliance of the New Critics
from the nearly complete cultural amnesia
to which they have been subjected by
the “advances” in academic criticism of the
last four decades. Whatever its impact, the
moment is right for this volume to appear.
“Ripeness is all,” and Garrick Davis has
happened upon the perfect time to reacquaint
us with what his subtitle justly heralds
as The Best of the New Criticism.