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NEW CRITICISM :POSTULATES AND LIMITATIONSThe study of literature means the study of literature, not of biography nor of literary history (incidentally of vast importance), not of grammar, not of etymology, not of anything except the works themselves, viewed as their creators wrote them, viewed as art, as transcripts of humanity—not as logic,not as psychology, not as ethics. —Martin Wright Sampson

The term “New Criticism,” designated a break with traditional

methods, was a product of the American university in 1930s and

40s. It stressed close reading of the text itself, much like

the French pedagogical precept “explication du texte.” Joel

Spingarn, the American Renaissance scholar and historian wrote

a short booklet in 1911 titled “New Criticism” in which he

discussed the writings of Benedetto `Croce, the Italian

philospher. Thirty years later, the name comes from John Crowe

Ransom’s book The New Criticism (1941), in which he surveyed the

theories developed in England by T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards,

and William Empson, together with the work of the American

critic Yvor Winters. As a strategy of reading, “New Criticism”

viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object

independent of historical context and as a unified whole that

reflected the unified sensibility of the artist.A teacher-

scholar-poet, John Crowe Ransom and several of his bright

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students – Allan Tate, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks,

adopted the name of Fugitives and published an elegant

literary magazine called The Fugitive in Nashville from 1922 to

1925. They dealt with organic tradition, the importance of

strict attention to form, conservatism related to classical

values, the ideal of a society that encourages order and

tradition, a preference for ritual, and the rigorous and

analytical reading of literary texts. Eliot was particularly

influential in his formulation of the objective correlative

and was also influential in his endorsement of the English

Metaphysical poets of the 17th century for their success in

blending ‘states of mind and feeling’ in a single ‘verbal

equivalent’.

The New Critics sought precision and structural tightness

in the literary work; they favoured a style and tone that

tended toward irony; they insisted on the presence within the

work of everything necessary for its analysis; and they called

for an end to a concern by critics and teachers of English

with matters outside the work itself – the life and history of

the author, or the social and economic implications of the

literary work. In short, they turned the attention to the

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essential matter: what the work says and how it says it as

inseparable issues.

J. Ransom called for a more ‘objective’ criticism

focusing on the intrinsic qualities of a work rather than on

its biographical or historical context; and his students

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren with Robert B. Heilman

had already advanced their critical theory and techniques

through a series of brilliant college textbooks on literary

analysis: Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943) by

Brooks and Warren, Understanding Drama (1945) by Brooks and

Robert B. Heilman, which helped to make New Criticism the

academic orthodoxy for the next twenty years. Other critics

grouped under this heading, despite their differences, include

Allen Tate (The House of Fiction, 1950, co-ed. Caroline Gordon),

Ray B. West, Jr. and Robert W. Stallman (The Art of Modern Fiction),

R.P. Blackmur, W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Kenneth Burke.

Influenced by T.S. Eliot’s view of poetry’s autotelic status,

and by the detailed semantic analyses of I.A. Richards in

Practical Criticism (1929) and Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930),

the American New Critics repudiated ‘extrinsic’ criteria for

understanding poems, dismissing them under such names as the

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affective fallacy and the intentional fallacy. Moreover, they

sought to overcome the traditional distinction between form

and content: for them, a poem was ideally an ‘organic unity’

in which tensions were brought to equilibrium. Their favored

terms of analysis – irony, paradox, imagery, metaphor, and

symbol – tended to neglect questions of genre, and were not

successfully transferred to the study of dramatic and

narrative works. Many later critics – often unsympathetic to

the New Critics’ Southern religious conservatism – accused

them of cutting literature off from history, but their impact

has in some ways been irreversible, especially in replacing

biographical source-study with text-centered approaches. The

outstanding works of New Criticism are Brook’s The Well-Wrought

Urn (1947) and Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon (1954). New Critics like

Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K.

Wimsatt placed a similar focus on the metaphysical poets and

poetry in general, a genre well suited to New Critical

practice. “New Criticism” aimed at bringing a greater

intellectual rigor to literary studies, confining itself to

careful scrutiny of the text alone and the formal structures

of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among others.

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New Criticism began as a movement replacing the

biocritical and historical methods that dominated English

studies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The life and

times of the author may interest a historian but not a critic;

the text ought not to be confused with its origins

(intentional fallacy) or its effects upon the readers

(affective fallacy). It is the text that provides all the

evidences we require which can be examined through the formal

elements that make up the text: image, simile, metaphor and

other such forms of figurative language. The literary object

is a timeless, autonomous, verbal object. It is the same for

all people at all times. Its meaning is objective meant to be

realised by anyone who analyses it with close examination. Its

complex meaning cannot be explained by just paraphrasing it.

Literary language is different from scientific language

or everyday language. While scientific language points to some

world outside without calling attention to itself, everyday

language, on the other hand, is denotative depending on a one-

to-one correspondence between words and the objects they stand

for. The former is used for reference and the latter is for

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the expression of emotions and attitudes.Cleanth Brooks also

makes it clear in the following words:

The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize terms, to freeze them into strict

denotations; the poet’s tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually

modifying each other and thus violating their dictionary meanings.(The Well

Wrought Urn)

Literary language organises all linguistic resources

into some special kind of arrangement into a complex and

unique unity in order to create an aesthetic experience. And

the form in which this experience is clothed is inseparable

from its content and meaning. In other words what a text means

and how it means are one and the same. And the work, the

verbal icon, possess an ideal, organic unity (the world’s

body) in which all elements contribute to create an

indivisible whole. This organic unity makes for the complexity

of the work and this achievement of an organic whole is the

criterion for evaluating a literary work. By explaining its

unity, its inclusiveness, its coherence, its value is

judged.The complexity of a work is often the result of

multiple and conflicting meanings that are produced by such

devices as irony, paradox, ambiguity, tension and so on.

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Should a work achieve its unity, its order, these devices

should help to resolve the conflicts and tensions in the work

leading to its harmony. This critical practice goes by the

name ‘intrinsic’ criticism which means that criticism exists

within the confines of the text and does not go outside the

text for the tools they require to interpret the text. The

text is an auto telic artefact. It is complete and wholesome

in itself, and it exists for its own sake. Its relationship

with the world beyond is not much of an interest for the New

Critic.

Two full accounts of New Critical manifesto appeared as

“The Intentional Fallacy,” and “The Affective Fallacy,” authored jointly by

Wimsatt and Beardsley. The twin essays constitute the most

uncompromising theoretical statement of the manifesto that

objective criticism is that in which attention is focussed

upon the meaning of a work itself without being distracted by

enquiries into the origins of works in personal experiences.

This exclusion of authors and their contexts is taken to what

might appear to be its logical extreme in Wimsatt and

Beardsley’s influential essay on “The Intentional Fallacy.”

They declare:

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The intenationalist position was a Romantic fallacy, consistent only with the

conviction that poetry is to be approached as the efflux of a noble soul. Knowledge

of the author’s intentions was neither available nor desirable.

Wimsatt and Beardsley question the importance of the

individual reader’s response in “The Affective Fallacy.” The

groundwork for their position had already been worked out in

the 1920s by I. A. Richards. Richards conducted a series of

close reading experiments with his students at Cambridge. He

began with the assumption that students should be able to read

poems richly by applying careful scrutiny to the works

themselves. To focus students’ attention on the work itself,

Richards would often remove the distraction of authors’ names,

dates, even titles. In 1929, when he reported his results in

“Practical Criticism”, two things appeared to be clear. First, his

students seemed not to be very good at reading texts

carefully. Richards thought, and many people agreed, that

students obviously needed much more training in “close

reading.” They needed to learn how to look carefully at a

text, suppressing their own variable and subjective responses,

as Wimsatt and Beardsley would later persuasively argue. How a

work affects a particular reader, Wimsatt and Beardsley

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assert, is not critically significant. “Whereas the Intentional

Fallacy ” they say, “is a confusion between the poem and its origins, the

Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results” (21).

Biographers may want to speculate on the poet’s intention, and

psychologists may want to theorize about a poem’s effects, but

literary critics should study the poem itself. The second

thing made evident by Richards’ “experiments” was that such

close reading was not only possible but very rewarding, as

Richards himself was able to read these isolated works in

revealing and stimulating ways, exposing unsuspected

complexities and subtleties in the works he examined. Even in

the following description of the creative process of poets,

taken from Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s New

Critical textbook, Understanding Poetry (1938), the author’s

intention is of little enduring interest:

At the same time that he [the poet] is trying to envisage the poem as a whole, he is

trying to relate the individual items to that whole. He cannot assemble them in a

merely arbitrary fashion; they must bear some relation to each other. So he develops

his sense of the whole, the anticipation of the finished poem, as he works with the

parts, and moves from one part to another. Then as the sense of the whole develops,

it modifies the process by which the poet selects and relates the parts, the words,

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images, rhythms, local ideas, events, etc. . . . It is an infinitely complicated process of

establishing interrelations. (527)

New Criticism is pragmatic in its concerns and ought not

to be construed as a doctrine. One way to get at New Criticism

Principles, and begin to see why they have remained so

appealing, might be to look at a famous poem written about the

time that New Criticism was emerging as a critical force.This

poem is of particular interest because it is about poetry,

attempting to define it, advising us how to view it. Thus it

seeks to provide a kind of guide for criticism: “Here is what

poetry ought to be,” the poem says; “read it with these standards in mind.”

Widely anthologized in introduction-to-literature texts since

its appearance, the poem not only reflects the ideas of a

nascent New Criticism, but it also probably helped to promote

those ideas over several generations. Read it through

carefully a few times, noting any questions or confusions that

arise.

Ars Poetica

Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute

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As a globed fruit,

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone 5

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs, 10

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,

Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time 15

As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf. 20

For loves

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean

But be. (1926)

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The poem is startling from its opening lines, asserting

that a poem should be “palpable and mute.” He uses comparisons

that reinforce particularly the idea of being “palpable.” In

comparing the poem to a “fruit,” for instance, MacLeish

suggests that the poem should be a real thing, having

substance. From lines 1–8, then, we draw our first principle

of New Criticism:

A poem should be seen as an object—an object of an

extraordinary and somewhat mysterious kind, a silent

object that is not equal to the words printed on a page.

Lines 9–16 articulate another idea: “A poem should be

motionless in time.” This idea seems easy enough to

understand: MacLeish believes that poems shouldn’t change.

Something that is “leaving” is neither fully here nor fully

gone; it is caught in time and space, in an in-between

contradictory timespace. We do not notice a memory

deteriorating: it is there, unchanging; then it is only partly

there; then it may be gone. This paradox adds to the mystery

of the earlier lines and also suggests a second principle:

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The poem as silent object is unchanging, existing

somehow both within and outside of time, “leaving” yet

“motionless.”

Lines 17–18 offer a third surprising idea: “A poem should

be equal to: / not true.” It’s difficult to believe that

MacLeish is saying that poems should lie. Poetry, MacLeish is

saying, should speak metaphorically, substituting evocative

images for the description of emotions, or historical details,

or vague ideas. Instead of telling us about an idea or

emotion, literature confronts us with something that may spark

emotions or ideas. A poem is an experience, not a discussion

of an experience. The final two lines summarize this point in

a startling way: “A poem should not mean / But be.” Ordinarily

we assume that words are supposed to convey a meaning,

transferring ideas from an author to a reader. But the images

that MacLeish’s poem has given us—the globed fruit, the old

medallions, the casement ledges, the flight of birds, the moon

climbing, the empty doorway and the maple leaf, the leaning

grasses and the two lights—these do not mean” anything in a

literal, historical, scientific way. These things just are

suggestive and even moving, but their meaning is something we

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impose on them; they simply exist, and we experience their

being more powerfully than any abstract idea. In much the same

way, poems (MacLeish is asserting) do not mean, but rather

have an existence—which takes us to the third principle:

Poems as unchanging objects represent an organized

entity, not a meaning. In this way, poems are therefore

fundamentally different from prose: prose strives to

convey meaning; but poems cannot be perfectly translated

or summarized, for they offer a being, an existence, an

experience perhaps—not a meaning.

The implications of this second crucial assumption, that poems

exist outside of time, can already be seen in the criticism of

T. S.Eliot, whose ideas influenced the New Critics. In

“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot’s famous essay of

1919, “Poetry is said to be not the expression of personality, but an escapes from

personality.” The New Critics are aware of course that poems have

authors, and they will sometimes refer to biographical

information, but it is not the focus of their attention. Close

reading of the work itself should reveal what the reader needs

to know. Historical and biographical information, to be sure,

may sometimes be helpful, but it should not be essential. This

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emphasis on a work’s form has led some thinkers to link New

Criticism to another movement, Russian formalism, which

originated with the work of Viktor Shklovsky in 1917—about the

same time that New Criticism’s ideas first began to emerge in

Western Europe and North America. The Russian formalists do

seem to prefigure the New Criticism when they assume that a

writer should be evaluated as a craftsman who fashions an

artistic object. The writer should not be evaluated, New

Critics and Russian formalists would agree, on the basis of

the work’s message. Paradise Lost is a great poem (or it isn’t)

because of Milton’s artistic performance, not because of the

validity of its theological or political message. Russian

formalism was rather short-lived, fading away by the late

1920s, discouraged by the Russian authorities, who no doubt

noted that focusing on style and technique would tend to let

all sorts of ideas float around.

Although New Criticism has been criticized at times for

its lack of political commitment, one could argue that an

attention to form (not message) is in fact a subtly powerful

commitment to openness and freedom. Admittedly, in celebrating

a certain kind of form (unified complexity), New Criticism has

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perhaps not been so entirely open in its actual practice, as

feminist critics have persuasively argued, noticing the

predominance of white males in the canon of works valued by

New Critics. Is the relative absence of women in the

traditional canon of New Criticism really a consequence of its

principles? One could argue that women have tended to write in

genres that may resist New Criticism’s particular kind of

close reading (in journals and letters, for instance), but

certainly some women (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily

Dickinson, Virginia Woolf) have produced works celebrated by

New Critical readings.

To encapsulate, each new critic has a basic principle to

evaluate a work of art. Thus Brook’s ‘paradox’, Tate’s

‘tension’, Warren’s ‘irony’, Ransom’s ‘texture’, Blackmur’s

‘gesture’ and Empson’s ‘ambiguity’ are the yardsticks to judge

a work of art. New Criticism not only raised level of

awareness and sophistication in American Criticism but

developed ingenious new methods of analysis of poetry and its

devices: imagery and symbol. It has given a new taste averse

to romantic tradition. It is also to the credit of the New

Critics that they have taken away the importance from the

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author and given it to the text. The printed page ‘the text’

is the centre neither the author nor the reader. So, the

validity of the New Criticism lies in the fact that it takes

the poem as a work of art, a structure having an independent

existence.

Works Cited

Rice, Philip, and Patricia Waugh. Modern Literary Theory. 4th ed. NewDelhi, 2001.

Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory : The Basics. London and New York, 2007.

Berry, Peter. Beginning Theory : An Introduction to Literatureand Cultural Theory.

Manchester, 1995.

Seldon, Raman, Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker. A Reader’s Guideto Contemporary

Literary Theory. 5th ed. Great Britain, 2005.

Nagarajan,M.S. “The Legacy of New Criticism”. Journal of Teaching and Research in

English Literature 4.2 (2012) :n.pag. Web. 15 Nov.2012.

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