Introduction:
The beginning of the twentieth century
marked a significant change in the old values and tradition in literature and life.
“Question, examine and test” – were the watchwords of the new era. The
revolutionary development in science and technology entirely transformed
literary criticism. Four schools of literary criticism, popularly known as
Analytical Criticism, Psychological Criticism, Sociological Criticism and
Expressionism, came into existence. In fact, criticism seems to have separated
into several kinds in the modern age. In fact, the twentieth century writers
and poets rebelled against authority and the idea of fixity. In the area of
criticism T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards, William Empson, Hulme and
Ezra Pound broke away from the critical tradition of the previous age and
carefully charted a new route for modern criticism. New criticism was a
formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary
criticism in the mid decades of the 20th century. It emphasized
close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature
functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement
derived its name from John Crowe Ransom’s book, The New Criticism, published in 1941. However, the ideals of new
criticism expressed by T.S. Eliot’s with the publication of his “Tradition and
Individual Talent” in 1919. The new criticism was a reaction against the
Aesthetic Movement of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. The historical criticism of
poetry and other critical approaches were cast aside. The new criticism
includes the critical principles and theories of T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards,
F.R. Leavis and Empson among English critics, John Crowe Ransom, W.K. Wimsatt,
Cleaneth Books, Allen Tate, Monroe Beardsley and R.P. Blackmur among the
Americans.
The following are the
main assumptions of the new criticism:
i.
The poem is seen as an object in itself or an independent or
autonomous entity.
ii.
Close reading of the poem is essential for revealing its multiple
meanings or ambiguities. The new critics concentrate on the linguistic
processes of a poem.
According to Ransom – “a poem consists of a
dichotomy of “structure and texture.” In
his essay, Criticism as Pure Speculation
(1941), he says: “A Poem is a logical structure having a local texture. The
texture is the quality of expression enriched by every kind of appropriate
metaphorical device so as to embody the full quality of the things being
referred to and the logical structure
implies rational and logical argument.
iii.
There is no room for the poet’s intentions or the reader’s
subjective response in a poem.
iv.
It disentangles a poem from any historical or social context.
v.
New criticism cultivated a “hard-headed technique or critical
dissection.” Therefore, it insisted on “strict objective way of analyzing” a
poem.
Basic Principles of
the New Criticism:
i.
A poem or a work of art should be treated as an object in
itself, primarily as poetry and not as any other thing. In analyzing and
evaluating a work, the new critics usually do not refer to the author’s
biography, to contemporary social conditions and to its psychological or moral
effect on the reader. The literary critic must approach the work with an open
mind.
ii.
The new critics are mainly concerned with the study of words and
the structure of poetry. The distinctive procedure of new criticism is
explication or close reading, the close and subtle analysis of the complex
interrelations and ambiguities of the component elements within a work. The new
critics derived their explicative procedure from I.A. Richards’ The Practical Criticism (1929) and
William Empson’s Seven Types of
Ambiguities (1930).
iii.
Poetry is communication and poetry is the means of
communication. So the new critics seek to understand the full meaning of a poem
through the study of poetic language. To them words are very important, and
their study is the only key to reveal the poetic meaning of the poem. The key
concepts of criticism deal with the meanings and interactions of words, figures
of speech and symbols. There is a great emphasis on ‘the organic unity’ of
structure and meaning.
iv.
The new critics reacted sharply against the vulgarization of
meaning by the rhetoric of mass communication or privatization of language as a
means of communication. According to Allen Tate, poetry is not mere
communication of ideas or attitudes but ‘it is a complex patterning of meaning
to be read and appreciated.’
Conclusion:
Each
of the new critics has devised his own method to bring to light the uniqueness
of a poem and check the vulgarization of language: Richards his “emotive and
referential meanings,” Eliot has “objective correlative’, Books his “paradox”
and Warren his “irony.” The new critics reduced all poetry to formula. They
removed criticism into a highly specialized technical area where it cannot be
read or appreciated by the ordinary man. Their contribution to “linguistic”
expression has benefited the study of poetry. They taught a generation to
read, to reflect on meaning, to pay attention to what a work of literary art
really means. They tell us what literature is and how it works.
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