New Criticism: An Introduction

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 20^th 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.