The New Criticism grew up in the 1930’s alongside the “socially committed” criticism which used to be thought of as its rival but which it has, by now, long outlived. It began to flourish in a serious way in the postwar decade, when its leading exponents gained ascendancy in English departments which, in their turn, offered new courses not in particular poets but in understanding poetry. One could not read this or that poet until one had learned to read poetry in general. Those were the years when back issues of the little reviews were to be seen lining the shelves of every respectable academic, and Kenneth Koch, in a cheerful anarchist poem, reflected that the only consequence of setting fire to the Hudson Review offices might be that “One ends up in prison with trial subscriptions/ To the Partisan, Sewanee, and Ken-yon Review !” It may be that things are a little mellower now. John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks, at any rate, have entered the peculiarly courtly and mellow old age of Southern gentlemen, their writing is even gentler than it has been, and there is evidently less need for the polemical edge in their pronouncements; so that their two most recent books,¹ coming very late in the history of the New Critical enterprise, can provide the occasion for a backward glance at the achievement of the New Critics as a group.

Though the phrase “new criticism” was very much in the air during the years following the publication of “The Waste Land”—no doubt meaning a great many different things to different people—it was brought into currency definitely, I believe, by Ransom’s book The New Criticism. There he spoke of the findings, and the apparently new way of finding, of a company of critics that included R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, I. A. Richards, William Empson—and the one archcritic to whom the Americans in this group especially paid homage, T. S. Eliot. (Indeed, it is probably best to remove the British names from this list. Richards has only rarely made use of the faculty of “close reading” associated with the New Critics, and Empson is too thoroughly an original to belong to any group. On the other hand, a book like F. R. Leavis’s Revaluation seems to have been written almost wholly under Eliot’s influence, and presents something of a puzzle to the reader who does not know how intoxicating that influence could be.) The points of method and doctrine that separated these critics from one another are in danger of being forgotten, but are worth remembering: Blackmur, with his allegiance to Dante, his indifference to the Romantics, his alternately opaque and idiomatic style, and his insistence that a poem contain matter sufficiently serious for a critic’s pondering; Winters, with his steadily committed moralism, his continual awareness of and revulsion from the Romantics, his dedicated efforts to bring modern poetry to the drawing board and expose once and forever its nonsensicalities of syntax and sentiment; finally Brooks, with his famous “pouncing” (Ransom’s word) on the central paradox of a poem, and Ransom himself, with his longing for a more philosophical criticism that might adequately distinguish poetry from other types of verbal discourse. Obviously, differences in manner among the New Critics are also differences in matter. It is the old unity of form and content about which the New Criticism itself has had so much to say. Yet whatever separates them from time to time, these critics do at last belong together, for in their emphasis on the texture of the literary object, and in their patient demonstration that the minutest gestures of a creating mind represent the deepest sense of what that mind is, they brought about a small revolution in the teaching and the reading of literature.

The New Critics are at their happiest in dealing with the shorter literary forms, the lyric poem in particular. This special strength of their approach has been noticed often enough, but it will bear remarking here once again since it is also, surely, a weakness. Thus, if we consider for a moment the case of Ransom, that lovely writer, which of his critical observations are the ones that stay most permanently in a reader’s mind? That Milton mourns for Lycidas “with a very technical piety”; that Shakespeare’s sonnets are “a field of imagery in which the explorer has performed too prodigiously, and lost his chart,” and of the performance in one sonnet, that “it is my impression that our poet is faking”; that “there is often in Hardy’s poems the visible quaint Tightness of a workman going by the rules”: all these are epigrammatic and authoritative in the manner of great criticism, and never mind that half of them are wrong. But notice, in passing, that they all have to do with lyric poetry. To discussion of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Wordsworth’s The Prelude the New Critics have had notably little to contribute, and, as one variety of politically-minded critic might say, it is no accident that this should be so. The reason for the deficiency of New Critical labor on certain subjects is not, however, really political, despite all the attacks on the group for its political conservatism. It is rather a cultural deficiency attributable to the revolt against Romanticism, the revolt which Eliot led, or thought he was leading, to such tonic effect, but which has turned out to have some deadening side-effects.

I do not like to be abrupt to critics who are themselves so circumspect, but the truth is that the New Critics cared very little for the Romantics and understood them hardly at all. Their objections to Shelley, for example, were made largely on grounds of decorum, and one thing about criticism based on decorum is that it prevents the critic even from knowing his enemy. The greatest difficulty of Romantic poetry is that reading it, and reading any single Romantic poet, is a cumulative experience that depends on slowly accumulated understanding. More than other poets, the Romantic likes to define his own terms, so that in a quite immediate sense it is not enough for a reader of Wordsworth or Blake or Wallace Stevens to know how to read poetry in general. It is strange to think of Robert Lowell saying “all my poems are in a sense one poem,” but to hear a Romantic say this would not be puzzling in the least. The work of a Romantic poet is continuous, and tends in any case toward the longer forms: the poems of Heaven, and Hell, and Life. And about such poems, about Paradise Lost and all that came after it, the New Critics have been inhibited from saying much of lasting value. At this point in a consideration of the group, however, individual features begin to seem fairly important. One remembers that Blackmur slipped worse than anyone else on the pons asinorum of modern criticism—reducing private speech to public speech—when he condemned as nonsense a certain poem by Stevens, “Disillusionment at Ten O’Clock,” which to a sympathetic reader seems a perfectly lucid comic gem. And one remembers that Winters was the one man who did after all know his enemy. Perhaps, too, this is the time to say a few words about the new collections by Ransom and Brooks, which I shall begin by recommending without hesitation, to be read as all new books by good critics or good books by New Critics should be read.

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The Ransom and Brooks ways of proceeding with a poem could scarcely be more sharply at odds, even though in their cultural background, according to Ransom, the two “were about as like as two peas from the same pod.” Brooks has a simple and reliable trick. He finds the particular current of imagery that runs down the middle of the object at hand, discovers for himself what tensions it generates, how tone and speaking voice alter to fit the progress of the work, and then hands everything back to the reader, whole and enriched. The Well Wrought Urn is now regarded as a rather staid and sober book, yet it must be, by any fair estimate, one of the most unusual works of criticism ever written. For consider its plan: a series of texts issuing from vastly differing periods and sensibilities is presented to the reader complete with Brooks’s commentary, and it is assumed that the right mode of analysis for each text will be pretty much the same. Of course, the illumination is constant; but it is not always of the kind most suitable to its object. One tendency of Brooks’s criticism is that its view of the text as, above all else, a balanced and delicate thing, discourages the impulse to note imperfections, the irritable reaching after fact and reason, which is one of the critic’s functions. In short, it discourages a reader from finding things wrong when once the sanctity of a work has been established.

Brooks’s procedure works astonishingly well on certain occasions—one recalls the essay on Macbeth in The Well Wrought Urn, which leaves no reader quite as it found him—but it can never give a satisfactory account of those texts in which a good part of the appeal stems precisely from their failure to resolve every tension. Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode has always seemed to me the great instance of this, though other readers may wish to supply their own. At all events, there are a few distinct moments in the criticism of Brooks and Ransom when the contrast between them, as one might imagine it, is quite extreme. Commenting on Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” Ransom wonders about the shift from “thou” to “you” within the space of a few lines, and concludes that the poet is hedging for euphony. Brooks would blanch at the suggestion. He would say that the poet, obviously, has grown rapidly less familiar because he wants to lead the lady slowly to his outrageous proposal. And for myself, I should probably side with Brooks, so imperceptibly have his tricks of reading become my own. But then, Ransom is himself a poet, and an exquisite one, perhaps not so very far removed from the type of Marvell, and he may be looking at the practice of a fellow versifier with a properly jaundiced respect.

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In the present collection, Brooks will be found doing close analyses in the well-worn style on passages from Milton, Wordsworth, and others, making points which are certainly useful, though in a limited way. Of these exercises it is fair to say that when you have called them “good in detail,” you have paid them the highest possible compliment. It was never fair to say of the New Critics that they were anti-historical: Brooks’s debate with Douglas Bush some years ago, in which he scored highly by using historical evidence, too, in detail, should have got rid of that charge for all time. But no amount of qualification on Brooks’s part will dispose of a perhaps less serious charge, that the New Critics were and are essentially microscopic in their readings. They are. And, unfortunately, the microscope is bound sooner or later to restrict a critic’s range of vision. Brooks has been an editor of Milton, and writes well about him, and it is not until one looks into the writings of other Milton critics—even the satanic critic William Empson—that one realizes how much of that poet’s world is missing from his discussion. Similarly with the essays on more or less contemporary, broadly cultural subjects: he keeps an even balance—remarking the danger of the Hemingway-Mailer phenomenon, when the man begins to compete with his art, and arguing for a less precariously close relation of the artist to his public—and manages, really, to preserve such a clear, bright, sensible tone on the large issues that only a fool would care to find fault. There is lacking only some of the exhilaration that comes from reading Harold Rosenberg or Northrop Frye, critics who remain more fully and nervously alive to the society around them.

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As for Ransom, it would be merely ungrateful to chide him for not keeping up with the news. Beating the Bushes reprints some very old pieces; it has a dated look—there is even a review of Max Eastman’s The Enjoyment of Poetry; but altogether, the effect of this author’s personality is winning. The typical Ransom essay is greater than its occasion, overtly philosophical or generalizing, slightly rambling, ready on a moment’s notice to swoop down upon the literary object from a great height. Actually, he belongs to the New Critical group only as an honorary member. His early disdain for Eliot (later recanted), his wariness in the face of a modern poetry that could imitate the traditional touchstones without the traditional coherence that led up to them, even his hesitation before the uniformity of Brooks’s critical method (as in the essay, “Why Critics Don’t Go Mad”), are perhaps nothing more than recalcitrant interludes, but they express a conservatism of the surest and subtlest kind. Ransom has always been a convinced Kantian: the poet was not made to be “useful,” he supplies no information, his discoveries do not follow any of the rules available to a positivist. And critics who try to elicit information from a poem are asking for social significance, under one guise or another. They are Hegelians; or maybe—Ransom says this in his more surly moods—just “fiction critics.” A writer like Ransom could not, even if he wanted to, contribute to the fortification of old prejudices and stock responses which is, sadly, part of the program within any critical school. His admiration for Hardy is visibly right, but among the New Critics it makes him look, if I may say so, a little quaint. He is consistent with the group, however, in turning his own deaf ear to the Romantics, and at this point one is brought back to the rewriting of literary history for which the New Critics bear responsibility. The metaphysical poets are their heroes, the Romantics, on the whole, their villains. “Our age rejoices in having recovered Donne,” Brooks notes, “but in doing so we have recovered not just Donne’s poetry, but poetry.” And it is this feature of the New Criticism that may, finally, come to seem stultifying.

As a rule, the New Critics like a poet best if he is metaphysical, or if he can be made to sound metaphysical, as in the case of Milton or Yeats. What such a preference distorts most of all is their taste in modern poetry. R. P. Blackmur is representative of a whole school of criticism when he writes, in “Lord Tennyson’s Scissors,” that Hardy and Frost will at last go down as secondary writers, to be read in light of the larger achievement of Yeats and Eliot and Pound. Or again, that the name of Wallace Stevens needs to be invoked only “so that we may more richly hear Yeats, Eliot, and Pound,” because Stevens is “full of syllables where the others are full of words.” It will be seen that criticism of this kind is rather intensely concerned with the ranking of poets. Perhaps this is a necessary concern of every school of criticism. But in any case, the verdict of time about Eliot and Pound has not been at all what Blackmur thought it would be, and the best answer to his strictures is probably the one Stevens offers in “The Creations of Sound”:

Tell X that speech is not dirty
    silence
Clarified. It is silence made still
    dirtier.
It is more than an intimation for
    the ear.

He lacks this venerable complication.
His poems are not of the second
    part of life.
They do not make the visible a
    little hard

To see nor, reverberating, eke
    out the mind
On peculiar horns, themselves
    eked out
By the spontaneous particulars of
    sound.

By “X” here Stevens surely means Eliot: the phrases about dirty silence make an unsolemn reference to Eliot’s nightingale in “The Waste Land”—saying “‘Jug jug’ to dirty ears”—and Stevens’s poem, in a general way, persuades one that its urbane sarcasm is the only possible tone to adopt under the circumstances. It is a minor poem for Stevens but it is a great moral, even a critical, response to Eliot’s kind of poetry, and its significance extends far beyond the respective rankings of these two poets.

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The revolt against Romanticism has not been a very great success. Even Prufrock, poor man, is a stunted Byronic growth, with all of the old desires and none of the energies, and the man who created him seems not to have numbered irony among his fundamental poetic impulses. Eliot’s fall into Christian piety looks perfectly logical when once he has been understood as a butt-end Romantic. His master, Pound, derives ultimately from Walt Whitman, and in his greatest poetry sounds as naive as a baby. Together, Eliot and Pound are the leading public poets of our age, while the private voices, roughly, are Blackmur’s secondary names. At the height of the New Critical era this would have been a surprising thing to say, but the taste of the New Critics has, I think, lost its old influence, though the Brooks-Warren method of textual analysis has passed into the language. One might speculate that Winters will last best of all the group, because of his independence: he, at any rate, did not like Eliot and did not recant. But it is the failure of all these critics that they could not explain the characteristic poetry of their time, which spoke in a private tongue. When Brooks asks somewhere what the phrase “liar’s quinsy” can mean in one of Auden’s poems, the fact is that he cannot know until he knows Auden: it is a special tag from the days of Auden’s enthusiasm for Homer Lane. And it is private. For the most part, poets of our age have not been able to follow Eliot in striking a neurasthenic public pose. It leaves too little time for the poetry. The richness and dirtiness of a single imagined world find their way into the greatest modern poetry, which is private rather than esoteric, and which belongs to the second part of life.

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¹ Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays 1941-1970, by John Crowe Ransom, New Directions, 176 pp., $7.95; A Shaping Joy: Studies in the Writer's Craft, by Cleanth Brooks, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 393 pp., $7.95.