New Criticism

The poet and critic T. S. Eliot gave shape to many of the concerns that would eventually coalesce as New Criticism. Eliot articulated a sense of literary tradition that wrenched criticism away from historical and biographical assessment. In essays such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent," rather than emphasizing the greatness of the individual poet, Eliot stressed the importance of directing criticism upon the poem itself. In turn, the tradition of poetry became the collective vessel through which cultural greatness was transmitted. By distinguishing levels of poetic appreciation, he stressed the benefit of technical appreciation as opposed to the more popular (and coarse) emotional. The aim of the critic was to mine "significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet" (Eliot, p. 11). Eliot, then, was establishing a way of reading poetry that acknowledged Western tradition as a continuum dating back to Greek antiquity, in which "art never improves, but that material of art is never quite the same" (p. 6). In doing so, he sought a rigorous, formalist appreciation of art as a corrective to more popular modes of modern culture. Eliot, like later New Critics, hoped to cultivate an understanding of great literature as a countervailing force to the vulgar and degradative thrust of modern mass society.

The emphasis on rigorous technical understanding of the literary work would become the hallmark of New Criticism. Most practitioners generally eschewed explicit formulation of theoretical orientation but, rather, focused on the practical application of certain, specific ways of reading. This orientation was captured in the title of I. A. Richards's 1929 work Practical Criticism, in which the notion of criticism was allied with careful or "close" readings of poetic works. Richards used his Cambridge Honors students' responses to poetry to reveal the reading deficiencies of ostensibly well-trained readers. These misreadings allowed him to distinguish four distinct meanings that the critic needed to draw out in order to understand a poem: Sense, Feelings, Tone, and Intention. Such an emphasis on reading as a practice, whose focus was to be directed solely upon formal aspects of the literary object, would become a key trait of New Critical thought.

Indeed, the status of the literary object, isolated from historical and cultural context, would gain strength over the next two decades. The poem was the literary object par excellence, its condensed and intense use of language particularly conducive to close reading. For most of the New Critics poetry was literature, and they eschewed more lengthy and convoluted genres such as fiction and drama. In the 1920s, Richards had defined the poem as an autonomous and organic being whose unity as an aesthetic object was essential to its study. In the 1930s and 1940s, critics based in the American South would develop this idea further.