Understanding New Criticism: Principles and Application, Study notes of Literature

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C H A P T E R

Unifying the Work

New Criticism

The 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 PURPOSE OF NEW CRITICISM

For much of the previous century, “traditional” criticism was in large part synonymous with what has become known as “New Criticism.” This way of looking at literature began to emerge clearly in the 1920s and dominated literary criticism from the late 1930s into the 1960s. In 1941, John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism gave this movement its name (even though the point of Ransom’s book, iron- ically, is that the New Critic had not appeared). Its effects continue even to the present day, when it might better be called “the old New Criticism.” Although those who have been called “New Critics” have not agreed in every respect, and some have even rejected the title, it is possible to identify a number of fundamental assumptions shared by an enormous number of critics and teachers and their students. The odds, in fact, are excellent that some of your English teachers were trained in the methods of New Criticism, even if they never heard the term; and in surprisingly many classrooms today, even in the midst of a cornucopia of critical options, New Criticism is often

For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf. 20 For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea— A poem should not mean But be. (1926)

The poem is startling from its opening lines, asserting that a poem should be “palpable and mute.” How can a poem possibly be “palpable,” or “capable of being handled, touched, or felt” ( American Heritage Dictionary )? Whether we think of a poem as an idea, or a group of ideas, or the writing on a piece of paper, or a group of spoken words, none of these seems to be the sort of thing we can handle. And how can a poem be “mute”? Isn’t a poem made of words? Don’t we at least imagine a voice speaking the words? Suggesting that a poem be mute seems a bit like suggesting that a movie be invisible, or a song be inaudible, or a sculpture be without shape. But MacLeish reiterates these ideas in subsequent lines, saying explicitly that a poem should be “Dumb,” “Silent,” and (most amaz- ingly) “wordless” (lines 3, 5, and 7). He uses comparisons that rein- force 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. The idea that it should be “globed” (a “globed fruit”) emphasizes the three-dimensionality that MacLeish desires: like a globe, the poem should have more exten- sion in time and space than a map or a picture. Not just a depiction of a fruit, it should be a globed fruit. Likewise, “old medallions to the thumb” and “the sleeve-worn stone / Of casement ledges where the moss has grown” are both not only “silent” or “dumb,” but they also have an enduring solidity, a tangible reality. These images of fruit, old medallions, and worn ledges may also seem a bit mysterious, like “the flight of birds” (line 8), which in some “wordless,” seemingly magical way is organized and orchestrated—as anyone knows who’s ever seen a flock of birds rise together and move as one, silently. From lines 1–8, then, we draw our first principle of New Criticism:

1. A poem should be seen as an object—an object of an extraordi- nary 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 motion- less in time.” This idea seems easy enough to understand: MacLeish

The Purpose of New Criticism 39

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believes that poems shouldn’t change. Aren’t Shakespeare’s sonnets the same today as they were when he wrote them? (“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee,” as Sonnet 18 says.) But MacLeish’s comparison, “As the moon climbs,” is not so easy to grasp: how can the moon be “climbing” through the sky, yet “motionless in time”? Perhaps the answer lies in the repeated idea that the moon, like the poem, should be “Leaving, as the moon releases / Twig by twig the night-entangled trees” (11–12); it should be “Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves / Memory by memory the mind” (13–14). 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. The moon climbing in the sky does seem like this: it appears to sit there, motionless in time, yet it is leaving and will “release” the trees. MacLeish repeats lines 9–10 in lines 15–16, as if his own poem is motionless, continuing on but remaining in the same place it was. This paradox adds to the mystery of the earlier lines and also sug- gests a second principle:

2. 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. But what is he saying? Lines 19–22 appear to explain his point, but these lines seem particularly difficult. What can these lines possibly mean—ignoring for the moment the con- cluding assertion of lines 23–24, which seems to be that poems ought not have meanings? The lines are obscure basically because the verbs are missing, so our task of making sense must include imagining what has been left out. First MacLeish says, “For all the history of grief / An empty doorway and a maple leaf” (19–20). If we look closely at this statement, its form is familiar and clear enough: “For X, Y.” Or, adding a verb, “For X, substi- tute Y.” Thus, I take these lines to mean simply that instead of recount- ing “all the history of grief,” the poet should present instead “An empty doorway and a maple leaf.” An empty doorway can speak to us of some- one departed, conveying an emptiness and an absence that may be more compressed and intense than an entire history of grief. A maple leaf, perhaps lying on the ground, bursting with fall colors inevitably turning to brown and crumbling, may tell us something about loss more directly and powerfully and concisely than any history book.

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cannot be perfectly translated or summarized, for they offer a being, an existence, an experience perhaps—not a meaning.

Radicals in Tweed Jackets

What was the appeal of these principles? Why did New Criticism, a dras- tically new way of reading, become so popular on college campuses? In the landmark study that did much to solidify the academic prestige of the New Criticism, Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949), René Wellek declares, “The work of art is an object of knowl- edge” (156). Because the literary work has an “objective” status, Wellek says, critical statements about a work are not merely opinions of taste. “It will always be possible,” he maintains, “to determine which point of view grasps the subject most thoroughly and deeply.” Thus, “all relativism is ultimately defeated” (156). Although this assumption that the poem exists like an object, like fruit, like medallions, allows New Critics to think of literary criticism as a discipline just as rigorous and prestigious as a science, it is clear that for New Critics poems are in an important way also not like the objects studied by science. Poems, as MacLeish puts it, are “motionless in time”; they embody, as Marianne Moore says, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Thus, a poem is an entity somehow tran- scending time, existing in a realm different from that of science, the realm of the literary, of the imagination. 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 (as we just noted) 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 escape from personality” (10). 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. His- torical and biographical information, to be sure, may sometimes be helpful, but it should not be essential. 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.” Even when biographical and historical information is meticulously and voluminously gath- ered, as in the case of Lowe’s work on Coleridge and Kubla Khan, Wimsatt and Beardsley question its value for reading the work. Even Coleridge’s own account of how the poem came to him (in a dream, supposedly), Wimsatt and Beardsley say, does not tell us anything

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about how to read the poem itself—even if we could be sure Coleridge is telling the truth. Only the poem can tell us how to read the poem. By the same token, Wimsatt and Beardsley question the impor- tance 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 stu- dents’ 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 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 the- orize 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 sub- tleties 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

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for instance), but certainly some women (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf) have produced works celebrated by New Critical readings. It is clear enough that New Criticism’s kind of formalism, which turns away from politics, must take place within some (unacknowl- edged, invisible) political context, but at the same time it does not seem clear to me that any particular political stance is inherently more or less suited to New Critical strategies. New Criticism discriminates against works that are “poorly made” by its definition—works that are simplistic, single-sided, shallow, inarticulate, lacking in irony and self- consciousness. New Criticism champions works that repay our careful and imaginative attention, works that seem to challenge us to look again, to look more deeply, to find a more complex unity. It might even be said that New Criticism makes it both possible and necessary for other kinds of approaches to arise. At the least, many critics would agree that New Criticism remains a kind of “norm” against which other approaches can be delineated. At its best, it remains an exciting and revealing strategy for unfolding literary works.

HOW TO DO NEW CRITICISM

To make sure the process is clear in your mind, let’s think of it in three steps:

1. What complexities (or tensions, ironies, paradoxes, oppositions, ambiguities) can you find in the work?
2. What idea unifies the work, resolving these ambiguities?
3. What details or images support this resolution (that is, connect the parts to the whole)?
   1. The first step assumes that great works are complex, even when they appear to be simple. Literature does not imitate life in any literal way, according to the New Critics; instead, poems (and other works) create realities of their own, transforming and order- ing our experience. A poem, as Coleridge says, in a quotation often cited by New Critics, is an act of the imagination, “that synthetic and magical power”—an act that “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposites or discordant qualities” (11). Poems have the power, Coleridge says, “of reducing multitude into unity of effect.” And, for the New Critics, the richer and more compelling the “multitude” of ideas or “discordant qualities,” the greater the

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poem’s power. The sort of complexity that New Critics particularly value is captured in Keats’s concept of “negative capability,” which is also often cited by New Critics: it is the capability “of being in uncer- tainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (1:193). When New Critics identify a poem’s complexities (the first step here), they use a number of closely related terms, especially “irony,” “ambiguity,” “paradox,” and “tension.” Although these terms mean slightly different things, they all point to the idea of complexity—that the poem says one thing and means another, or says two things at once, or seems to say opposing things, or strains against its apparent meaning. For instance, in “The Language of Paradox,” a celebrated essay from The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Cleanth Brooks shows how Donne’s famous poem “The Canonization” (included here in an Appendix) sets up a dilemma:

Either: Donne does not take love seriously; here he is merely sharpening his wit as a sort of mechanical exercise. Or: Donne does not take sainthood seriously; here he is merely indulging in a cynical and bawdy parody. (11)

2. The second step assumes that great works do have a unifying idea, a theme. It’s much more useful to think of this theme in terms of a complete thought or a sentence rather than a phrase. For instance, to say that the theme of Donne’s “Canonization” is “love and religion” really doesn’t tell us much about how Donne solves the dilemma of sainthood versus love. Here’s what Brooks tells his readers:

Neither account [that Donne doesn’t take love seriously, or that he doesn’t take religion seriously] is true; a reading of the poem will show that Donne takes both love and religion seriously; it will show, further, that the paradox is here his inevitable instrument. (11)

A cynical reader might observe (with some justification) that paradox is Donne’s “inevitable” instrument because the New Critics inevitably find something like paradox in every great poem. But Brooks’ point, of course, is that paradox is inevitable because Donne, with the imagination of a great poet, sets up the problem in such a way that only paradox will resolve it.

3. The third step unfolds or explicates the poem, indicating how the parts work together. This description of the poem is no sub- stitute for the poem itself, but it should enrich our experience of it.

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first sentence, Napoleon, played by Heder, is paradoxically both “hero” and “object of derision.” The adjective that modifies “hero” is “forbidding,” while the adjective that modifies “object of derision” is “great,” and this pulling in opposite directions also occurs in the description of Napoleon as a “tetherball-playing monster teen”: teth- erball is an elementary school game, played by children during recess—not at all what one associates with a “monster teen.” The sec- ond sentence also celebrates the film’s balancing of oppositions, maintaining “a sunny disposition despite the traumatic social melt- down we witness” and Napoleon’s apparently dim future. The third and final sentence continues to see the film in paradoxical terms, as Napoleon’s weirdness is somehow also “all too emblematic of too many Americans.” As an earlier sentence puts it, Napoleon “is such a fantastic creation you can’t help seeing him as both a catastrophically extreme case and the common flailing nerd we all still shelter in our deepest memory banks.” This kind of both/and vision, unifying oppositions, extends even to the genre of the film, as Atkinson’s con- clusion asserts that the film is a comedy that would have been a tragedy, if it “weren’t so funny.”

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© Photofest, Inc.

Clearly Atkinson, like a New Critic, is noticing and valuing para- doxes, ironies, and tensions. Moreover, Atkinson sees how these oppositions are held together: The movie is dismal yet ultimately “sunny,” a tragedy that is really a comedy; Napoleon is both heroic and ridiculous, “catastrophically extreme” and everyman. This idea, in fact, is arguably what unifies the film for Atkinson—that at some deeper level, we are like Napoleon. His absurdity is what sets him apart, and at the same what makes him part of us. We laugh at Napoleon, but he is constructed in such a way that we are also laugh- ing at some core aspect of ourselves. Although Atkinson is obviously interested in how audiences respond to the film, he tends to view the movie as an artistic object, rather than an experience. He sees the character of Napoleon, for instance, as a coherent thing, “a perfectly conceived and executed battery of melodramatic harrumphs, bruised exhalations, defensive squints, clueless pronouncements, and explo- sively irate retorts.” And the movie as a whole succeeds because its complex ironies and paradoxes are held together in a satisfying unity. Although I seriously doubt that Atkinson considers himself to be a card-carrying New Critic, his assumptions and values are in line with New Criticism—which isn’t surprising, when we consider its pervasive popularity over the past century. This brief look at a movie review suggests how we might reason backward from a finished essay to the strategies employed. To give you a better idea of how to use these principles, let’s now work through the process of writing a sample New Critical essay in the next section.

THE WRITING P ROCESS : A S AMPLE ESSAY

Literary works are often charming, uplifting, amusing; but they are also often troubling and challenging, confronting difficult and dis- turbing issues, stimulating our thought. The following poem will probably haunt you. It is a powerful and moving engagement with one of the most controversial and emotional topics of our day. Read it carefully, writing down any questions or comments that occur, looking particularly for tensions or oppositions or ambiguities.

The Mother

Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or no hair,

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why does the speaker say “you” rather than “me,” especially since the sec- ond section reveals that she has had abortions? (b) The second line is contradictory, referring to children “you got that you did not get”? Either you got them or you didn’t, it would seem. (c) Why is the poem called “The Mother” if she has had abortions? Does this refer to her other children or to the abortions? This is probably an important tension: it is, after all, the title. (d) Lines 3 and 4 offer conflicting views. In line 3,“the children” are simply “damp small pulps with a little or with no hair.” A “pulp” isn’t alive, isn’t a person, so removing a hairless (or nearly hairless) pulp isn’t a big deal. But line 4 refers to the abortions in a strikingly different way, as “singers and workers that never handled the air.” As singers and workers, the children are real, and their loss is tragic: They did not even get a chance to handle the air—which is a wonderful and surprising description of living. We are all, as singers and workers, handling the air. (e) Another opposition shapes the next few lines. Lines 5–6 suggest that the abortions were in some respects a good thing:“You will never neglect or beat / Them.” The next image, never “silence or buy with a sweet,” is perhaps faintly negative or even neutral: it doesn’t sound good to think of silencing or buying children, and giving them “a sweet” probably isn’t the greatest thing to do, but every parent resorts to such strategies. And the next image moves into the realm of tenderness: to “wind up the suck- ing-thumb” or “scuttle off ghosts that come”—these are acts of kindness. So the lines move from abuse, which places the abortions in a more positive light, to parental care, which makes the abortions seem more tragic. (f) I notice that the speaker seems to be talking about more than one abortion. But the pain revealed in the poem won’t let us easily conclude that the speaker is callous, readily aborting babies without a thought. (g) The idea of eating up the children in line 10 is strange (“a snack of them, with gobbling mother eye”).

It’s fine if your ideas aren’t similar to those above. In fact, it’s great because we’d certainly be bored if everyone thought the same things. But you may find it useful to notice the level of detail involved above and the kind of attention being paid. This kind of preparation will make writing about the poem much easier. You might reasonably wonder how much you need to know about 1945, when the poem was published; about the history of the debate over abortion; about Gwendolyn Brooks’s life; about her career as a poet and about her other poems; and on and on. All these things would be good to know, but in adopting a New Critical stance, you will assume that the poem itself will reveal whatever it is essential for you to know. So, remind yourself specifically what a New Critical reading attempts to expose: unity and complexity. Great works confront us with a unified ambiguity; second-rate works see things simply or fragmentarily.

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Shaping

What would you say is the unifying idea of “The Mother”? What holds it together? Those questions are crucial to a New Critical reading because they lead to your thesis, which will shape and control the development of your essay. Even in the few notes I’ve reproduced above here, it seems clear that the title points us toward the poem’s complexity: the speaker, as the title identifies her, is “The Mother,” and yet she speaks only of the children she does not have, the chil- dren who have been aborted. So how can she be a mother without any children? How can she love her children, or have destroyed them, if they don’t exist? That, it seems to me, is one way of saying what the poem struggles through. The theme or unifying idea, hold- ing together the ambiguous status of the speaker, can be stated in any number of ways, and you might try out your own way of expressing it. Here’s one way to put it:

Although her children do not exist, and may have never existed, the speaker is a mother because she loves her “children.”

In articulating this theme, I’ve given emphasis to the way the poem ends. Generally that’s where the oppositions are resolved. In this case, I would argue, the ambiguity between the speaker as mother and non-mother is resolved at the end of the poem with her declaration of love. She could not love the children if they did not have some kind of existence, and if they exist in some way, then she is some kind of “mother.” But her status is by no means simple. Like- wise, she “knew” them, she says, even if it was “faintly”; and, again, it would seem she could not know them if they did not exist, if they were not her children. The strategy of a New Critical reading, then, would involve show- ing how the details of the poem support and elaborate this complex or ironic unity. Your structure involves arranging this evidence in a coherent way, grouping kinds of details perhaps or moving logically through the poem. That is, throughout the poem, a New Critical reading would find oppositions reinforcing and supporting in some way the poem’s central ambiguity. For instance, line 21 would be seen as a reflection of the central opposition. The speaker says, “even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.” Just as the children who are aborted are not children; just as the woman who gives up her mother- hood by having an abortion nonetheless retains her claim to the name of “mother”; by the same token, the speaker’s “deliberateness is not deliberate.”

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The comfort takes two forms.The mother first eases her pain by pointing to the uncertainty of her decision to have the abortions: “even in my deliberations I was not deliberate” (21). Since she is uncertain about the status of what is being aborted, she decided without knowing what she was deciding. In truth, she still does not know what her decision means: no one can say with authority when life begins, or when fetuses become per- sons and when they are still unviable tissue masses, or “pulps” (3). More importantly, the speaker is also comforted in the end by declaring her love, even though this expression paradoxically sustains her pain and mourning. She clings to the idea of her “dim killed children” (11), refusing to let them become “pulps,” because she can love them only if they actually existed. So she must say that she “knew” them, even while admitting it was only “faintly” (32). She does claim her status as “the mother,” as the title says, even though it causes her pain. As she says in the opening line, “Abortions will not let you forget,” but perhaps only if you continue to see yourself as a mother, even though you have no children.Thus, the poem balances the speaker’s two visions of herself, as murderer and as mother; and it resolves this conflict in the final lines, as the mother is able to atone for her decision, in some measure, by suffering with her memory always, saying “I loved you, I loved you / All” (32-33).

In this essay I obviously didn’t explicate every detail that supports my thesis. Rather, I tried to bring forth enough evidence to be per- suasive. How much evidence you need to present to make a close reading convincing will vary depending on the work and your thesis. Follow your common sense and the guidance of your teacher. Finally, as you apply New Criticism on your own, notice how two factors helped the sample essay develop smoothly.

1. Thorough preparation. The essay, for the most part, arranges and connects the extensive notes on the poem. When I came to write my essay, I had already written a great deal. I had much more material than I could use in my essay, and so I was able to pick and choose which ideas to use. This process, of selecting from an abundance of ideas, is a whole lot more pleasant than struggling for something to say.
2. Theoretical awareness. Since I knew what kind of approach I wanted to take, I knew to look for certain things in the poem: ideas or images in opposition; complexity or ambiguity; the unifying idea or

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This explains how the uncertainty comforts the mother.

This point began to emerge in (f): the mother’s pain suggests her love, which is explicitly declared later on.

Still relying on the opposition: mother/not; children/not.

From (a) above.

Resolving the problem set up in the intro.

theme. Likewise, I knew what my essay was going to set out to do. I didn’t have to worry about whether Brooks might have intended to say this or that, nor did I have to worry about my own attitude toward abortion or even my own reaction to the poem. My job was to focus on the text itself, exposing its complexity and unity. By being aware of the theoret- ical stance you are evolving or adopting, you clarify for yourself what you’re doing and how to do it.

PRACTICING NEW CRITICISM

It’s highly unlikely that one example will make New Criticism crystal clear for you. You’ll need to practice it for yourself, see other examples, and (ideally) discuss its workings with your teacher and classmates. To get you started, I offer here three poems and a parable, along with guiding questions for each.

forgiving my father

Lucille Clifton

it is friday. we have come to the paying of the bills. all week you have stood in my dreams like a ghost, asking for more time but today is payday, payday old man, 5 my mother’s hand opens in her early grave and i hold it out like a good daughter. there is no more time for you. there will never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher old liar. i wish you were rich so i could take it all 10 and give the lady what she was due but you were the son of a needy father, the father of a needy son, you gave her all you had which was nothing. you have already given her 15 all you had. you are the pocket that was going to open and come up empty any friday. you were each other’s bad bargain, not mine. daddy old pauper old prisoner, old dead man 20 what am i doing here collecting? you lie side by side in debtor’s boxes and no accounting will open them up. (1969)

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