Larbi Ben M’hidi University

Department of English
Third year students
Module: Literature
Lesson: The New Criticism
Teacher: Zerrouki.Z

Introduction:

The New Criticism is an Anglo American approach that dominated teaching and scholarship
between the 1920’s and the early 196o. The major impetus behind New Criticism was the work of
the English poet, educator Mathew Arnold.
Writing in the second half of the 20th century, Mathew Arnold was aware of the moral decline in the
western society. As a result, he placed literature within a spiritual context (literature is the
repository of the best that has been said and thought in the world). He believed that literature is
timeless since it is the creation of timeless minds (based on what is called liberal humanism). He
also emphasized the superiority of poetry over the other literary forms.
Coming together originally at Vanderbuilt University in the years following World War I, the
New Critics included a teacher school –poet John Crowe Ransom and several bright students –
Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. Associated at first in an informal group, they
adopted the name of the Fugitives and published a magazine called The Fugitive from 1922 to
1925. In the 1930’s other critics associated with them such as [Link], [Link], WEmpson,
[Link],[Link], [Link], [Link], [Link].

New criticism regards the literary text as an autonomous product that is free from any external
factors as social, economic and political conditions or from any reference to the author that creates
the text. The new critics favour poetic texts . For them , the literary text’s meaning is based on its
formal and rhetorical properties.
The Major Figures of New criticism

[Link] Stearns Eliot

The most influential spokesman for Arnold’s vision was the young expatriate American poet T.S.
Eliot who had settled in London before the First World War. T.S Eliot is considered to be the most
influential figure behind new criticism. In his essay “ Tradition and the Individual Talent”
written in 1919, Eliot stressed the detachment from emotion that a writer must have while writing in
order to achieve a scientific state. For Eliot “ Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape
from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” For him, the

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expressions of profound emotion should not have an autobiographical dimension. What the poet
needs to look for, Eliot tells us in ‘Hamlet’, another essay from 1919, is an ‘objective correlative’:
‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion’.
Emotion must be conveyed indirectly. The poet’s emotion should be invested in such an ‘objective
correlative’.
In ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ he argues that the so-called ‘Metaphysical poets’ still knew how to
fuse thought and feeling, and seriousness and lightness, in their poetry. After their heyday, however,
a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ had set. He seeks in poetry the sort of profound experience that the
modern world cannot offer. For Eliot, the natural, organic unity that is missing from the world and
that we ourselves have lost – the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ – is embodied in aesthetic form in
poetry.

2. Ivor Armstrong Richards

In Richards’s hands Eliot’s emphasis on the poem itself became what we call practical criticism. In
a still fascinating experiment Richards withheld all extra-textual information – no author, period, or
explanatory commentary – and asked students (and tutors) to respond to poems that were thus
Completely stripped of their context. Since Richards developed his practical criticism – the label
was popularized through the title of a book he published in 1924. Richards had deep misgivings
about a contemporary world which seemed to have lost its bearings. He, too, saw in poetry an
antidote to the spiritual malaise.
The arts are our storehouse of recorded values. They spring
from and perpetuate hours in the lives of exceptional people,
when their control and command of experience is at its
highest, hours when the varying possibilities of existence are
most clearly seen and the different activities which may arise
are most exquisitely reconciled, hours when habitual narrowness
of interests or confused bewilderment are replaced by an
intricately wrought composure.
(Richards [1924] 1972a: 110)
Because the arts are our storehouse of recorded values, they ‘supply the best data for deciding what
experiences are more valuable than others’. Literary art, then, helps us to evaluate our own
experience, to assess our personal life. It is all the better equipped for this because its language is
not scientific but emotive. Scientific language is for Richards’s language that refers to the real world
and makes statements that are either true or false. Emotive language, however, wants to produce
certain emotional effects in the reader. Literature, then, conveys a certain type of knowledge which

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is not scientific and factual but has to do with values and meaningfulness and which makes use of
language that expresses and manipulates emotions.
Practical criticism focuses upon the textand the text alone. Because of this exclusively textual
orientation, it was an ideal programme for teasing out all the opposites that for Richards (following
Eliot) were reconciled and transcended in poetry, often through the use of irony. Practical criticism
became a major instrument in spreading the idea that the best poems created a vulnerable harmony.

[Link] Raymond Leavis

Until Leavis changed the picture, fiction had gone largely unnoticed. For him, Novels cannot very
well be subjected to the same sort of analysis that we use with poems, especially novels that until
the end of the nineteenth century were more or less the rule. But Leavis’s discussions of fiction
would in any case have departed from the course set out by Eliot and Richards. By the 1940s Leavis
had already in his discussions of poetry begun to include a moralistic dimension that is almost
completely absent from the work of his American contemporaries, the New Critics. He increasingly
comes to judge poems in terms of the ‘life’ and the ‘concreteness’ they succeed in conveying. In
other words, he begins to discuss content, as relatively independent of form while for the New
Critics, form and content were inextricably interwoven. What the literary work should provide was
a mature apprehension of authentic life (he was not charmed by the ironies of James Joyce’s
Ulysses, which Eliot had thought a great work of art). For Leavis, authentic representations of life
depended on a writer’s personal authenticity and moral integrity. As he said in his 1948 The Great
Tradition of the novelists he considered great: ‘they are all distinguished by a vital capacity for
experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’ (Leavis [1948]
1962: 17). He believes that the novel can represent life in all its fullness; it is for Leavis and
Lawrence superior to whatever the other arts or the human sciences (such as psychology or
sociology) may have to offer. Lawrence said: ‘To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive:
that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you’.

4. Cleanth Brooks
The New Critics saw poetry as a means of resisting commodification and superficiality because of
its internal organization – its formal structure – a poem presents a vital alternative. Cleanth Brooks
set the tone for a new kind of poetic language. He discussed Paradox as the most important
language and literary convention in poetry. Paradoxes are not “ some sort of frill or trimming”
external to the work , they spring from the very nature of the poet’s language : it is language in
which the connotations play as great part as the denotations”. Our Greatest poems are “ built around

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Paradoxes”.
In The Well Wrought Urn 1947, Brooks warrants the claim that poetry and paradox are all but
identical. Brooks concludes the work with what he called “Heresey of Paraphrase”, arguing that
any attempt to reduce poetic meaning to prose statement of a theme or a description of a plot is a
betrayal of the poem as a poem. Brooks evoked the Heresey of paraphrase to stress the importance
of the creative imagination as a union.

Allen Tate
In Tension in Poetry 1938, Allen Tate talked of each poetic work producing a whole that is the
result of the configuration of meaning that is the appropriate subject of investigation by literary
critics. Tate believes that the meaning of the poem is “ the full organized body of all the extension
and intension that we can find in it”
An exaggerated emphasis on extension, Tate argued, results in the Fallacy of mere denotation
while an exaggerated emphasis on intension results in the Fallacy of Communication.

John Crowe Ransom

The New Critics focus more on the actual form of literary works than their English counterparts. In
fact, within the context of English and American criticism their approach to literature might well be
considered formalist and it does indeed often go by that label. The term New Criticism became
established as the name of the school after John crow Ransom published a collection of essays
bearing that title, in 1941. In one of the essays , “ Wanted an Ontological Critic”, he announced
the it is time to identify a powerful intellectual movement which deserved to be called “New
Criticism”. In the book, he aims to correct some of the errors in the works of the British critics
including I. A, Richards and F.R. Leavis. Ransom argues that a critic is needed who would
attempt to define poetry in terms of its ontological interests a discourse.

W.K Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley

There are two new critical essays in particular which have become influencial texts in modern
critical discourse: ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) and ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1949), written by
W.K . Wimsatt- a professor of English at Yale University and author of the titled book, The Verbal
Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry – in collaboration with Monroe C. Beardsley, a
philosopher of aesthetics.
The first essay argues the Intentional Fallacy represents confusion between the poem and the
author: the author’s intention or design is not a desirable standard in criticism.
The second essay argues that the Affective Fallacy represents ‘a confusion between the poem and

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its results’: ‘tryning to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the
poem…. ends in impressionism and relativism’.

Though it was not the product of a single theoretical voice, New Criticism theories have gained a
considerable attention. They have influenced many schools of criticism like Poststructuralism.
However, the extremism of the New Criticism was ultimately regarded unacceptable by a number
of approaches like New Historicism, Reader Response criticism, and Feminism .