M.H.

Abrams, Theories of Literary Criticism: An Outline

What follows are notes from “Types and Orientations of Critical Theories”, in Doing Things
with Texts, by M.H. Abrams (W.W. Norton, 1989). Where Abrams speaks throughout of
‘poetry’, he uses the word as Aristotle does in his ‘Poetics’ as referring to all literature:
poetry, drama, and fiction. We can in most cases substitute the word ‘literature‘ wherever the
word ‘poetry‘ is used below. —etm

“There is no uniquely valid way to classify theories of poetry; that classification is

best which best serves the purpose in hand.”

Four elements
• universe [mimetic]
• audience [pragmatic]
• poet [expressive]
• poem [objective]

Most theories emphasize one of these four elements as being central to the writing,
reading, or judgment of poetry; thus we have ‘four broad types of poetic theory,
which may be labeled mimetic, pragmatic, expressive, and objective.’

Mimetic Theories [emphasize the ‘universe’]

• Name from mimesis, Greek for ‘imitation’.
• From Plato, who wrote that poetry is mimesis. That is, poetry is a mirror that
reflects the world.
• Cf. Hamlet’s advice to the actors: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the
action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of
nature; for anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end
both at the first, and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to
nature . . . .”
• However, Plato intended this definition of poetry as a criticism of it. In Plato’s
philosophy the world itself is illusory, an imitation of the perfect Forms that
constitute reality; so poetry becomes an imitation of an imitation. And both in
Plato and for centuries afterward it was not difficult to show that (at various
times) philosophy, or religion, or science could do a better job of describing
reality than poetry does.
• Since the 19th century the mimetic view of poetry has been argued mainly by
proponents of realism in art.
• Key idea: ‘the tendency to look to the nature of the given universe as the clue to
the nature of poetry’.
• Key words: imitation, image, reflection, feigning, counterfeiting, copy,
representation.

Pragmatic Theories [emphasize the audience]

• The poet deliberately uses mimesis to achieve certain effects in the reader.

Eric T. MacKnight • http://www.EricMacKnight.com/

 Abrams: Theories of Literary Criticism

• Horace: ‘Poets wish either to instruct or to please’.

• Other purposes include moral improvement, emotion, and delight.
• Samuel Johnson: ‘It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better’ [i.e., by
telling stories that result in the moral improvement of their readers].
• Pragmatic critics regard the poem as ‘a made object, the product of an art or
craft . . . deliberately designed to achieve foreknown ends’ [i.e., not
unconscious creations whose meaning or effects are wholly or partially
unknown to their creators].
• Pragmatic critics allow mimesis to include fantasies and absurdities if they
achieve a desired effect such as delight in the reader.

Expressive Theories [emphasize the poet]

• ‘In the expressive orientation, the poet moves into the center of the scheme . . .‘.
• Source: On the Sublime, by Longinus, which became known in the late 1600s.
Longinus defines sublimity ‘by its effect of ekstasis, or transport’, i.e., the poet
and then the reader are ‘carried away’ by the poem. The most important source
of this effect is the author’s “vehement and inspired passion”. “Sublimity is the
echo of a great soul”, said Longinus [not, as in the pragmatic view, a great
craftsman].
• Longinus’s ideas had a huge influence on thinkers throughout the next century,
and became associated with the view that lyric poetry (not narrative or epic
poetry) was the ‘most poetic’ form of language, whose essence was in emotion,
not reason. This led to . . .
• Wordsworth, who made the ‘single most important pronouncement of the
emotive theory of poetry’, wrote that poetry “is the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings”. In this view, ‘the source of the poem is no longer the
external world [as in mimetic theories] but the poet himself; and . . . the subject
matter of the poem [is] the poet’s “feelings” ‘. The word ‘spontaneous’ is
important, once again distinguishing expressive theories from the pragmatic
view, in which the poet/craftsman deliberately aims at certain effects.
• John Keble ‘described the poetic process as a release, a “safety valve,” for pent-
up feelings and desires’.
• John Stuart Mill: “Poetry is feeling, confessing itself to itself in moments of
solitude.” When poetry “is not itself the end, but a means to an end . . . then it
ceases to be poetry, and becomes eloquence [i.e., persuasive speech].
• In mimetic theories, the dominant forms of poetry are narrative and dramatic
[i.e., epic and tragedy], and the opposite of poetry is history. But in the
Romantic expressive view, the primary form of poetry is the lyric, and its
opposite is science [i.e., the heart vs. the head, emotion vs. reason].
• J.S. Mill: ‘. . . Poetry embodies “itself in symbols which are the nearest possible
representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s
mind.” The mirror held up to nature becomes a mirror held up to the poet . . . .’

Page 2 of 4
 Abrams: Theories of Literary Criticism

• Expressive criticism led to an interest in the author’s biography and (later)

psychology: to understand the poem, one must psychoanalyze the author and
know all the secrets of his biography. Edmund Wilson: “the real elements . . . of
any work of fiction, are the elements of the author’s personality . . . .”

Objective Theories [poem as object] [emphasize the poem]

• Based on Aristotle’s idea of a tragedy as ‘subject to internal requirements . . .
which determine the selection, treatment, and ordering of the parts into an
artistic whole.
• Emphasizes the perspective of the reader or audience perceiving the poem ‘as a
given object’.
• Two versions, which often are intermixed:
• ‘Heterocosmic model’: ‘each work constitutes a unique, coherent, and
autonomous world’.
• ‘Contemplation model’ (which became ‘art for art’s sake’): ‘each work is a
self-sufficient object that is contemplated disinterestedly for its own sake.
[The word ‘disinterestedly’ is important because it distinguishes this view
from the mimetic and pragmatic ideas of poetry having a purpose or aim.]
• Addison: ‘Poetry “makes new worlds of its own, shows us persons who are not
to be found in being”.’
• Alexander Baumgarten: ‘ “The poet is like a maker or creator. So the poem
ought to be like a world”; hence each poetic world . . . manifests a “poetic”
truth that is not of correspondence to the real world but of internal coherence.’
• Breitinger: ‘the poetic imagination finds its originals “not in the actual world,
but in some other possible world-structure. . . . “ ‘
• The contemplation model derives from Plato, who in the Symposium asserts
‘that the highest good of life consists in the “contemplation of beauty
absolute” . . . as seen “with the eye of the mind”.’
• Moritz: “the beautiful object . . . is completed . . . in its own self . . . and affords me
pleasure for its own sake”.
• Mid-19th century: in France, l’art pour l’art [art for art’s sake].
• Poe: ‘the “poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this
poem written solely for the poem’s sake” and offering a “pure” pleasure “from
the contemplation of the Beautiful”. ‘
• Flaubert: “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present
everywhere and visible nowhere.”
• A.C. Bradley: ‘Poetry and reality “are parallel developments which nowhere
meet . . . they are analogues”. ‘
• ‘The objective conception of poetry-as-such . . . became the dominant mode of
thinking for many . . . critics [and] authors in the half-century or so beginning
in the 1920s.
• “Russian Formalists”
• French Structuralists

Page 3 of 4
 Abrams: Theories of Literary Criticism

• ‘Structuralism . . . regards a work [as] a self-determining structure of inter-

relations constituted by a play of specifically literary conventions and
“codes.” ‘
• The New Criticism [ca. 1940 -->]
• ‘A poem thus becomes its own world—a distinctive universe of
discourse . . . and the integrity and boundaries of this world, or poetic
“object,” are carefully guarded by prohibitions against the “personal
heresy” [concern with the author’s biography and psychology], “the
heresy of paraphrase” [the idea that a poem has a ‘meaning’ that can be
re-stated in other words], . . . the “intentional fallacy” [the idea that we
can know the author’s intentions, and that they are important], and the
“affective fallacy” (reference to the responses of the reader). The sole end
of a poem is the poem itself as a self-sufficient “structure of meanings.”
The New Critics developed . . . the detailed “explication,” or “close
reading,” of individual poems as a totality of “logical structure” and
“local texture” . . . or an equilibrium of multiple “tensions” . . . or an
“organic unity” of ironies, ambiguities, paradoxes, and image-patterns.’
• W.K. Wimsatt: “Neither the qualities of the author’s mind nor the effects of a
poem upon a reader’s mind should be confused with the moral quality
expressed by the poem itself.”

-----------------------

Thus two of these theoretical approaches—the mimetic and pragmatic—see

literature as having a purpose. The critic’s job, in this case, is to identify the purpose
and judge whether the aim of the poem has been achieved.

The other two approaches—the expressive and objective—see literature as

something to be appreciated, contemplated, and observed. The critic’s job is to
examine it carefully and judge it not with reference to the ‘real world’ or to its effects
on the reader or audience, but strictly on its own terms, as established by the poem
itself.

Note also that most students naturally gravitate toward expressive criticism (because
of the pervasive influence of Romanticism in our culture) while the objective
approach to analyzing literature (e.g., commentaries in IB English A1) has
predominated—not without competition—in the 20th century.

Finally: please don’t think that you can profitably use these terms—which except for
‘mimetic’ are not widely understood as Abrams defines them—in your writing. Use
the ideas to think about the works you read, but leave the terminology alone.

Page 4 of 4