NEW CRITICISM – FORMALIST CRITICISM

A Historical Account of New Criticism

The New Criticism was a school of literary criticism that was founded in the United
States in the 1920s. It was an academic movement, which grew in importance at the
beginning of the 1940s in the American universities. The New Critics were devoted to
close textual analysis, rather than historical research and they extended their influence
through textbooks and journals.

They came up with theories of poetic language and structure, which at first were received
with reserve by their colleagues, but after years of practice and publication, they were
considered as the authority in the critical field across the Atlantic Ocean.

There has been considerable disagreement about the name and nature of the movement.
“What is the New Criticism?” is a question that has been more frequently than fruitfully
discussed. Some people used terms like aesthetic formalism or analytical criticism in
order to describe the practice of the New Critics. But these title do not take into account
certain attitudes and theoretical statements that distinguish the New Criticism as
something different from a simply formalist movement. The new critics were: John
Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, R.P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, Robert Penn
Warren.

Besides their practice of close textual analysis, the members of this group had
conservative literary, social and political views. They were hostile toward the physical
and social sciences and avoided ideas and terms from these disciplines. The New Critics
depended rather upon traditional rhetorical and literary sources.

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As defenders of literature, some of the New Critics attempted to establish standards by
which the language of poetry might be distinguished from that of science. On the basis of
such distinctions, they argued that poetry or imaginative literature provides knowledge or
truth different from that supplied by science. With this idea of the “two truths” they
contributed to an aesthetic mystique, according to which the truth of art is understood
immediately through the contemplation of the aesthetic symbol.

The new movement attempted to develop an ‘ontological’ theory establishing poetry as a

unique mode of understanding reality. As Ransom announced in his book The New
Criticism:

“I suggest that the differentia of poetry as a discourse is an ontological one. It treats an

order of existence, a grade of objectivity, which cannot be treated in scientific
discourse… Poetry tends to recover the denser (…) original world which we know
loosely through our perceptions and memories. By this supposition it is a kind of
knowledge which is radically or ontologically distinct.”

4.4. John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom expresses a dislike of science, which is abstract, and defends myth
as a mode of concrete presentation that respects the particularity of nature.
In his book The World’s Body (1938) Ransom continues his attack against science, in the
name of poetry, with an emphasis on the ritual. In a world in which political, economic
and religious problems seem insoluble, the only possible solving of issues is aesthetic.
For Ransom poetry is a source of order and knowledge, it also serves a restorative
function, since through its concrete particularity it re-establishes the “body” of the world
that science forgot about through its abstractions.

The impulse to abstraction Ransom saw as the scientific impulse; the impulse to
concreteness he claimed for poetry.

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“… the sciences deal almost entirely with structures, which are scientific structures; but
poetic structures differ radically from these.”

The fundamental language unit of science is the concept, but what is essential for poetry
is the image.

The critics intended not only to make what Ransom called an “ontological distinction”
between science and poetry, but also to explore the particular characteristics which make
the difference between poetic image and the scientific language unit, the concept. In The
World’s Body Ransom wrote:
“The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness which the idea can never
claim.”

John Crowe Ransom was one of the first critics who pointed at the distinction between
content and form in literature, and who argued that the beauty of a poem lies in the way
in which the ideas are poetically expressed. Drawing attention on form, Ransom played
an essential role in the development of modern literary criticism.

4.5. Cleanth Brooks

Cleanth Brooks, a major figure of New Criticism, is usually identified with one method,
“close reading”, and with a search for such devices as paradox and irony in English
poetry.
His most accessible books are: Modern Poetry and Tradition (1939), and The Well-
Wrought Urn (1947), in which his brilliant style is obvious.

Cleanth Brooks was Ransom’s student at Vanderbilt University in the late 1920s and was
influential as an editor and author of textbooks and critical essays. In preparing
textbooks, he often collaborated with Robert Penn Warren. Together they wrote several
books:
An Approach to Literature (1936)

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Understanding Poetry (1938)
Understanding Fiction (1943)

The best known of these books is the second, which helped New Criticism become an
established and widely accepted school of criticism in colleges and universities.

The first edition of the anthology Understanding Poetry includes model analysis and
questions to help the student. The book is deliberately designed to make the student focus
on the bare text of the poem. The book is constructed in order to lead into poetry by
stages, beginning with simple narratives and descriptions and continuing with poems
which require attention to imagery, tone and attitude.

In “A Letter to the Teacher” the editors reject such substitutes for the study of the poem
as “paraphrase of logical and narrative content”, “study of biographical and historical
materials”, “inspirational and didactic interpretation”. They recommended instead that
“emphasis should be kept on the poem”, “the treatment should be concrete and
inductive”, and “a poem should always be treated as an organic system of relationships,
and the poetic qualities should never be understood as existing in one or more factors
taken in isolation.”

In his book The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) Brooks
further develops his theory in several skillful and well-written essays on individual
poems. One of the best known and most representative of the essays is “Keats’s Sylvan
Historian”, an analysis of the poem “Ode on the Grecian Urn” by John Keats. After
observing that the poem violates the “doctrine of the objective correlative”, by ending
with the famous statement that “beauty is truth and truth, beauty”, Brooks justifies the
device by arguing that the statement is supported by a dramatic context. The paradox of
the “speaking urn” stressed throughout the poem achieves a climax and resolution, or
conclusion in the enigmatic final utterance.

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The structure of meaning, which is kept in balance by paradox, ambiguity and irony,
cannot be translated into discursive terms, that is into a sequence of explanatory
sentences, without losing its essence. The reason for this is that the structure of meaning,
unlike that of a statement abstracted from it, is not logical. It is rather a “pattern of
resolved stresses”, or of “resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed
through a temporal scheme.”