New Criticism

New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated

American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It
emphasised close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of
literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.

John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom coined the term "new criticism" in 1941. The term started to
be used academically after he published the book titled The New Criticism. John
Crowe Ransom was an American poet.

Characteristics
New Critics focused their attention on the variety and degree of certain literary
devices, specifically metaphor, irony, tension, and paradox. The New Critics
emphasized “close reading” as a way to engage with a text, and paid close attention
to the interactions between form and meaning.

Thomas Stearn Elliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic,
and editor. His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized English
poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected
new ones. The publication of Four Quartets led to his recognition as the greatest
living English poet and man of letters.

Tradition and Individual Talent

"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary
critic T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published in The Egoist (1919) and later in
Eliot's first book of criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920). This essay is divided into
three parts: first the concept of "Tradition," then the Theory of Impersonal Poetry,
and finally the conclusion.

Eliot attempts to do two things in this essay: he first redefines “tradition” by

emphasizing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry, and he
then argues that poetry should be essentially “impersonal,” that is separate and
distinct from the personality of its writer.

Tradition
The concept of “tradition” according to Eliot is the sense of continuity from the past. It is
a continuity where a writer or a poet should write in tradition. The Western world seems
to be occupied more on the creative forces but Eliot stresses on the elements of critical
thoughts while obtaining a “tradition’. According to Eliot, a poet has to write in “tradition”
and there exist the elements of the past in the work of poet’s art when it is examined or
explored from a critical lens rather than a creative force.

Individual Talent
Individual talent is the capability of a poet to retouch and recolour the
pastness of the past.No artist or no poet of any art has his real value
alone. If we want to evaluate him, we must set him among the dead
poets.

Eliot further goes on to say that “tradition” is a “dynamic one”. He suggests that the past
directs the present and the present alters the past to create a new work of art which is
the “individual talent”. Hence, the knowledge of the past and the creation of a new art
becomes the “Tradition and the Individual Talent”.

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” is intended to give primacy to literary tradition and
elevate the text of a poem above the poet's personality.
Ivor Armstrong Richards
I.A. Richards, in full Ivor Armstrong Richards, was an English critic, poet, and
teacher who was highly influential in developing a new way of reading poetry
that led to the New Criticism and also influenced some forms of
reader-response criticism. he wrote three of his most influential books: The
Meaning of Meaning (1923; with C.K. Ogden), a pioneer work on semantics;
and Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929).
Richards is best known for advancing the close reading of literature and for
articulating the theoretical principles upon which these skills lead to “practical
criticism,” a method of increasing readers’ analytic powers.

4 Meanings
I.A. Richards's concept of “The Four Kinds of Meaning” was expressed in his famous
seminal work “Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement” which appeared on
the literary scene in 1929.
He identified four kinds of meaning or, the total meaning of a word depends
upon four factors – Sense, Feeling, Tone and Intention, where
- sense refers to what is said, or the ‘items’ referred to by a writer;
- feeling refers to the emotion, attitude, interest, will, desire, etc towards
what is being said;
- tone is the attitude towards the audience/ reader; and
- the intention is the writer’s conscious or unconscious aim or the effect that
s/ he is trying to produce.
Richards suggests that the perceptive reader should be prepared to apprehend
the interplay of the four meanings, which together comprise the total meaning of
the poem.

The sense plays a vital role in the making out of a meaning. It is what we direct
our hearer's attention to when we utter something. But we generally have
some feelings about the items we are referring to. Then we usually employ our
own words and arrange them with an eye to the character or understanding of
the person we address and his relationship to us. This determines the tone of
our utterance. It is the tone of the poet which clearly indicates the sense of the
subject-matter. Finally, we speak with conscious or unconscious intention and
this purpose modifies our speech.