NEW CRITICISM

 

The new critics of 1930s insisted on the intrinsic values of a work of art and focused their attention on the individual work alone as an independent unit of meaning. They never considered the biological, sociological, and historical background of the work of art for the interpretation of the work. I.A. Richards (1893-1979) is a staunch advocate of a close textual and verbal study and analysis of a work of art. In order to ascertain the responses of fairly cultured readers, he distributed among his Cambridge students, printed sheets containing twelve poems and invited their comments. The names of the poets and all other information about them were carefully with-held. Having analysed their comments, he also gave his comments, interpretations, and conclusions. They were all included in the third part of his book, ‘The Practical Criticism’. That book became a landmark in the history of literary criticism. Thus, I.A. Richards has made literary criticism factual, scientific, and complete. Actually, these factual and scientific methods of critical analysis influenced a lot of the new critics on both sides of the Atlantic.

A poet wants to communicate and so he writes. The language he uses is the means of that communication. Language is made of words and hence a study of words is all important to understand the work of art. According to I.A. Richards, words carry four kinds of meaning. They are sense, feeling, tone and intention. By sense is meant something that is communicated by the plain literal meaning of the words. ‘Feeling’ refers to emotions, emotional attitude, will, desire, pleasure, unpleasure and the like. By ‘tone’ is meant the writer’s attitude to his reader. Actually, ‘feeling’ is only a state of mind. It won’t imply an object. But ‘intention’ has an object. It is actually, the writer’s aim which may be conscious or unconscious. It refers to the effect the writer wants to produce. Really this purpose modifies the expression. It draws attention to something of importance.

Though I. A. Richards, William Empson and T. S. Eliot had their contributions to this critical approach, it was John Crowe Ransom’s ‘The New Criticism’ gave the name to it. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren too had their contributions to it. The new critics set out to define and formalize the qualities of poetic thought and language. They utilize the technique of close reading with special emphasis on the connotative and associative values of words. They also focused on the multiple functions of figurative language like symbol, metaphor, and image in the work. They are also of the opinion that the poetic form and content should not be separated, since the experience of reading the particular words of a poem, including its unresolved tensions, is the poem’s ‘meaning’.

Though T.S. Eliot sneered at the ‘verbal analysis’ as ‘lemon squeezing, many new critics including John Crowe Ransom and William Empson used this tool and techniques on an extensive scale. Moreover, William Empson came out with his book ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ in 1930, where he identified seven different types of verbal difficulty (ambiguity) in poetry and gave, examples of them with work analysis.

According to Cleanth Brooks, ‘The language of poetry is the language of Paradox’. So, the paradox is also a central concern of many new critics. It is actually used by almost all poets. Though it seems to be self-contradictory, it turns out to have a valid meaning. It is evident that the paradoxical utterance ‘Death’s death’ of John Donne in his ‘Death, be not proud’ has made the poem unique. It happened only when the new critics came out with their new approach. Metaphysical poets were totally neglected earlier. Similarly, irony, ambiguity, tension, affective fallacy and intentional fallacy are all having their inevitable contribution to poetry. They were all excellently identified and interpreted by the new critics between 1930 and 1970, in which period the practical criticism or the new criticism had a dominant role to play both in Britain and America.

--Thulasidharan V