7 What Is New Criticism?

When most college students think about analyzing a literary text, terms like symbol, imagery, meter, rhyme, alliteration, and metaphor may come to mind. These are all critical terms that became important for literary analysis with the advent of New Criticism.

New Criticism is a literary theory that emerged in the United States in the early 20th century, primarily in the 1930s and 1940s, as part of an attempt to help readers understand the “right” way to interpret a literary text. Unlike biographical criticism, New Criticism focuses on close reading and analysis of the text itself, rather than taking into account the author’s background or historical context.

New Critics believe that a work of literature should be viewed as a self-contained and self-referential entity—”a poem should not mean but be”—and that the meaning of the text can be discovered through careful examination of its language, structure, and imagery in the text. These scholars emphasize the ambiguity and complexity of language, believing that when multiple meanings can be found in a text, this complexity contributes to the work’s aesthetic value. According to Stephen Matterson, “Rather than calling it a critical movement, New Criticism may be better described as an empirical methodology that was, at its most basic and influential, a reading practice” (166).

The New Critics also emphasize the importance of irony and paradox, arguing that like ambiguity and complexity, these elements contribute to the depth and richness of a text. As noted above, they reject the use of information that is outside the text as a means to understand the text. This means that the author’s biography or historical context do not matter when we are interpreting a work of literature.

Prominent New Critics include Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. While New Criticism declined in popularity in the 1960s, its influence can still be seen in literary criticism today.

An Excerpt from New Criticism Scholarship

Read the following excerpt from the article “Criticism, Inc.” by John Crowe Ransom before proceeding with this chapter:

Criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic, and this means that it must be developed by the collective and sustained effort of learned persons—which means that its proper seat is in the universities.

Scientific: but I do not think we need be afraid that criticism, trying to be a sort of science, will inevitably fail and give up in despair, or else fail without realizing it and enjoy some hollow and pretentious career. It will never be a very exact science, or even a nearly exact one. But neither will psychology, if that term continues to refer to psychic rather than physical phenomena; nor will sociology, as Pareto, quite contrary to his intention, appears to have furnished us with evidence for believing; nor even will economics. It does not matter whether we call them sciences or just systematic studies; the total effort of each to be effective must be consolidated and kept going. The studies which I have mentioned have immeasurably improved in understanding since they were taken over by the universities, and the same career looks possible for criticism.

Rather than occasional criticism by amateurs, I should think the whole enterprise might be seriously taken in hand by professionals. Perhaps I use a distasteful figure, but I have the idea that what we need is Criticism, Inc., or Criticism, Ltd.

What Ransom proposes here is a new approach to literary criticism, one founded on the idea that there are universal things about literature that can be observed and measured, just as we can observe and measure things in science. This approach to literature does not require us to know anything at all about the author in order to undertake literary analysis of a text. It does, however, require training and mastery of literary analysis techniques, starting with the close reading. Conveniently, this training can only be undertaken in universities, led by qualified English professors.

Close Reading: An Important Tool for All Kinds of Criticism

Close reading is an important tool developed by the New Critics that we will use in all our approaches to literature going forward. Close reading is a method of literary analysis that involves careful and detailed examination of a text in order to uncover its meaning and significance. Elaine Showalter describes close reading as “slow reading, a deliberate attempt to detach ourselves from the magical power of story-telling and pay attention to language, imagery, allusion, intertextuality, syntax and form.” She compares close reading to “a form of defamiliarisation we use in order to break through our habitual and casual reading practices” (Teaching Literature, 98).

Scholars typically engage in close reading by following a systematic process that involves the following steps:

1. Selecting a text: Scholars choose a text to analyze, often one that is particularly complex or has multiple layers of meaning.
2. Reading the text: The scholar reads the text carefully and attentively, paying close attention to the language, form, and structure of the work. When working with poetry, scholars number the lines if this has not already been done.
3. Analyzing literary devices: The scholar identifies and analyzes literary devices such as metaphor, simile, imagery, and symbolism, as well as elements of form and structure such as meter, rhyme, and stanza.
4. Identifying patterns: The scholar looks for patterns and repetitions within the text, such as repeated words or images, and considers their significance.
5. Making connections: The scholar considers how different parts of the text relate to one another, and how the text as a whole relates to larger themes or ideas.
6. Formulating interpretations: The scholar develops interpretations of the text based on their close reading, drawing on evidence from the text to support their claims.

Overall, close reading is a rigorous and systematic process that requires careful attention to detail and a deep understanding of the literary devices and elements of form and structure that contribute to a text’s meaning and significance. The idea is that scholars will find unity in the complexity of a literary text. Texts that lack complexity are not considered to be literature (and we can infer that they are not worth our study).

Applying New Criticism Techniques to Literature

As I mentioned previously, literary criticism develops in conversation with literature, and perhaps one of the best examples of this concept with respect to New Criticism is the 1926 poem “Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish.

This poem positions itself in the shadow of the Latin poet Horace’s “Ars Poetica.” But it does something very different. Instead of telling us how to write poetry, the poem shows us how to write poetry. Its deceptively simple structure, with couplets and slant rhymes, uses imagery and metaphor to demonstrate how to read and write a poem—how to practice the art of poetry. As Steven Lynn, author of Texts and Contexts, notes: “Only the poem can tell us how to read the poem” (51).

The complexity, irony, metaphors, oppositions, and tensions in this poem all predict the types of textual elements that will become important to the New Critics and their attempts to make a scientific practice of literary criticism.

Do a close reading of the poem below (we’ll do this together in class or as part of the recorded lecture for this chapter). After you complete your close reading of the poem and find evidence from the text, ask yourself, “So what? Who cares?” The answer to this question may help you to formulate a thesis statement that makes an argument about the text, using New Criticism as your critical method.

Here are some questions to consider as you analyze the poem:

As mentioned in the questions above, MacLeish’s poem alludes to the Latin poet Horace’s treatise, Ars Poetica, an early work of literary criticism. Of poetry, Horace writes this:

“In the choice of his words, too, the author of the projected poem must be delicate and cautious, he must embrace one and reject another: you will express yourself eminently well, if a dexterous combination should give an air of novelty to a well-known word….

It is not enough that poems be beautiful; let them be tender and affecting, and bear away the soul of the auditor whithersoever they please….

As is painting, so is poetry: some pieces will strike you more if you stand near, and some, if you are at a greater distance: one loves the dark; another, which is not afraid of the critic’s subtle judgment, chooses to be seen in the light;”

How does MacLeish’s poem compare to Horace’s description of poetry? If you’ve been paying attention, you may object that this question would not be appropriate to a New Criticism analysis of the poem because we don’t consider the context, but in this case, Horace is definitely fair game because the title of the poem is an allusion to the well-known Classical text. When citing works in New Criticism scholarship, you may want to research any allusions you find.

New Criticism’s Critics: The Limitations of New Criticism

While New Criticism was an important development in literary criticism, this approach also has its limitations. According to Gerald Graff, “The New Critics’ attempt to emulate the empirical scientists by employing an objective, analytic method for literary texts was judged as one more symptom of the university’s capitulation to the capitalist-military industrial- technological complex” (72-73). But Graff also argues that New Criticism was much more than just objective close reading of a text–that the critic’s search for unity in the text was also a search for unity with the text. In other words, while New Critics sought to separate reader from text, this is an impossible task.

While New Criticism is certainly an important step in development of modern critical theories, there are also several limitations to this approach. First, this type of criticism assumes that the text is universal—that it has one universal meaning. For example, maybe you had to read The Great Gatsby in high school. I love this book. And I still remember the multiple choice test I took on it where there was one right answer to the question about what the green light at the end of the dock symbolized. If you’ve ever taken a multiple choice test on a poem or a book, chances are your teacher took a New Criticism approach. Remember again that the goal is to find empirical and scientific ways to evaluate literature. That means we have to be able to find the “right” answer.

A second rather obvious limitation is something that we all know intuitively: how the text affects you, the individual reader, does matter! With New Criticism, because the text is all we need to understand the text, we don’t take individual readers or their different experiences into account.

But we never read the same text the same way twice. Think about a book you’ve read more than once over the course of your life. Because you are not the same person when you reread the book, your experience of reading it will inevitably be different. Consider your response to Natasha Tretheway’s poem “Theories of Time and Space.” Many readers think this poem is hopeful, and you can certainly support that reading with evidence from the text. Other readers, myself included, think the poem is melancholy—that it’s basically about death. That reading is also supported by the text. How you read this—or any—text will depend on your individual experiences.

Ultimately, both of these concerns reveal a flaw in this empirical, scientific approach to literature. In the homogenous literary culture that existed in the 1920s-1950s, the same people were writing literature, reading literature, teaching literature, and evaluating literature. In Western societies, those people happened to be white men. This does not mean that the literature produced during this period isn’t amazing. It is! I love T.S. Eliot and Archibald MacLeish. But you can see how it’s much easier to find universal meaning when you’re in a closed circle of people who all were educated in the same way, read the same types of books, and are now teaching others the things they learned.

When we talk about exploding the canon, this is what we mean. By allowing new voices to enter these literary spaces, it’s no longer quite so easy to find a universal meaning in every text. These limitations of New Criticism ultimately led to the development of several other critical theories we will learn about in this course.

Further Reading