New Criticism

Anglo-American literary criticism

New Criticism, post-World War I school of Anglo-American literary critical theory that insisted on the intrinsic value of a work of art and focused attention on the individual work alone as an independent unit of meaning. It was opposed to the critical practice of bringing historical or biographical data to bear on the interpretation of a work.

The primary technique employed in the New Critical approach is close analytic reading of the text, a technique as old as Aristotle’s Poetics. The New Critics, however, introduced refinements into the method. Early seminal works in the tradition were those of the English critics I.A. Richards (Practical Criticism, 1929) and William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1930). English poet T.S. Eliot also made contributions, with his critical essays “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917) and “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919). The movement did not have a name, however, until the appearance of John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941), a work that loosely organized the principles of this basically linguistic approach to literature. Other figures associated with New Criticism include Cleanth Brooks, R.P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., although their critical pronouncements, along with those of Ransom, Richards, and Empson, are somewhat diverse and do not readily constitute a uniform school of thought. New Criticism was eclipsed as the dominant mode of Anglo-American literary criticism by the 1970s.

To the New Critics, poetry was a special kind of discourse, a means of communicating feeling and thought that could not be expressed in any other kind of language. It differed qualitatively from the language of science or philosophy, but it conveyed equally valid meanings. Such critics set out to define and formalize the qualities of poetic thought and language, utilizing the technique of close reading with special emphasis on the connotative and associative values of words and on the multiple functions of figurative language—symbol, metaphor, and image—in the work. Poetic form and content could not be separated, since the experience of reading the particular words of a poem, including its unresolved tensions, is the poem’s “meaning.” As a result, any rewording of a poem’s language alters its content, a view articulated in the phrase “the heresy of paraphrase,” which was coined by Brooks in his The Well Wrought Urn (1947).

This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn.

Elder Olson

American poet and literary critic

Elder Olson, (born March 9, 1909, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died July 25, 1992, Albuquerque, N.M.), American poet, playwright, and literary critic. He was a leading member of the Chicago critics—a Neo-Aristotelian, or “critical pluralist,” school of critical theory that came to prominence in the 1940s at the University of Chicago.

After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1938, Olson taught for several years at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago. He returned to the University of Chicago in 1942 and—along with his teachers and colleagues Richard McKeon, R.S. Crane, and Wayne C. Booth—became known for his responses to New Criticism. In Critics and Criticism (1952; the Neo-Aristotelian manifesto edited by Crane) and later works, including Tragedy and the Theory of Drama (1961) and The Theory of Comedy (1968), Olson argued for a systematic and comprehensive approach to criticism based on but not limited to the principles of Aristotle’s Poetics. He attacked the New Critics for focusing on the diction of poetry and argued that criticism should concentrate on poetic wholes instead.

Although less widely known than his criticism, Olson’s poetry is characterized by rich imagery, serious and elegiac tone, sharp wit, technical dexterity, and metaphysical themes. His verse collections include Thing of Sorrow (1934), The Scarecrow Christ and Other Poems (1954), Plays and Poems (1958), and Olson’s Penny Arcade (1975).

This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn.

William Empson

British critic and poet

William Empson, (born September 27, 1906, Hawdon, Yorkshire, England—died April 15, 1984, London), English critic and poet known for his immense influence on 20th-century literary criticism and for his rational, metaphysical poetry.

Empson was educated at Winchester College and at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He earned degrees in mathematics and in English literature, which he studied under I.A. Richards. His first poems were published during this time. Several of the verses published in Empson’s Poems (1935) also were written while he was an undergraduate and reflect his knowledge of the sciences and technology, which he used as metaphors in his largely pessimistic assessment of the human lot. Much influenced by John Donne, the poems are personal, politically unconcerned (despite the preoccupation with politics in the 1930s), elliptical, and difficult, even though he provided some explanatory notes. Later collections of his poetry included The Gathering Storm (1940) and Collected Poems (1949; rev. ed. 1955).

Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; rev. ed. 1953), one of the most influential critical works of the first half of the 20th century, was essentially a close examination of poetic texts. Empson’s special contribution in this work was his suggestion that uncertainty or the overlap of meanings in the use of a word could be an enrichment of poetry rather than a fault, and his book abounds with examples. The book helped lay the foundation for the influential critical school known as the New Criticism, although Empson never allied himself with the New Critics’ attempts to disregard authorial intention. Empson applied his critical method to somewhat longer texts in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) and further elaborated it in The Structure of Complex Words (1951), where he added attention to social, political, and psychological concerns to his primarily linguistic focus.

From 1931 to 1934 Empson taught English literature at the University of Tokyo, and he subsequently joined the English faculty of Peking National University in China. He was Chinese editor at the British Broadcasting Corporation during World War II and returned to teach at Peking National University from 1947 to 1952. Empson was professor of English literature at Sheffield University from 1953, becoming emeritus in 1971. He was knighted in 1979.

Empson’s later criticism includes many uncollected essays and one book, Milton’s God (1961), in which his extreme rationalism is directed against a positive valuation of the Christian God. This later body of writing concerns itself with biography and textual criticism as well as with issues of interpretation and literary theory more generally.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn.

Cleanth Brooks

American critic and educator

Cleanth Brooks, (born Oct. 16, 1906, Murray, Ky., U.S.—died May 10, 1994, New Haven, Conn.), American teacher and critic whose work was important in establishing the New Criticism, which stressed close reading and structural analysis of literature.

Educated at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and at Tulane University, New Orleans, Brooks was a Rhodes scholar (Exeter College, Oxford) before he began teaching at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, in 1932. From 1935 to 1942, with Charles W. Pipkin and poet and critic Robert Penn Warren, he edited The Southern Review, a journal that advanced the New Criticism and published the works of a new generation of Southern writers. Brooks’s critical works include Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Authoritative college texts by Brooks, with others, reinforced the popularity of the New Criticism: Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), written with Warren, and Understanding Drama (1945), with Robert Heilman.

Brooks taught at Yale University from 1947 to 1975 and was also a Library of Congress fellow (1951–62) and cultural attaché at the U.S. embassy in London (1964–66). Brooks’s later works included Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957; cowritten with William K. Wimsatt); A Shaping Joy: Studies in the Writer’s Craft (1972); The Language of the American South (1985); Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth Century Poetry (1991); and several books on William Faulkner, including William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963), William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978), William Faulkner: First Encounters (1983), and Firm Beliefs of William Faulkner (1987).

I.A. Richards

British critic and poet

I.A. Richards, (born Feb. 26, 1893, Sandbach, Cheshire, Eng.—died Sept. 7, 1979, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire), English critic, poet, and teacher who was highly influential in developing a new way of reading poetry that led to the New Criticism and that also influenced some forms of reader-response criticism.

Richards was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was a lecturer in English and moral sciences there from 1922 to 1929. In that period 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), companion volumes that he used to develop his critical method. The latter two were based on experimental pedagogy: Richards would give students poems in which the titles and authors’ names had been removed and then use their responses for further development of their “close reading” skills. 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.

During the 1930s, Richards spent much of his time developing Basic English, a system originated by Ogden that employed only 850 words; Richards believed a universally intelligible language would help to bring about international understanding. He took Basic English to China as a visiting professor at Tsing Hua University (1929–30) and as director of the Orthological Institute of China (1936–38). In 1942 he published a version of Plato’s Republic in Basic English. He became professor of English at Harvard University in 1939, working mainly in primary education, and emeritus professor there in 1963. His speculative and theoretical works include Science and Poetry (1926; revised as Poetries and Sciences, 1970), Mencius on the Mind (1932), Coleridge on Imagination (1934), The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), Speculative Instruments (1955), Beyond (1974), Poetries (1974), and Complementarities (1976). His verse has been collected in Internal Colloquies (1971) and New and Selected Poems (1978).

A student of psychology and philosophy along with literary forms, Richards concluded that poetry performs a therapeutic function by coordinating a variety of human impulses into an aesthetic whole, helping both the writer and the reader maintain their psychological well-being. He valued a “poetry of inclusion” that was able to contain the widest variety of warring tensions and oppositions.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn.

R.S. Crane

American literary critic

R.S. Crane (born Jan. 5, 1886, Tecumseh, Mich., U.S.—died July 12, 1967, Chicago, Ill.) was an American literary critic who was a leading figure of the Neo-Aristotelian Chicago school. His landmark book, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953), formed the theoretical basis of the group. Although Crane was an outspoken opponent of the New Criticism, he argued persuasively for a pluralism that values separate, even contradictory, critical schools.

Crane was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A., 1908) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1911). He taught at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. (1911–1924), and at the University of Chicago (1924–1967). Central to his position as a Chicago critic is the theory that no subjects are barred from investigation by the methods and arts of the humanities; such fields as mathematics, the physical sciences, sociology, and psychology all have histories, languages, literature, and fundamental philosophical precepts that can be discussed and analyzed by means of the general arts of the humanities. These arts are four: analysis of ideas; analysis of symbolic expression, including use of language; explication and interpretation; and historical research.

In addition to publishing many journal articles, Crane edited the influential book Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (1952). Much of his writing was collected in The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical (1967) and Critical and Historical Principles of Literary History (1971).

Roland Barthes

French critic

Roland Barthes (born November 12, 1915, Cherbourg, France—died March 25, 1980, Paris) French essayist and social and literary critic whose writings on semiotics, the formal study of symbols and signs pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, helped establish structuralism and the New Criticism as leading intellectual movements.

Barthes studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree in classical letters in 1939 and in grammar and philology in 1943. After working (1952–59) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he was appointed to the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1976 he became the first person to hold the chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France.

His first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero), was a literary manifesto that examined the arbitrariness of the constructs of language. In subsequent books—including Mythologies (1957), Essais critiques (1964; Critical Essays), and La Tour Eiffel (1964; The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies)—he applied the same critical apparatus to the “mythologies” (i.e., the hidden assumptions) behind popular cultural phenomena from advertising and fashion to the Eiffel Tower and wrestling. His Sur Racine (1963; On Racine) set off a literary furor in France, pitting Barthes against traditional academics who thought this “new criticism,” which viewed texts as a system of signs, was desecrating the classics. Even more radical was S/Z (1970), a line-by-line semiological analysis of a short story by Honoré de Balzac in which Barthes stressed the active role of the reader in constructing a narrative based on “cues” in the text.

Barthes’s literary style, which was always stimulating though sometimes eccentric and needlessly obscure, was widely imitated and parodied. Some thought his theories contained brilliant insights, while others regarded them simply as perverse contrivances. But by the late 1970s Barthes’s intellectual stature was virtually unchallenged, and his theories had become extremely influential not only in France but throughout Europe and in the United States. Other leading radical French thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him included the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, socio-historian Michel Foucault, and philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Two of Barthes’s later books established his late-blooming reputation as a stylist and writer. He published an “antiautobiography,” Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes), and his Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse), an account of a painful love affair, was so popular it quickly sold more than 60,000 copies in France. Barthes died at the age of 64 from injuries suffered after being struck by an automobile. Several posthumous collections of his writings have been published, including A Barthes Reader (1982), edited by his friend and admirer Susan Sontag, and Incidents (1987). The latter volume revealed Barthes’s homosexuality, which he had not publicly acknowledged. Barthes’s Oeuvres complètes (“Complete Works”) were published in three volumes in 1993–95.

Robert Penn Warren

American writer

Robert Penn Warren, (born April 24, 1905, Guthrie, Ky., U.S.—died Sept. 15, 1989, Stratton, Vt.), American novelist, poet, critic, and teacher, best-known for his treatment of moral dilemmas in a South beset by the erosion of its traditional, rural values. He became the first poet laureate of the United States in 1986.

In 1921 Warren entered Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., where he joined a group of poets who called themselves the Fugitives (q.v.). Warren was among several of the Fugitives who joined with other Southerners to publish the anthology of essays I’ll Take My Stand (1930), a plea for the agrarian way of life in the South.

fter graduation from Vanderbilt in 1925, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley (M.A., 1927), and at Yale. He then went to the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. From 1930 to 1950 he served on the faculty of several colleges and universities—including Vanderbilt and the University of Minnesota. With Cleanth Brooks and Charles W. Pipkin, he founded and edited The Southern Review (1935–42), possibly the most influential American literary magazine of the time. He taught at Yale University from 1951 to 1973. His Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), both written with Cleanth Brooks, were enormously influential in spreading the doctrines of the New Criticism (q.v.).

Warren’s first novel, Night Rider (1939), is based on the tobacco war (1905–08) between the independent growers in Kentucky and the large tobacco companies. It anticipates much of his later fiction in the way it treats a historical event with tragic irony, emphasizes violence, and portrays individuals caught in moral quandaries. His best-known novel, All the King’s Men (1946), is based on the career of the Louisiana demagogue Huey Long and tells the story of an idealistic politician whose lust for power corrupts him and those around him. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and, when made into a film, won the Academy Award for best motion picture of 1949. Warren’s other novels include At Heaven’s Gate (1943); World Enough and Time (1950), which centres on a controversial murder trial in Kentucky in the 19th century; Band of Angels (1956); and The Cave (1959). His long narrative poem, Brother to Dragons (1953), dealing with the brutal murder of a slave by two nephews of Thomas Jefferson, is essentially a versified novel, and his poetry generally exhibits many of the concerns of his fiction. His other volumes of poetry include Promises: Poems, 1954–1956; You, Emperors, and Others (1960); Audubon: A Vision (1969); Now and Then; Poems 1976–1978; Rumor Verified (1981); Chief Joseph (1983); and New and Selected Poems, 1923–1985 (1985). The Circus in the Attic (1948), which included “Blackberry Winter,” considered by some critics to be one of Warren’s supreme achievements, is a volume of short stories, and Selected Essays (1958) is a collection of some of his critical writings.

Besides receiving the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Warren twice won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1958, 1979) and, at the time of his selection as poet laureate in 1986, was the only person ever to win the prize in both categories. In his later years he tended to concentrate on his poetry.

Seven Types of Ambiguity

critical work by Empson

Seven Types of Ambiguity, critical work by William Empson, published in 1930 and revised in 1947 and 1953. The book was influential as one of the foundations of the school of literary theory known as New Criticism.

In Seven Types of Ambiguity Empson sought to enhance the reader’s understanding of a poem by isolating the linguistic properties of the text. He suggested that words or references in poems are often ambiguous and, if presented coherently, carry multiple meanings that can enrich the reader’s appreciation of the work. He argued that the complexities of cognitive and tonal meanings in poetry form the basis of the reader’s emotional response.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.

John Crowe Ransom

American poet and critic

John Crowe Ransom, (born April 30, 1888, Pulaski, Tenn., U.S.—died July 4, 1974, Gambier, Ohio), American poet and critic, leading theorist of the Southern literary renaissance that began after World War I. Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941) provided the name of the influential mid-20th-century school of criticism (see New Criticism).

Ransom, whose father was a minister, lived during his childhood in several towns in the Nashville, Tenn., area. He attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville for two years, then dropped out to teach because he felt his father should not continue to support him. He later returned to the university and graduated in 1909 at the head of his class. Subsequently he went to Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. From 1914 to 1937 he taught English at Vanderbilt, where he was the leader of the Fugitives, a group of poets that published the influential literary magazine The Fugitive (1922–25) and shared a belief in the South and its regional traditions.

Ransom was also among those Fugitives who became known as the Agrarians. Their I’ll Take My Stand (1930) criticized the idea that industrialization was the answer to the needs of the South.

Ransom taught from 1937 until his retirement in 1958 at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he founded and edited (1939–59) the literary magazine The Kenyon Review. Ransom’s literary studies include God Without Thunder (1930); The World’s Body (1938), in which he takes the position that poetry and science furnish different but equally valid knowledge about the world; Poems and Essays (1955); and Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays, 1941–1970 (1972). Ransom’s poetry, which one critic has applauded as exhibiting weighty facts “in small or delicate settings,” often deals with the subjects of self-alienation and death. His poetry is collected in Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). Thereafter he published only five new poems; his Selected Poems (1945; rev. ed., 1969), which won a National Book Award, contains revisions of his earlier work. T.D. Young edited his critical essays (1968). Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom appeared in 1984.

This article was most recently revised and updated by J.E. Luebering.