ABSTRACT
I want to begin by scotching an old notion—that there was ever a school that said one should refer, in reading a poem, “only to the words on the page.” The critics who asked that attention be paid to the words on the page were, most of them, poets, such as Allan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, John Crowe Ransom, and I. A. Richards. They all assumed that a reader studying poetry would have had an excellent education in Latin, modern languages, philosophy, history, theology, and canonical works of literature. What they objected to were essays in literary history, literary theory, and the history of ideas that displayed only the skimpiest knowledge, if that, of what a poem was up to, what its author was up to. The New Critics asked not for a “close” reading, as it is nowadays referred to, but what I would call “a writer’s reading”—the study that another writer would give to what had been attempted, and accomplished, on the page. The writer-reader would of course know the history of previous poetry and would be curious what interesting new aesthetic practice was being brought off by the writing writer.
