The “New Criticism”

Most observers of the American literary scene agree that the major development in the history of academic criticism following the onset of the Great Depression was the overwhelming success of the “New Critics” in pioneering and institutionalizing formalist concepts andmethods. The first stage of this development occurred during the 1920s when T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Empson in England and the Fugitives and Agrarians (especially John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate) in America began to express ideas and work out practices that would form the fundamentals of the New Critical School a decade later. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s-the second stage of development-the number of critics sympathetic to this emerging formalism increased, and the New Critics spread their beliefs effectively into literary quarterlies, university literature departments, and college textbooks and curricula. The major critics associated with New Criticism by the late 1940s were Eliot, Richards, Empson, Ransom, Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, René Wellek, W. K. Wimsatt and, to some extent, Kenneth Burke, F. R. Leavis, and Yvor Winters. Numerous others could be named but these constituted the leading early New Critics. Journals sympathetic to New Criticism included, among others, Eliot’s The Criterion (1922-39) and Leavis’ Scrutiny (1932-53) in England, and in America the Southern Review, edited by Brooks and Robert Penn Warren from 1935 to 1942, the Kenyon Review, headed by Ransom from 1938 to 1959, and the Sewanee Review, run by Tate from 1944 to 1945 and thereafter by other sympathizers into the present. Another stage of development, the third, happened over the decade from the late 1940s to the late 1950s when, as the movement lost a “revolutionary” aura and occupied the mainstream, its followers produced intricate canonical statements of its theories. We can cite in this regard particularly René Wellek’s and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949), W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon (1954), Murray Krieger’s The New Apologists for Poetry (1956), and Brooks’ and Wimsatt’s Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957). Just when some of the leading New Critics were turning away from strict

formalist practices to broader cultural concerns, their doctrines began to

spread to second-and third-generation followers who sometimes insured the purity of New Criticism at considerable cost, reducing the movement to a carefully refined dogmatic method. Among those first to move beyond New Criticism was T. S. Eliot, who throughout the 1930s and 1940s wrote much social criticism. The interests of Richards after the late 1930s and Blackmur after the late 1940s went beyond “normal” New Criticism. Others were associated with the School for only a short time, as, for example, Leavis, who early preferred cultural analysis; Yvor Winters, who practiced moral criticism; and Kenneth Burke, who pioneered interdisciplinary theoretical systems. While these critics maintained certain New Critical habits of mind and procedures of investigation, they supplemented formalism in a rich variety of ways. The result of such departures is that the list of first-generation, lifelong American “true believers” is small: Ransom, Tate, and Brooks. In this reduced version of the School, Wimsatt, Krieger, and Wellek, while fervent longtime New Critics, appear latecomers who arrived on the scene after the opening stages of development in the 1920s and 1930s. Of Ransom, Tate, and Brooks, the most influential popularizer was Brooks.

Unlike Ransom and Tate, who considered themselves poets first and critics second, Brooks, an academic critic, early initiated the refinement, systematization, and dissemination of New Criticism throughout America’s colleges and universities. Neither an innovator like Eliot, nor a profound interpreter like Blackmur, nor a fierce polemicist like Tate, Brooks proved to be a rigorous and insightful analyst as well as an effective and enduring representative of the School. Well into the 1980s he was frequently invited to American university campuses to present his New Critical views. That the New Criticism was over by the late 1950s as an innovative and

original School was clear to both adherents and opponents. Nevertheless, after that time, the New Criticism served for growing numbers of academic critics and scholars as “normal criticism” or simply as “criticism.” This transformation of a particular school into a cultural status quo distinguished New Criticism from all other competing schools, marking a special-a fourth-stage of development. Often critics practicing New Criticism during this phase were unaware that they were doing so: the ideas and methods of the School had become so deeply embedded and broadly generalized among critics as to form the very essence of “criticism.” To delineate the fourth stage of development, we can cite the lucid observations of William Cain, a critical historian writing in the 1980s: