ABSTRACT
It sometimes seems to me that the difference between academic and non-academic criticism is not that one is careful and the other slapdash, that one is learned and the other superficial, nor even that one is penny-plain and the other twopence-coloured; it is rather that the academic critic runs a fence round the subject under discussion, and keeps himself and his readers inside that fence. Any discussion of a literary text has implications that go beyond purely literary study, whatever 'literary' may mean in this context: the critic's attitude to it will depend on his general presuppositions, and the terms in which he will seek to present it to his readers will be dictated, ultimately, by his view of the world. If he is an academic critic he will try to keep all this out of sight; if he is not, he will not mind letting it appear (which is not the same thing as dragging it into long disquisitions). Speaking for mys elf, though I have often read academic criticism with pleasure and interest, the criticism I enjoy most, that gathers me up in the same way as imaginative literature, is the work of critics who, however learned and professional, are non-academic in the sense I have just described-those who keep a window open on the larger landscape such as one might see in a Renaissance painting. My tutor C. S. Lewis was one such; William Empson, obviously, is another. Such men discuss literature out of a great depth of knowledge, but without allowing that knowledge to become a limiting structure. There is no barbed wire in their work. Both the two I have named, as it happens, have written studies of Milton; and from both A Preface to Paradise Lost and A1ilton's God it would be possible-is, indeed, unavoidable-to learn the author's personal views on religion and, by implication, largely on politics and society. The academic critic would think it tactful to keep these views as invisible as possible, and try to make himself into a lens
through which the 'work itself' could be more clearly seen; these non-academic, though equally professional, critics are without that ideal of tact and so their critical work is 'literature' in its own right.
