Poetry and New Criticism

I. What is poetry? Compare the following sentences:

"Do you see Mary sitting under the tree waiting for Joseph and me?"

            Do you see
               Mary
            Sitting under the tree
               Waiting    
            For Joseph and me?

Consider the difference between language and the visual arts, between "discursive" and "presentational" symbolic transformation (see Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key [2nd ed. New York: New American Library, 1951] 76-89). Discursive symbolism is temporal, requiring time to communicate itself through a linear progression of words, controlled by logical, syntactic relations and limited by word denotations. Presentational symbolism is spatial, requiring no time to be grasped as a whole and not subject to the constraints of logic or extrinsic structures. While rational thinking is discursive, intuitive knowledge is presentational.

While language is by nature discursive, all literary uses of language pull toward more presentational forms of symbolic transformation, with poetry the most directly presentational through its emphasis on the specific properties of words (sound, rhythm, arrangement, past history, connotations, etc.). This is also called “linguistic foregrounding”; in other words, poetry calls attention to the signifier. Poetry creates presentational effects by undermining the discursive nature of its medium, language, in many different ways; a poem requires reflexive reading (or re-reading), in which individual sections are examined in the light of an awareness of the whole piece. However, poetry is never purely presentational; its richness and ability to convey both rational and intuitive meanings simultaneously stem from the tension between the discursive and presentational modes.

See Marilyn Singer's compilation of poets' and writers' discussion of What Makes a Good Poem.

II. New Criticism: A formalist critical approach that dominated literary studies from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Although no longer current as a theory of criticism, New Criticism’s influence can still be felt in the methodology of close reading and in the emphasis on supplying concrete, specific examples from the text to support critical interpretations.

Some key assumptions of New Criticism:

1. The literary work has an objective existence as a self-sufficient artifact, a “verbal icon”
2. All formal elements of a text work together to create an “organic unity”
3. Organically unified texts have an objective meaning (“the single best reading”) that must be determined by close reading, by “intrinsic criticism” that analyzes all the elements of its form and structure (“the text itself”); what a text means is inseparable from how it means
4. Key principles to seek when interpreting a text are tension, paradox, irony, and ambiguity
5. “Extrinsic criticism,” which analyzes a work in relation to its author, audience, society, or other texts is misguided (note such terms as “intentional fallacy,” “affective fallacy,” “heresy of paraphrase”

Additional Links:

• The New Criticism (David Arnason, St.John's College, University of Manitoba)
• New Criticism Explained (Warren Hedges, Southern Oregon University)
• Excerpts from Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students, rev. ed., 1950 (Alan Filreis, U. Penn.)
• The Sound of Poetry (Don Maxwell, J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College)