Cure for the “New Critics”

Although it has been practiced openly for less than two centuries, English criticism already has a complex genealogy. From Caxton’s 1485 foreword to Malory and Hamlet’s speech to the players, through Dryden’s prefaces and Pope’s sly edition of his own bookish letters, it was a marginal, half-illicit leakage indulged in mostly by poets themselves. Professional status was not achieved until Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets in 1779, and it was only with Coleridge and Hazlitt, Macaulay and Carlyle, that the Critical Essay— part history, part judgment, part self-expression—became a form of writing as primary and honorable as verse, drama, or the novel. Arnold followed, and Swinburne, but after them the tradition petered out in the sycophantic niceties of Gosse and others.

Meantime, the highly conscious methods of French writing were beginning to cross-fertilize English novels and verse. With James, Conrad and Ford, with Eliot, Pound, and the Imagists, new demands were made on readers, and an exegetical kind of criticism was called for, an entre-preneuring agent to make introductions between the new writers and the new readers. A book like Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction uttered the challenge in 1921: “The author of the book was a craftsman: the critic must overtake him at his work and see how the book was made.”

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Robert Phelps

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Although it has been practiced openly for less than two centuries, English criticism already has a complex genealogy. From Caxton’s 1485 foreword to Malory and Hamlet’s speech to the players, through Dryden’s prefaces and Pope’s sly edition of his own bookish letters, it was a marginal, half-illicit leakage indulged in mostly by poets themselves. Professional status was not achieved until Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets in 1779, and it was only with Coleridge and Hazlitt, Macaulay and Carlyle, that the Critical Essay— part history, part judgment, part self-expression—became a form of writing as primary and honorable as verse, drama, or the novel. Arnold followed, and Swinburne, but after them the tradition petered out in the sycophantic niceties of Gosse and others.

Meantime, the highly conscious methods of French writing were beginning to cross-fertilize English novels and verse. With James, Conrad and Ford, with Eliot, Pound, and the Imagists, new demands were made on readers, and an exegetical kind of criticism was called for, an entre-preneuring agent to make introductions between the new writers and the new readers. A book like Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction uttered the challenge in 1921: “The author of the book was a craftsman: the critic must overtake him at his work and see how the book was made.”