“The poet and critic William Logan … handily skewers the hypocrisy of literary theory in his foreword to Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, edited by Garrick Davis: “In classrooms of theory, all readings are tolerated, except the wrong ones—the morally absolute masquerades here as the morally relative and manages to be high-minded about it, too.” Kafka, he adds, “would have smiled in recognition.” In the subtitle to his winning selection of essays, Davis throws down the gauntlet with that word best. Anyone who has sat around a seminar table with students of literary theory knows this can be a provocative term….”
“… The metaphysical poet as a rationalist begins at or near the extensive or denotating end of the line; the romantic or Symbolist poet at the other, intensive end; and each by a straining feat of the imagination tries to push his meanings as far as he can towards the opposite end, so as to occupy the entire scale. [- quoting Allen Tate]
“This opposition between reason and emotion is restated throughout the New Criticism. In the last chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), the English poet-critic William Empson finds the same dichotomy expressed in this passage from the 1927 edition of Oxford Poetry : there is a “logical conflict, between the denotary [sic ] and the connotatory [sic ] sense of words; between, that is to say, an asceticism tending to kill language by stripping words of all association and a hedonism tending to kill language by dissipating their sense under a multiplicity of associations.” The important point here is that as soon as a poet moves too far in one direction—toward denotation or connotation—the language dies; the object, as Tate says, is to occupy the entire scale.”
“….In his essay on Poe in The Forlorn Demon, Tate attributes poets’ disconnection from reality to the “angelic imagination”: Since Poe, Tate argues,
refuses to see nature, he is doomed to see nothing. He has overleaped and cheated the condition of man. The reach of our imaginative enlargement is perhaps no longer than the ladder of analogy, at the top of which we may see all, if we still wish to see anything, that we have brought up with us from the bottom, where lies the sensible world. If we take nothing with us to the top but our emptied angelic intellects, we shall see nothing when we get there.
“Ransom says in The World’s Body that “art gratifies a perceptual impulse and exhibits the minimum of reason.” Still, it exhibits enough reason to keep the poem from escaping the world and the laws of language entirely. The downside of maintaining an attachment to the world is a flattening out of the very imaginative, musical, and emotional flights that constitute the poetic in poetry. This flattening of emotion, of course, is never the aim of any poet, least of all the New Critics, who appreciated with such energy the new vibrations set in motion by modernism. What they wished to define with clarity and force was the limit after which the poetic outpaces reality so utterly that is becomes a diminished thing.”
-extracts taken from the an article in The New Criterion, Grammars of a possible world by David Yezzi
-Julie
