Literary Criticism
From Plato to the New Critics — complete notes for UGC NET English Paper 2 Unit VIII by Prof. Amirul Khan.
VIII of X
Unit
~15–20%
Exam Weight
Paper 2
Paper
Classical Criticism
Literary criticism as a serious intellectual activity began in ancient Greece — not as admiration for great writing, but as a debate about whether poetry was good for society at all. Plato opened that debate by attacking poetry; Aristotle answered him by defending it; Horace gave poets a practical set of rules to follow. These three thinkers — writing across roughly four centuries — established the vocabulary and the questions that all later critics would inherit. When you encounter terms like mimesis, catharsis, or dulce et utile anywhere in your UGC NET preparation, you are meeting ideas born in this period.
Plato (428–348 BCE)
Plato believed that reality exists on two levels. The eternal, perfect world of 'Forms' (or Ideas) is the true reality. The physical world we live in — tables, trees, human faces — is merely an imperfect copy of those Forms. A carpenter's table is a copy of the Form of Table. Now, a painting of that table is a copy of a copy: twice removed from truth. Plato called this process of copying mimesis (imitation). His objection to poetry is this: poetry imitates the world of appearances, which is already an imitation of the Forms. Poets give us shadows of shadows. That is his ontological (truth-based) objection. His moral objection is equally sharp: tragic poetry stirs our emotions — grief, fear, pity — and feeds the irrational part of the soul. A well-ordered soul is ruled by reason; poetry undermines that order. For these reasons, Plato would banish the tragic poets from his ideal republic. But Plato is not simple. In the Ion, he takes the opposite position: the poet is not a liar but divinely inspired — a mouthpiece for the gods who composes in a state of divine frenzy, not through craft or knowledge. This tension — poet as dangerous imitator vs. poet as inspired prophet — runs through Plato and through all criticism that follows him.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE)
Aristotle was Plato's student, but he disagreed with his teacher on poetry. The Poetics is essentially a systematic reply to Plato's attack. Aristotle's first move is to redefine mimesis: imitation is not deception; it is a natural human instinct through which we learn and take pleasure. Children learn by imitating; we enjoy representations of things (even ugly things) because through them we understand and recognise. So poetry, being imitative, is not dangerous but educational and pleasurable. Aristotle then analyses tragedy specifically, giving the most famous definition in all of literary criticism: tragedy is 'the imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, effecting through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions.' Catharsis — purging or cleansing — is Aristotle's answer to Plato's moral objection. Rather than corrupting us, tragedy safely exercises and then purges our emotions, leaving us calmer and wiser. Aristotle identifies six elements of tragedy in order of importance: Plot (mythos) is most important — 'the soul of tragedy'; then Character (ethos); Thought (dianoia); Diction (lexis); Melody; and Spectacle (least important). Three technical terms are essential for NET: hamartia (the protagonist's tragic flaw or error of judgement), peripeteia (a sudden reversal of fortune), and anagnorisis (a moment of recognition — the hero discovers the truth).
Horace (65–8 BCE)
Where Plato and Aristotle were philosophers asking big questions about what poetry is, Horace was a working poet offering practical advice to young writers. His Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry) is a verse letter addressed to a Roman family of aspiring poets. Its tone is that of a wise, experienced craftsman: here is how you write well. His most famous rule is dulce et utile — poetry must be both sweet (delightful) and useful (instructive). A poem that only entertains is shallow; one that only preaches is tedious. The best poetry does both at once. Horace also insisted on decorum: each genre has its proper style, tone, and characters, and mixing them is a sign of poor craft. He argued that a play should have five acts, that characters should behave consistently with their age and social position, and that the poem must be a unified whole — like a living body, not a patchwork. His phrase 'Ut pictura poesis' ('as is painting, so is poetry') became the basis of Renaissance debates about whether poetry and painting are sister arts. Horace's practical, prescriptive approach made him the favourite critic of the Neo-classicists.
Longinus (1st century CE)
On the Sublime is attributed to a critic known as 'Longinus,' though the true author and date remain uncertain. Unlike Plato's suspicion or Aristotle's cool analysis, Longinus is interested in the moments in great literature that overwhelm the reader — the passages that do not merely please or instruct but strike like a bolt of lightning and leave the reader transported. He calls this quality the sublime (hypsous — literally 'height'). The sublime is not about following rules correctly; it comes from greatness of soul in the writer. Longinus identifies five sources: great and noble thoughts; strong and inspired emotion; figures of speech and thought; noble diction and word-choice; dignified and elevated composition. Longinus was largely forgotten until rediscovered in the Renaissance, and he became enormously influential in the 17th and 18th centuries when the 'sublime' became one of the central aesthetic categories — the experience of vastness, terror, and awe in nature and art.
Exam Tip
UGC NET tests Plato heavily — always know his two objections (ontological and moral) and the difference between the Ion (divine inspiration) and Republic Book X (banishment). For Aristotle, the definition of tragedy and the six elements in order must be precise. Catharsis and hamartia are frequently asked.
Renaissance Criticism
The Renaissance (roughly the 15th–17th centuries) saw a revival of classical learning across Europe. Aristotle's Poetics, which had been lost to Western Europe for centuries, was rediscovered, translated into Latin, and then debated intensely by Italian critics. English writers inherited this revived classical framework and used it to address a very local problem: Puritan and moral attacks on poetry and the theatre. If poetry was useless or immoral, poets needed to defend themselves. Sidney was the first great English defender; Dryden, writing a century later, was the first great English critic in prose.
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)
Sidney wrote his Defence in response to a Puritan pamphlet called The School of Abuse (1579) by Stephen Gosson, which attacked poetry and theatre as morally corrupting. Gosson had dedicated the pamphlet to Sidney without asking permission — a provocation Sidney could not ignore. The result is the first major work of literary criticism in English, and it remains a pleasure to read. Sidney's central argument is that poetry is the queen of all arts and sciences. History can only tell us what actually happened — which is often ugly and discouraging. Philosophy can only give us abstract principles — which are difficult to apply to real life. But the poet does something neither can: the poet creates ideal examples, characters who are braver, wiser, and nobler than any real person, and through these examples teaches virtue more vividly and memorably than any treatise. The poet, says Sidney, creates a 'golden world' — a world better than the real, 'brazen world' of nature. One of Sidney's cleverest moves is his defence against the charge that poets are liars. A liar asserts something false as true. But the poet never claims to be speaking literally: 'The poet nothing affirmeth' — the poet makes no factual claim. You cannot call Hamlet a lie. Sidney also criticises the English drama of his own day for being incoherent — mixing comedy and tragedy, violating the classical unities. This is important: Sidney defends poetry in principle while finding fault with English poetry in practice.
George Puttenham (c.1529–1590)
Puttenham's Arte is not as philosophically ambitious as Sidney's Defence, but it is the most detailed practical handbook for Elizabethan poets. It covers figures of speech (with delightful English names for Greek rhetorical devices), metre, poetic forms, decorum — the idea that each subject demands its appropriate style — and the social function of the poet at the royal court. It is a valuable source for understanding how educated Elizabethans thought about the craft of verse.
John Dryden (1631–1700)
Dryden is the bridge between Renaissance and Neo-classical criticism, and he is the first writer in English to practise literary criticism as an art form in prose. His Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) is written as a dialogue between four educated gentlemen floating down the Thames during a naval battle — a vivid framing device. They debate the great critical questions of the day: Are the Ancients (classical writers) superior to the Moderns? Is French drama (with its strict classical rules) better than the freer, more irregular English drama? Should the stage obey the Three Unities of action, time, and place? Dryden's own voice emerges in the defence of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson: English drama is more varied, more vital, more true to human nature than the elegant but cold French drama. Dryden is not anti-classical — he admires the Ancients — but he insists that English writers have their own greatness. His concept of 'wit' as 'a propriety of thoughts and words' and his graceful, balanced prose style set the standard for English criticism for a century.
Exam Tip
Sidney's Defence is one of the most tested texts in Unit VIII. Know all three of his arguments for poetry (older than all arts; golden world; teaches virtue through delight) and his clever defence against the charge of lying. Dryden's Essay is tested for the Ancients vs Moderns debate and his defence of English drama.
Neo-classical Criticism
Neo-classical criticism dominated English literary culture from roughly 1660 to 1780 — the age of Dryden, Pope, Addison, and Johnson. Its governing principle was reason: good writing is not the outpouring of personal feeling but the product of disciplined thought, good taste, and adherence to the models established by the great writers of classical antiquity. 'Follow Nature' was the Neo-classical slogan — but by 'Nature' they meant not wild mountains and rivers but universal human nature as understood by reason. A great poem should ring true to all educated readers of all times. The Neo-classicists valued clarity, proportion, decorum, and restraint. Excess — whether of feeling, language, or imagination — was a fault.
Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
Pope wrote his Essay on Criticism at the age of twenty-three — a verse essay (written in heroic couplets) that is itself a model of the wit and precision it recommends. Its central argument is that the best criticism follows the same principles as the best poetry: both must follow Nature, and following Nature means following the great classical writers who discovered Nature first. 'Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; / To copy Nature is to copy them.' The young critic who has read a little of classical literature is more dangerous than the one who has read none — 'A little learning is a dangerous thing.' True wit, Pope argues, is not mere cleverness or novelty: it is the perfect expression of what everyone has half-felt but never clearly articulated — 'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.' Pope's Essay is packed with aphorisms that still circulate today: 'To err is human, to forgive divine'; 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.' These are not decorations — each is a compressed critical principle.
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
Samuel Johnson is the dominant critical intelligence of the 18th century — forceful, fair-minded, and utterly honest. His Preface to Shakespeare (1765) is his greatest critical achievement and one of the most important documents in the history of English criticism. By Johnson's time, Shakespeare had been dead for nearly 150 years, and neo-classical critics had been complaining about him for decades: he mixed tragedy with comedy (violating decorum), he ignored the Three Unities of time and place, his language was sometimes coarse. Johnson addresses every objection directly. On the Unities: the unities of time and place are not Aristotle's rules but Italian Renaissance inventions, and they serve no real purpose. The audience in a theatre always knows it is watching a performance — it is never truly deceived into thinking the stage is real Rome or real Egypt. Since there is no genuine delusion, there is no need to maintain a fictional consistency of place and time. Shakespeare's greatness lies precisely in his fidelity to human nature — his characters are not types but people. The Lives of the Poets is another landmark: Johnson invented the form of the critical biography, interweaving a writer's life with close evaluation of their work. His description of Metaphysical poetry — 'the most heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together' — became the standard definition for two centuries.
Exam Tip
Pope's aphorisms from the Essay on Criticism are standard single-line NET questions — memorise the most famous ones. Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare is tested for his defence against neo-classical objections, especially his pragmatic argument against the Unities. His definition of Metaphysical wit is also frequently asked.
Romantic Criticism
By the 1790s, the Romantic poets were in open revolt against the Neo-classical tradition. They rejected its emphasis on rules, reason, and classical authority, and turned instead to imagination, emotion, nature, childhood, and individual vision. Critically, this meant a complete change in what poetry was thought to be and what the poet was thought to do. For the Neo-classicists, the poet was a craftsman who worked within established conventions to express universal truths. For the Romantics, the poet was a visionary whose imagination could perceive truths unavailable to ordinary reason. This shift — from craft to inspiration, from convention to originality, from reason to feeling — is the central movement of Romantic criticism.
William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads — a collection of poems written in plain, everyday language about ordinary rural people: a shepherd, a discharged soldier, a mad mother. This was a deliberate provocation against the artificial, elevated diction of 18th-century poetry. In the Preface (1800, expanded 1802), Wordsworth explained his aims. Poetry, he argued, should be written in 'the real language of men' — the speech of rural people who live close to nature and express genuine feeling without literary artifice. He attacked the 'gaudy and inane phraseology' that passed for poetic diction in the 18th century. Most importantly, he offered a new definition of what poetry is: 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.' Notice that this is a two-stage process. First, the poet has a powerful emotional experience. Later, in a calm state, the poet recalls that emotion; the recollection generates a new emotion, and this becomes the poem. The word 'spontaneous' does not mean hastily written — it means that when writing finally happens, the feeling flows naturally because it has been understood. The Preface to Lyrical Ballads is the founding manifesto of English Romanticism.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
Coleridge is the deepest and most philosophical of the Romantic critics. His Biographia Literaria (1817) is part autobiography, part philosophical treatise, part literary criticism — sprawling, brilliant, and uneven. Its most important critical contribution is the distinction between Imagination and Fancy. Both work with existing materials (memories, perceptions), but they work differently. Imagination — especially what Coleridge calls the Secondary Imagination, the creative faculty of the poet — 'dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.' It transforms its raw materials into something new and unified. Fancy, by contrast, is merely a mechanical ability to combine and rearrange fixed memories and associations without transforming them. A poet who only has Fancy produces clever but cold work; a poet with Imagination produces living art. Coleridge also introduced the concept of 'organic form': a great work of art grows from within, like a plant, according to its own internal necessity — as opposed to 'mechanic form,' which imposes a pre-existing shape from outside (like pouring liquid into a mould). This is why Shakespeare's plays feel alive: they are not rule-following exercises but organisms. Coleridge also gave us the phrase 'willing suspension of disbelief' — the reader's agreement to temporarily accept the fiction as real, which makes imaginative literature possible.
John Keats (1795–1821)
Keats never wrote a formal critical essay, but his letters contain some of the most original critical thinking of the Romantic period. His most celebrated concept is Negative Capability, defined in a letter to his brothers in December 1817 as the capacity to remain 'in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' Most intellectuals — scientists, philosophers, even critics — feel compelled to resolve uncertainty: they push towards answers, conclusions, systems. Keats thought that the greatest poets, especially Shakespeare, had the opposite quality: they could dwell in ambiguity, hold contradictory ideas simultaneously, and let experience be complex without forcing it into neat categories. The great poet has no fixed self — the 'poetical character' takes as much delight in imagining a villain as a hero. This idea has proven enormously influential for later critics who study how poetry resists simple interpretation.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
Shelley's Defence of Poetry was written in 1821 in direct response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock's satirical essay 'The Four Ages of Poetry,' which argued that in an age of science and reason, poetry had become a childish irrelevance. Shelley's response is one of the most passionate and elevated defences of poetry ever written. His central claim: the imagination — the faculty that perceives unity, beauty, and value in the world — is the highest human faculty, and poetry is its purest expression. Science describes the world; poetry transforms it. The great poets are not just entertainers or even moralists — they are the secret shapers of civilisation, giving form to the feelings and values by which societies live. Hence Shelley's famous closing claim: 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' The word 'unacknowledged' is crucial: society does not recognise poets as its lawmakers, but it lives by the imaginative visions they have created.
William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
Hazlitt is the most vigorous and readable of the Romantic critics — partisan, passionate, and direct where Coleridge is philosophical and Shelley is lofty. His Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817) treats Shakespearean characters as if they were real human beings with complex psychologies: Hamlet is not an abstract symbol but a recognisable kind of person, a man whose thoughts outrun his capacity for action. This approach — called 'character criticism' — was enormously popular in the 19th century but was later attacked (notably by L.C. Knights) for treating fiction as reality. Hazlitt's The Spirit of the Age (1825) is a series of brilliant portraits of his contemporaries — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Bentham, Godwin — that reads like an extended critical newspaper column. His criticism is important for its insistence that literature is alive and immediate, not a museum exhibit.
Exam Tip
Wordsworth's definition of poetry and Keats's Negative Capability are among the most tested phrases in all of UGC NET English — learn them word for word. Coleridge's Imagination vs Fancy distinction must be precise: know that Secondary Imagination 'dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.' Shelley's 'unacknowledged legislators' is tested both as a direct quote and in Assertion-Reason format.
Victorian Criticism
Victorian criticism (roughly 1830–1900) is pulled in two opposing directions, and the tension between them defines the period. On one side is Matthew Arnold: criticism should be serious, disinterested, and morally purposeful — it should identify 'the best that is known and thought in the world' and hold it up as a standard. On the other side are Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde: art exists for its own sake, the critic's only task is to record the quality of their own impression, and beauty is an end in itself. This is the conflict between moral criticism and aesthetic criticism, and it runs through Victorian intellectual life like a fault line.
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
Arnold is the central critical figure of the Victorian age — a poet who became a critic because he believed England needed one. In 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' (1864), he defines the critic's task as 'a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.' The key word is disinterested: the critic must be free of party spirit, personal prejudice, and the pressures of the moment. Arnold's practical method for achieving this standard is the touchstone: the critic should carry in their mind a handful of passages from the undisputed great poets — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton — and use these as measuring sticks when reading lesser work. If a passage has the 'high seriousness' of a Homeric line, it is great poetry; if it does not, it is not. Arnold's concept of poetry as 'a criticism of life' is also essential: great poetry does not merely entertain or decorate — it seriously engages with human experience and offers a way of understanding it. He famously criticised the Romantic poets for having imagination without knowledge: they 'did not know enough,' and their lack of critical intelligence limited their greatness.
Walter Pater (1839–1894)
Pater is Arnold's great opponent, though the two never directly debated. Where Arnold thought criticism should seek universal standards, Pater thought there are no universal standards — only individual impressions. The critic's first question is not 'Is this great by some objective measure?' but 'What does this work do to me? What is this picture, this poem, to me personally?' In the Preface to The Renaissance, Pater defines aesthetic criticism as the recording of one's own unique impression of a work of art. And in the famous Conclusion — which shocked readers when it appeared and which Pater briefly withdrew from the second edition, fearing it would corrupt young men — he urges his readers to live intensely: to 'burn always with this hard, gem-like flame.' The ideal life is one of sustained, discriminating responsiveness to beautiful experience. Every moment, every impression, every work of art should be seized and felt with maximum intensity. This philosophy — deeply subjective, sensuously committed to the present moment — is the foundation of Aestheticism, and it directly shaped Oscar Wilde's critical and creative work.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Wilde took Pater's aestheticism and gave it wit, paradox, and provocation. His essay 'The Critic as Artist' makes a startling claim: criticism is a higher art than the art it criticises. The artist is limited by their material — paint, words, stone — and by what actually happened to them. The critic is free: working only with ideas, they can recreate the work of art in an entirely new form. The best criticism, Wilde argues, is itself a work of art. In 'The Decay of Lying,' Wilde attacks the conventional idea that art imitates life. It is precisely the opposite: Life imitates Art. We see the world through the shapes that artists have given it. London fogs did not exist — aesthetically, that is — until Impressionist painters invented them. Dickens created a type of person (the Dickensian waif, the Dickensian miser) that we then see everywhere in real life. Art does not mirror nature; it creates it. Wilde's slogan 'Art for Art's Sake' — and his Preface's declaration that 'all art is quite useless' — is not nihilism. It is a refusal to subordinate art to any external purpose: moral, political, or commercial. Art justifies itself by being beautiful.
Exam Tip
The Arnold–Pater–Wilde arc is one of the most productive areas for NET questions. Arnold's touchstone method and 'criticism of life,' Pater's 'hard gem-like flame,' and Wilde's inversion of mimesis ('life imitates art, not art nature') are all tested regularly. Know the distinction between Arnold's moral standard and Pater's subjective impressionism — examiners love to ask you to tell them apart.
Modern Criticism & the New Critics
By the early 20th century, literary criticism had become either impressionistic (Pater's legacy: write beautifully about your feelings) or biographical (judge the poem by the poet's life). Neither approach felt rigorous or teachable. The Modern period saw a revolution: critics insisted on returning to the text itself. What exactly does this poem do with language? How do its words, images, and structures create meaning? This shift — from the author's life or the reader's feelings to the words on the page — is the defining move of modern criticism, and it culminated in the New Criticism, which dominated university English departments on both sides of the Atlantic for thirty years.
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)
T.S. Eliot was both a great poet and a formidably influential critic, and the two activities fed each other. His critical essays did not merely comment on literature — they reshaped what literature was worth reading. In 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919), he attacked the Romantic cult of originality. The truly original poet is not the one who expresses their unique personality most loudly, but the one who most fully absorbs the tradition — the whole of European literature from Homer onwards — and writes from within it. The poet's mind, Eliot says, is like a catalyst in a chemical reaction: it causes a transformation while remaining itself unchanged. Great poetry is not self-expression; it is an 'escape from personality.' This idea — that the poem is separate from the poet — is an important step towards the New Critical insistence on the autonomy of the text. In 'Hamlet and His Problems,' Eliot introduced the concept of the objective correlative: the only way to express emotion in art is to find 'a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.' When the right objects are presented, the emotion is automatically evoked in the reader. A poem that fails to do this — that generates emotion without adequate cause — is artistically defective. In 'The Metaphysical Poets,' Eliot argued that 17th-century English poetry underwent a 'dissociation of sensibility' — a separation of thought and feeling that had previously been unified in Donne and Marvell. The great Metaphysicals could think and feel simultaneously, in the same line. After Milton and Dryden, this unity broke: poets could feel (the Romantics) or think (the Augustans), but not both at once. This argument made Donne fashionable again after two centuries of neglect.
I.A. Richards (1893–1979)
I.A. Richards wanted to put literary criticism on a scientific footing. His method in Practical Criticism (1929) was empirical and revealing: he gave Cambridge undergraduates poems with authors' names removed, asked them to comment freely, then collected and analysed the responses. The results were startling: even well-educated readers made systematic and predictable errors. Richards catalogued these errors: misreading of plain sense (wrong meaning), failure to respond to the poem's tone, projecting irrelevant emotions onto the text, being derailed by stock responses (pre-formed emotional reactions to familiar words like 'sunset' or 'mother'), and sentimentality. Richards's experiment proved that close, disciplined reading was a skill that needed to be taught — and it provided the intellectual foundation for the New Criticism. Richards also introduced an important distinction: language is used referentially (to describe facts) or emotively (to express and arouse feelings). Poetry is primarily emotive language — it is not making truth-claims but organising our feelings. He called poetic statements 'pseudo-statements': they look like assertions but function differently.
William Empson (1906–1984)
William Empson wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, working with I.A. Richards. Its central claim is beautifully counterintuitive: ambiguity in poetry is not a flaw but a feature. When a word or phrase in a poem can mean more than one thing at once, the reader holds all those meanings simultaneously — and the effect is richer than any single meaning could achieve alone. Empson defines ambiguity broadly as 'any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.' He then arranges his seven types from simplest to most complex. Type 1 is a simple metaphor where the comparison illuminates both terms. Type 7 is the most extreme: a word or phrase contains two meanings so contradictory that they reveal a divided mind in the author — the poem is pulled in two directions at once and cannot resolve itself. Empson demonstrated his types through close, sometimes audacious readings of Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, and others. The book gave future critics a precise vocabulary for describing complexity in poetry and was one of the most direct inspirations for the American New Critics.
F.R. Leavis (1895–1978)
F.R. Leavis was the most controversial and influential British critic of the 20th century — admired, feared, and resented in roughly equal measure. His criticism is driven by a conviction that great literature is not merely beautiful or entertaining: it is morally serious, expressing a deep 'vital capacity for experience.' In The Great Tradition (1948), he identified the great English novelists as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D.H. Lawrence — and dismissed most of the rest. Dickens was (initially) excluded as a popular entertainer rather than a serious artist. Sterne was dismissed as a prankster. The Romantics were found wanting in moral weight. Leavis's judgements were often harsh and sometimes wrong (he later reversed himself on Dickens), but they were never superficial. He edited the journal Scrutiny (1932–53), which set the critical agenda for British academic English for a generation and made close reading in the service of moral discrimination the standard method. His influence on the British secondary school and university curriculum was immense.
New Criticism (USA, 1930s–1960s)
The New Criticism is not one person's work but a movement — a set of shared assumptions about how literature should be read, developed by a group of American critics in the 1930s–60s. Its governing idea is that a poem is an autonomous verbal object. It is not a record of the poet's feelings (that would make the poet's biography relevant). It is not a stimulus for the reader's emotions (that would make the reader's psychology relevant). It is a self-contained structure of meaning, and it must be analysed on its own terms. John Crowe Ransom gave the movement its name in The New Criticism (1941). Cleanth Brooks, in The Well Wrought Urn (1947), demonstrated the method through close readings of English poetry from Donne to Yeats, arguing that all great poems work through paradox and irony — and that the poem's meaning is so fully embodied in its specific language and form that any attempt to paraphrase it produces a 'heresy': the paraphrase loses exactly what makes the poem a poem. The theoretical foundations were provided by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in two landmark essays. 'The Intentional Fallacy' (1946) argued that the author's intended meaning is irrelevant to critical judgement — what matters is what the words actually do. 'The Affective Fallacy' (1949) argued that the reader's emotional response is equally irrelevant — the poem is not a machine for producing feelings; it is an object to be understood. Together, these two essays defined the New Critical position: the poem, and only the poem, is the proper object of criticism.
Exam Tip
This is the highest-yield period for UGC NET Unit VIII. Eliot's three key concepts — dissociation of sensibility, objective correlative, and escape from personality — must be precise. The Intentional and Affective Fallacies are tested in both direct and Assertion-Reason formats. Empson's definition of ambiguity and Cleanth Brooks's heresy of paraphrase are also standard questions. For Leavis, know the Great Tradition canon (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad, Lawrence) and the fact that Dickens was initially excluded.
Quick Revision: Key Terms
| Term | Critic | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Mimesis | Plato / Aristotle | Imitation — of the world of appearances (Plato) or of human action (Aristotle) |
| Catharsis | Aristotle | Purging of pity and fear through the experience of tragedy |
| Dulce et Utile | Horace | Poetry must delight and instruct simultaneously |
| The Sublime | Longinus | Greatness of thought and expression that transports the reader |
| Golden World | Philip Sidney | The superior world the poet creates — better than nature's 'brazen world' |
| Follow Nature | Pope / Neo-classicists | Poetry should imitate universal human nature as understood by reason |
| Metaphysical Wit | Dr Johnson | 'The most heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together' |
| Spontaneous Overflow | Wordsworth | Poetry as powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity |
| Imagination vs Fancy | Coleridge | Imagination creates; Fancy merely recombines fixed memories |
| Negative Capability | Keats | Capacity to remain in uncertainty without irritable reaching after fact |
| Touchstones | Matthew Arnold | Great passages used as standards to evaluate lesser poetry |
| Hard Gem-like Flame | Walter Pater | The ideal of the aesthetic life — burning with intense impression |
| Dissociation of Sensibility | T.S. Eliot | 17th-century split between thought and feeling |
| Objective Correlative | T.S. Eliot | Objects/situations that evoke a precise emotion in the reader |
| Seven Types of Ambiguity | William Empson | Poetic ambiguity as richness — from simple metaphor to contradiction |
| Intentional Fallacy | Wimsatt & Beardsley | Author's intention is irrelevant to critical judgement |
| Affective Fallacy | Wimsatt & Beardsley | Reader's emotional response is irrelevant to critical judgement |
| Heresy of Paraphrase | Cleanth Brooks | A poem cannot be paraphrased without loss — its meaning is its form |
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Plato's objection to poetry in the Republic?▾
To understand Plato's objection, you first need to know his theory of reality. For Plato, the world we see around us is not the real world — it is a world of appearances, imperfect copies of perfect, eternal 'Forms' (or Ideas). The Form of a bed is the true bed; a carpenter's bed is one step removed; a painting of that bed is two steps removed from truth. Plato calls this copying process mimesis (imitation). In Republic Book X, he argues that poetry is mimesis — it imitates the world of appearances, which is itself already an imitation. So poetry is twice removed from truth and therefore misleading. That is the ontological (truth-based) objection. His second objection is moral: tragic poetry excites our emotions — pity, fear, grief — and feeds the irrational part of our soul at the expense of reason. A well-governed soul should be ruled by reason, not swept away by feeling. For these two reasons, Plato would banish the tragic poets from his ideal state. He makes one exception: hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are allowed, because they serve a social purpose rather than merely entertaining.
What is the meaning of 'dulce et utile' in Horace's Ars Poetica?▾
The Latin phrase 'dulce et utile' simply means 'sweet and useful.' In his Ars Poetica (c.19 BCE), the Roman poet Horace argued that poetry has a double purpose: it should both delight its readers (dulce — sweetness, pleasure) and instruct them (utile — usefulness, moral profit). Think of it as the poet's job description: entertain your audience, but also improve them. Horace wrote that the poet who manages to combine pleasure with moral benefit 'wins all votes.' This idea became enormously influential. When Renaissance critics like Sidney or Neo-classical critics like Pope and Johnson needed to argue that poetry was not a waste of time or a morally dangerous pastime, they reached for Horace's formula. It gave them a ready answer: poetry is not mere entertainment, nor is it dry preaching — it teaches through delight.
What is Sidney's Defence of Poesy and what does it argue?▾
In 1579, a Puritan writer named Stephen Gosson published The School of Abuse, an attack on poetry and the theatre as immoral and useless. He had the cheek to dedicate it to Sir Philip Sidney without permission. Sidney responded with An Apology for Poetry (also called A Defence of Poesy), written around 1579 and published after his death in 1595. It is the first major work of literary criticism in English. Sidney's defence rests on three main arguments. First, poetry is the oldest and most honourable of arts — it existed before philosophy or history, and the first civilisers of mankind were poets. Second, poetry is morally superior to both history and philosophy: history can only describe what actually happened (which is often ugly and discouraging), and philosophy can only offer abstract principles (which are difficult to grasp). The poet creates a 'golden world' — an ideal world that is better than the real 'brazen world' of nature — and teaches virtue through vivid, moving examples. Third, the poet does not lie, because a lie requires asserting something false as true. The poet never claims to be speaking literally: 'The poet nothing affirmeth.' You cannot call a fiction a lie. Sidney's Defence set the terms of English literary criticism for the next century.
What is Wordsworth's definition of poetry in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads?▾
In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads — a collection of poems written in ordinary, everyday language about ordinary people and natural scenes. This was a deliberate break from the formal, elevated diction that dominated 18th-century poetry. In the expanded Preface (1800, revised 1802), Wordsworth explained the thinking behind the experiment. His famous definition: poetry is 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.' The process works in two stages. First, the poet undergoes a powerful emotional experience. Then, in a calm moment later, the poet recalls that emotion — and this recollection generates a new, kindred emotion, which becomes the raw material of the poem. The word 'spontaneous' can be misleading: Wordsworth does not mean written in the heat of the moment. He means that when the poet writes, the emotion flows naturally and freely — because it has been processed and understood. He also argued that the proper language of poetry is the real speech of ordinary rural people, not the artificial poetic diction of the 18th century. This Preface is the founding manifesto of English Romanticism.
What are William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity?▾
Most people think of ambiguity as a flaw — if a sentence can mean two things, it is poorly written. William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) argues the opposite: in poetry, ambiguity is a source of richness and power, not confusion. Empson defines ambiguity broadly as 'any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.' When a poem uses a word that carries multiple meanings simultaneously, the reader's mind holds all those meanings at once — and that layering creates an effect no single meaning could produce alone. Empson identifies seven types, arranged in order of complexity. Type 1 is the simplest: a metaphor that works as both literal and figurative meaning at the same time. Type 7 is the most extreme: the poem contains two meanings that are so contradictory they reveal a divided mind in the author. The book was written when Empson was an undergraduate studying with I.A. Richards at Cambridge. It gave future critics a precise vocabulary for talking about the complexity of poetic language and was hugely influential on the American New Critics.
What is T.S. Eliot's concept of the 'dissociation of sensibility'?▾
In his 1921 essay 'The Metaphysical Poets,' T.S. Eliot made a claim about the history of English poetry that was striking in its confidence. He argued that in the 17th century — roughly after the death of Donne and before the rise of Milton — a 'dissociation of sensibility' set in. Before this split, the best poets (Donne, Marvell, Herbert) possessed a unified sensibility: they could think and feel at the same time, in the same moment, in the same poem. Eliot's example: a Metaphysical poet could 'feel his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.' Thought and feeling were inseparable. After the split — which Eliot associated with the influence of Milton and Dryden — poets could do one or the other but not both. The 18th century gave us excellent reason but thin feeling; the Romantics gave us powerful feeling but weak thought. Eliot used this argument to do two things: rehabilitate the unfashionable Metaphysical poets (Donne had been largely ignored for two centuries) and implicitly question the greatness of the Romantics. The concept has been widely criticised by later scholars as historically oversimplified, but it remains one of the most tested ideas in UGC NET Unit VIII.
What is the Intentional Fallacy according to Wimsatt and Beardsley?▾
Imagine you read a poem and find it confusing. You look up an interview where the poet explains what they meant. Does that explanation solve the problem? W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley said no — and they called the mistake of relying on it the Intentional Fallacy. In their landmark 1946 essay, they argued that the author's intended meaning is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging a poem. It is not fully available because authors often cannot articulate what they meant, and what they say they meant may not match what the poem actually does. It is not desirable because the poem, once written, is a public object that must stand on its own — what it means is determined by the words on the page, not by the private thoughts in the author's head. Their companion piece, 'The Affective Fallacy' (1949), made an equivalent argument against judging a poem by the emotional response it produces in readers. Together, the two fallacies cleared the ground for the New Critical insistence that the text — and only the text — is the proper object of critical attention.
Targeted Deep-Dives
UGC NET Exam Prep
Practice: 25 UGC NET–Pattern MCQs
Plato · Aristotle · Sidney · Arnold · Eliot · Empson · New Critics — Direct, Assertion-Reason, Match, Statement I & II. Instant explanations.