New Criticism: The Art of Close Reading

Essay Q1

Explain the Intentional Fallacy and the Affective Fallacy. How do they together define New Criticism's approach to the literary text?

The two fallacies — both named by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley — together form the theoretical cornerstone of New Criticism's 'objective criticism', and they define the movement's approach by establishing what literary criticism must exclude as well as what it must include. The Intentional Fallacy (1946) is the error of the author's side. Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that an author's stated intentions — in letters, interviews, notebooks, or published commentary — are neither reliably available to the critic nor a valid standard for interpreting the poem's meaning. Their argument has two dimensions. First, the epistemological argument: we can never fully recover an author's actual intention, because the intention exists in a private mind to which we have no direct access. Letters and notebooks give us evidence of what the author hoped to do, not of what the poem actually achieves. Second, the aesthetic argument: even if we could perfectly recover the intention, it should not govern interpretation. 'If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do.' Once written and published, the poem becomes a public object, belonging to language and to the community of readers, not to its private maker. Biographical criticism — which explains the meaning of Sylvia Plath's poems through her mental illness, or Milton's Paradise Lost through his political disappointments — is precisely the Intentional Fallacy in action. The Affective Fallacy (1949) is the error of the reader's side. Here Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that it is equally mistaken to evaluate or interpret a poem by the emotional effects it produces in individual readers. To say 'this poem is great because it moved me to tears' is to report on the reader's nervous system, not to analyse the poem. Affective criticism leads, they argued, to 'impressionism and relativism' — if the standard of judgment is personal emotional response, then criticism becomes a record of individual sensations with no claim to disciplined validity. They pointed to Longinus' concept of the Sublime — measuring literary excellence by its overwhelming emotional and physiological effect — as an early instance of the Affective Fallacy. Together, the two fallacies map out New Criticism's methodology with precision: literary criticism must neither look backward to the author (Intentional Fallacy) nor forward to the reader's response (Affective Fallacy). It must look inward, to the text itself — to its diction, imagery, paradox, irony, ambiguity, and formal structure. This 'objective criticism', anchored in the publicly verifiable language of the poem, is New Criticism's central disciplinary claim.

Essay Q2

What is Cleanth Brooks' argument in The Well Wrought Urn (1947)? Explain the Heresy of Paraphrase.

The Well Wrought Urn (1947) is Cleanth Brooks' masterwork and one of the defining texts of American New Criticism. Its central argument — developed through close readings of ten poems from John Donne to W.B. Yeats — is that paradox is the fundamental mode of all great poetry, and that this paradoxicality means a poem can never be adequately reduced to a prose paraphrase. Brooks' argument begins with the claim that paradox is 'the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry'. A paradox presents a truth through an apparent contradiction — and Brooks showed that the best poems from every period consistently rely on paradox as their structural principle, not merely as an ornamental device. In Donne's 'The Canonization', profane erotic love is expressed through sacred religious vocabulary — the lovers are 'canonised' for their passion, which becomes a kind of holiness. In Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', the 'unheard melodies' are sweeter than heard ones, the frozen lovers are eternally young but eternally frustrated, and the urn that celebrates life is itself a 'Cold Pastoral' — beautiful but unfeeling. These are not decorative paradoxes but the structural core of each poem's meaning. This leads directly to the Heresy of Paraphrase. Brooks defined it as the critical error of believing that a poem's meaning can be extracted and expressed in a prose paraphrase — that there is a separable 'content' or 'message' that happens to be expressed in poetic form. The heresy is this: a paraphrase resolves the tensions that the poem deliberately maintains. To say 'Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn is about how art is immortal while life is transient' is to give a thesis statement — it resolves the urn's cold immortality into a comforting idea, destroying the paradoxical tension between the urn's perfection and its lifelessness, between beauty and truth, between the lovers' eternal youth and their eternal frustration. Brooks' conclusion is fundamental to New Criticism: 'The structure of a poem resembles that of a play, not that of an essay.' A play does not make an argument; it enacts a complex experience of contradictions, tensions, and irresolutions. Similarly, a poem does not deliver a message in an ornate container — it is an experience of tensions held in organic unity. The meaning of a poem cannot be separated from its specific form because the meaning IS the form. Any paraphrase is therefore not a simplification of the meaning but a destruction of it.

Essay Q3

Write a note on T.S. Eliot's contribution to New Criticism, with reference to Impersonality and the Objective Correlative.

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) is one of the most important precursors and theoretical authorities of New Criticism, even though he was not himself a systematic theorist in the academic sense. His two major critical ideas — the theory of Impersonality and the Objective Correlative — both point towards the New Critical insistence that the poem must be treated as an autonomous object, independent of the poet's biography and emotions. The theory of Impersonality appears in the landmark essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919). Eliot argued against the Romantic notion that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of the poet's personal emotion. Instead, he proposed a famous chemical analogy: just as platinum acts as a catalyst in a chemical reaction — enabling the combination of sulphurous acid and oxygen into sulphurous acid — without itself being altered or incorporated into the product, the poet's mind is a medium that combines emotions, images, and experiences from the whole tradition of literature into a new poem. But the poet's private feelings, biography, and personality are not expressed in the poem; they are transcended, escaped, impersonalised. Eliot's formulation is unforgettable: 'Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.' The distinction Eliot draws between 'the man who suffers and the mind which creates' became a central principle of New Criticism: if the poet's personality is deliberately escaped rather than expressed, then biographical criticism — looking for the man behind the poem — is methodologically misguided. The Objective Correlative appears in 'Hamlet and His Problems' (1919) in the context of Eliot's controversial argument that Shakespeare's Hamlet is an 'artistic failure'. Eliot defined the Objective Correlative as 'a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of a particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.' The argument is that a poet cannot communicate emotion directly — writing 'I am desolate' produces nothing. Instead, the poet must find an objective external form — a correlative — that, when presented to the reader, automatically produces the equivalent emotion. Eliot's diagnosis of Hamlet is that Hamlet's disgust, horror, and paralysis exceed the objective correlatives present in the play (his mother's remarriage, his father's murder) — the emotion seems in excess of its facts, and this inarticulateness is the play's dramatic weakness. Eliot's own poetry is a sustained example of the Objective Correlative method: in 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', the emotion of modern paralysis and self-consciousness is never stated but entirely conveyed through images — the patient etherised on a table, the overwhelming question, the mermaids who do not sing for him. Eliot's influence on New Criticism was enormous: his Impersonality theory provided the theoretical foundation for Wimsatt and Beardsley's Intentional Fallacy; his practice of close attention to metaphysical wit, paradox, and the 'dissociation of sensibility' modelled the kind of critical attention New Critics sought to systematise.

Essay Q4

Discuss the strengths and limitations of New Criticism as a literary theory.

New Criticism's dominance of Anglo-American literary studies for three decades (1930s–1960s) was not accidental — it offered a rigorous, teachable, and democratically accessible method that transformed literary education. Yet its limitations are equally significant, and the subsequent history of literary theory can in large part be read as a series of responses to what New Criticism excluded. Among New Criticism's major strengths: First, it established close reading as the foundational disciplinary practice of literary criticism — the patient, detailed analysis of a poem's diction, imagery, irony, paradox, and structure. This is an enduring contribution: even critics who reject every New Critical theoretical position still practise close reading. Second, New Criticism democratised literary study: one did not need specialised historical knowledge, access to archives, or biographical research to practise New Criticism — only attentiveness to the text. This made literary education accessible in a way that prior historical and philological scholarship was not. Third, New Criticism gave literary studies a claim to disciplinary rigour: by focusing on the publicly verifiable language of the text rather than on private reactions or biographical anecdote, it argued that literary criticism was a learnable, teachable, replicable skill. Fourth, the movement produced some of the most illuminating individual readings of English poetry ever written — Brooks on Donne, Ransom on Keats, Empson on Shakespeare and Milton remain extraordinary models of sustained close analysis. However, New Criticism's limitations are equally serious. Its most fundamental weakness is its ahistoricism: by bracketing historical, political, and social context, New Criticism produces readings that are aesthetically refined but politically blind. A New Critical reading of Kipling's 'The White Man's Burden' that focuses on its paradoxes and organic unity while ignoring its function as imperial propaganda is not just incomplete — it is politically irresponsible. Feminist critics argued that New Criticism's elevation of paradox, irony, and impersonality as universal poetic values reflected and reinforced patriarchal assumptions about what constitutes great literature — the New Critical canon was overwhelmingly white, Western, and male. Marxist and materialist critics pointed out that New Criticism's treatment of the literary text as a timeless, autonomous object mystified the social and economic conditions of a text's production and reception. Poststructuralism (Derrida, the later Barthes) challenged New Criticism's assumption that texts are organically unified and stably meaningful: deconstruction showed that texts are always internally contradictory, that meaning is always deferred, and that the 'organic unity' New Critics found in poems was partly a projection of their own interpretive frameworks. Reader-response criticism (Iser, Fish) reasserted the reader's constitutive role in producing meaning, rejecting the Affective Fallacy's dismissal of reader response. Finally, New Criticism's exclusive focus on short lyric poems as the ideal literary object left it poorly equipped to deal with novels, drama, and other longer forms — it could not easily account for narrative structure, character, ideology, or intertextuality. New Criticism is now largely superseded as a total theory, but its central technique — close reading — remains indispensable. It is most accurate to say that subsequent literary theory expanded what critics attend to (history, gender, class, race, reader, unconscious), without abandoning the fundamental New Critical lesson that the language of the text must be attended to with precision and care.

Essay Q5

Write a note on I.A. Richards' Practical Criticism (1929) and its significance for New Criticism.

Practical Criticism (1929) by I.A. Richards (1893–1979) is one of the founding texts of New Criticism and a landmark in the history of literary education. The book arose from an experiment Richards conducted in his Cambridge classrooms that is both simple and devastatingly revealing. Richards distributed poems to students with all identifying information removed: no title, no author's name, no date of composition. He asked students to write their responses — 'protocol sheets' — which he then collected and analysed. The results were, by Richards' own account, alarming. Students who were otherwise intelligent, educated, and articulate consistently misread the poems in predictable, systematic ways. They relied on what Richards called 'stock responses' — automatic, pre-formed emotional reactions triggered by conventional associations rather than careful attention to what the poem actually said. They made irrelevant biographical attributions (though they had no biographical information). They confused sentimental familiarity with poetic quality. They were unable to hold contradictory tones in tension and consistently smoothed complexities into simple messages. When told that a poem they had praised was actually by an obscure Victorian minor poet, they revised their assessment; when told that a poem they had dismissed was by Milton, they found sudden merits. Richards' analysis of these protocols became a systematic account of the obstacles to literary understanding: stock responses, irrelevant associations, sentimentality, technical incompetence (failure to hear metre or rhythm), overemphasis on doctrinal content, and what he called 'mnemonic irrelevance' — letting personal memories triggered by a word or image distort the reading of the poem. The book is both a diagnostic account of how readers fail and an implicit programme for literary education: readers must learn to set aside biographical, emotional, and associative responses and attend carefully, analytically, to the specific language of the text. The significance of Practical Criticism for New Criticism is enormous. First, it provided an empirical, quasi-scientific demonstration of the need for close reading — Richards showed, through actual documented evidence, that readers who did not practise close reading consistently misread texts. Second, it demonstrated the necessity of treating the poem as an object independent of its author's identity and biography: removing the author's name was the whole point of the experiment, and its results justified New Criticism's rejection of biographical criticism. Third, Richards' distinction between scientific language (referential, capable of truth and falsity) and emotive or poetic language (expressive of attitudes and values, not truth-apt in the same way) helped establish literary language as a qualitatively distinct domain with its own rules and values. Practical Criticism is, in effect, the empirical foundation on which the New Critical edifice was built.