1. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

2. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
A Brief Guide to the Fugitives  (from poets.org) “The Fugitive was a literary magazine of poetry and criticism published at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1922 until Both faculty and students, including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, among others, contributed to this publication. They were practitioners and defenders of formal techniques in poetry and were preoccupied with defending the traditional values of the agrarian South against the effects of urban industrialization.
According to critic J.A. Bryant, the group's goal as "the Fugitive poets" was simply "to demonstrate that a group of southerners could produce important work in the medium, devoid of sentimentality and carefully crafted," with special attention to the traditional prosodic techniques of meter, stanza, and rhyme. One member, John Crowe Ransom, had an enormous influence on an entire generation of poets and fellow academics, who subscribed to the doctrines he described in The New Criticism (1941), which restricted literary analysis to the text itself, rather than the cultural and historical context from which the text emerged.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

3. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
A Brief Guide to the Fugitives  (from poets.org) Some of the Fugitive poets went on to form a second group, the Agrarians, whose 1930 manifesto of essays, I'll Take My Stand, remains a controversial document in the development of Southern literature. The thesis of many of the anthology’s essays--a rejection of industrialism for the agrarian way of life--was undermined by some of the contributors' unquestioning embrace of the South's past, "a past whose legacy included segregation and white supremacy" (Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History). Other contributors, like Robert Penn Warren, rejected segregation in favor of constructing a more humane and just New South.
For further reading, visit the Fugitives and Agrarians exhibit ( from the Vanderbilt University Library Archives, which features biographical sketches and photographs of members of the Fugitives, and The Southern Renaissance Unit of American Passages ( a literary curriculum produced by the Annenberg Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

4. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
DEFINITION OF THE NEW CRITICISM The New Criticism is a type of formalist literary criticism that reached its height during the 1940s and 1950s and that received its name from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were a self-contained, self-referential object. Rather than basing their interpretations of a text on the reader’s response, the author’s stated intentions, or parallels between the text and historical contexts (such as author’s life), New Critics perform a close reading, concentrating on the relationships within the text that give it its own distinctive character or form. New Critics emphasize that the structure of a work should not be divorced from meaning, viewing the two as constituting a quasi-organic unity. Special attention is paid to repetition, particularly of images or symbols, but also of sound effects and rhythms in poetry. New Critics especially appreciate the use of literary devices, such as irony, to achieve a balance or reconciliation between dissimilar, even conflicting, elements in a text.
Because it stresses close textual analysis and viewing the text as a carefully crafted, orderly object containing formal, observable patterns, the New Criticism has sometimes been called an "objective" approach to literature. New Critics are more likely than certain other critics to believe and say that the meaning of a text can be known objectively. For instance, reader-response critics see meaning as a function either of each reader’s experience or of the norms that govern a particular interpretive community, and deconstructors argue that texts mean opposite things at the same time.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

5. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
The foundations of the New Criticism were laid in books and essays written during the 1920s and 1930s by I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism [1929]), William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930]), and T. S. Eliot ("The Function of Criticism" [1933]). The approach was significantly developed later, however, by a group of American poets and critics, including R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and William K. Wimsatt. Although we associate the New Criticism with certain principles and terms—such as affective fallacy (the notion that the reader’s response is relevant to the meaning of a work) and intentional fallacy (the notion that the author’s intention determines the work’s meaning)—the New Critics were trying to make a cultural statement rather than to establish a critical dogma. Generally southern, religious, and culturally conservative, they advocated the inherent value of literary works (particularly of literary works regarded as beautiful art objects) because they were sick of the growing ugliness of modern life and contemporary events. Some recent theorists even link the rising popularity after World War II of the New Criticism (and other types of formalist literary criticism such as the Chicago School) to American isolationism. These critics tend to view the formalist tendency to isolate literature from biography and history as symptomatic of American fatigue with wider involvements. Whatever the source of the New Criticism’s popularity (or the reason for its eventual decline), its practitioners and the textbooks they wrote were so influential in American academia that the approach became standard in college and even high school curricula through the 1960s and well into the 1970s.
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supriya M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

6. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
Where are the lions?
Lions in Sweden
No more phrases, Swensen: I was once
A hunter of those sovereigns of the soul
And savings banks. Fides, the sculptor’s priz,
All eyes and size, and called Justia,
Trained to poise the tables of the law,
Patienta forever soothing wounds
And mighty Fortitudo, frantic bass.
But these shall not adorn my souvenirs,
These lions, these majestic images.
If the fault is with the soul, the sovereigns
Of the soul must likewise be at fault, and first
. . .
--Wallace Stevens
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

7. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
New Criticism was born right here in Mid Tenn.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

8. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
I. A. Richards
Cleanth Brooks
John Crowe Ransom
William Empson
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Allen Tate
Robert Penn Warren

9. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
DEFINITION OF THE NEW CRITICISM The New Criticism is a type of formalist literary criticism that reached its height during the 1940s and 1950s and that received its name from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were a self-contained, self-referential object. Rather than basing their interpretations of a text on the reader’s response, the author’s stated intentions, or parallels between the text and historical contexts (such as author’s life), New Critics perform a close reading, concentrating on the relationships within the text that give it its own distinctive character or form. New Critics emphasize that the structure of a work should not be divorced from meaning, viewing the two as constituting a quasi-organic unity. Special attention is paid to repetition, particularly of images or symbols, but also of sound effects and rhythms in poetry. New Critics especially appreciate the use of literary devices, such as irony, to achieve a balance or reconciliation between dissimilar, even conflicting, elements in a text.
Because it stresses close textual analysis and viewing the text as a carefully crafted, orderly object containing formal, observable patterns, the New Criticism has sometimes been called an "objective" approach to literature. New Critics are more likely than certain other critics to believe and say that the meaning of a text can be known objectively. For instance, reader-response critics see meaning as a function either of each reader’s experience or of the norms that govern a particular interpretive community, and deconstructors argue that texts mean opposite things at the same time.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

10. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
The foundations of the New Criticism were laid in books and essays written during the 1920s and 1930s by I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism [1929]), William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930]), and T. S. Eliot ("The Function of Criticism" [1933]). The approach was significantly developed later, however, by a group of American poets and critics, including R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and William K. Wimsatt. Although we associate the New Criticism with certain principles and terms—such as affective fallacy (the notion that the reader’s response is relevant to the meaning of a work) and intentional fallacy (the notion that the author’s intention determines the work’s meaning)—the New Critics were trying to make a cultural statement rather than to establish a critical dogma. Generally southern, religious, and culturally conservative, they advocated the inherent value of literary works (particularly of literary works regarded as beautiful art objects) because they were sick of the growing ugliness of modern life and contemporary events. Some recent theorists even link the rising popularity after World War II of the New Criticism (and other types of formalist literary criticism such as the Chicago School) to American isolationism. These critics tend to view the formalist tendency to isolate literature from biography and history as symptomatic of American fatigue with wider involvements. Whatever the source of the New Criticism’s popularity (or the reason for its eventual decline), its practitioners and the textbooks they wrote were so influential in American academia that the approach became standard in college and even high school curricula through the 1960s and well into the 1970s.
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supriya M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

11. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
The Heresy of Paraphrase
Brooks concluded The Well Wrought Urn by describing what he called the "Heresy of Paraphrase," arguing that any attempt to reduce poetic meaning to a prose statement of a theme or a description of a plot was a betrayal of the poem as a poem. By using the term "heresy," when in truth there was no proper orthodoxy of interpretation from which to depart, Brooks virtually guaranteed polemical replies to his position, just as he called attention to a pervasive perplexity about how to construct a viable theory—which may seem to the individual theorist to be a direct description of a literary reality but appears to others as saturated with an incompletely examined ideology or system of values. While critics such as Blackmur had regarded explicit theory as either redundant or irrelevant, the increasingly vigorous practice of critical interpretation led to frequently irresolvable conflicts over rival interpretations that seemed mutually exclusive. Thus, the very success of New Critical practice called attention to theoretical problems that had never been adequately addressed, just as its practical strength in producing intelligible readings is the source of a persistent anomaly of incompatible readings that no available postulates appear able to resolve.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

12. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
The Intentional Fallacy and Affective Fallacy
A similar mixture of theory and polemic is evident in two influential essays by W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy" (Wimsatt 3–39), which argued, respectively, that reports of an author’s original intention are not germane to judging a work of art, which either succeeds or fails according to what is actually expressed in its words, and that the meaning of a poem cannot be equated with how it affects a reader. A "heresy" may be more damning than a "fallacy," but both imply that there is a correct position and that it is in some way securely sanctioned. In this case, however, the supposition that one could accurately interpret texts without reference to authorial intention presents so severe a test of the reader that a strict avoidance of the intentional fallacy almost forces the reader into the affective fallacy, since the reader of the text is, by default, the only judge—as post–New Critical theorists, such as Norman Holland, David Bleich, or Stanley Fish have not hesitated to assert criticism.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

13. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
Formal Elements
ambiguity
paradox
irony
tension
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

14. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
Formal Elements
ambiguity
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

15. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
Formal Elements
ambiguity
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

16. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
Formal Elements
paradox
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

17. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
Formal Elements
irony
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

18. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
New Criticism
Formal Elements
tension
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens