New Criticism & the Romantic Poet
Summarizing and Contending with Cleanth Brooks
Considering the New Critical style of reading that we all learned in High School.
Interpreting Wordsworth, Cleanth Brooks moves away from the Romantic emphasis on the subjectivity of the poet, to set up the poem as a microcosm with its own internal structure. Although the New Critical idea of the poem as a harmonious linguistic structure resembles Coleridge’s ideas of an organic whole, the expressive tendency of the Romantics is completely abandoned by their interpretation.
What the Poet Intended Doesn't Matter
The “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” that was so central to Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, is rendered irrelevant by the New Critical “Intentional Fallacy.” Indeed, for Brooks, Wordsworth’s feelings and their alleged overflowing at the moment of creation, have nothing to do with the meaning of the poem. It is the poem’s internal paradoxes, the tensions of its inner structure and the resolution of these stresses that are the source of meaning.
Separating the Poet from the Poetry
In this close reading of the poem, we gain a new perspective, an emphasis on form and structure that helps the reader comprehend the poem as a linguistic occurrence. Yet, we lose the poet in the bargain, we lose Wordsworth. If we assume that Keats was correct, that Wordsworth was a true example of the egotistical sublime, mediating the world through his dominating personality, it can be argued that his poetry cannot stand fully in his absence. In fact, in the New Critical interpretation, the poem is removed from more than the poet. The poem occupies its own realm of existence separate from the world, culture, and history. It is indeed a well-wrought urn, as the title of Brooks’ book celebrates, placed on a pedestal and removed from interaction with humanity.
There is hardly any sense of mimesis in the New Critical interpretations. In mimetic theories (at least as M.H. Abrams defines them), the poem is an imitation of the universe, but in Brooks the poem becomes a universe in and of itself. The focus is on the linguistic and structural particulars of the poem, the laws of its tiny universe, and how these resolved stresses produce meaning. What that meaning is representative of is not considered. If the poem imitates anything it imitates its own internal verbal structure.
The Pros and Cons of Separating the Poet from the Poetry
This new realm gave poetry a new integrity, protecting it from a scientific positivistic world that insisted on usefulness and purpose. In true Kantian form the poem serves no purpose in the real world but is a free end in itself, a purposeless purpose. We are left to ask if the price for this security is worth paying. Is poetry placed in its own private space, removed from the effects of history and culture, irrelevant to life?
More importantly, is this proposed sequestering of the poem even possible? After all, Literature exists in the temporal stream of history along with its creators. It is moved by class struggles and popular discourses because it is a product of the human imagination and the human imagination doesn’t exist in a societal vacuum. The idea that we can simply pluck the artistic work out of this stream, isolating it through the creation of a few conceptual fallacies, seems arrogant and almost delusional. For, in the end, poetry is a human production and therefore intimately affected by the structures of human life, of which language itself is a part.
