The trouble with literary criticism—whether it is done by school children or professors or freewheeling writers—is that it cannot be defined. Some critics write about biography, some about historical context, some about the dreaded French Theory, and some pick a poem apart word by word, as if they were stripping a Sunday chicken, ready to be broken up, put back into the pot, and boiled to make stock. This is by no means an adequate list of the various ways of reading. But we can make a distinction between those people who care about the way a poem makes you feel and those who care about how it is done.
This is the distinction, as Adam Kirsch puts it in The Modern Element, between “art and magic”. We call this the distinction between enchanters and engineers, or between Prospero in his cell and Faust in his study. The magic of poetry is the way that it can create a new sense of the world—can make you believe in things not merely unbelievable, but which we know to be untrue. The art of poetry is in the specific wording of the spell—change the words, get the order wrong, and the magic will not manifest.
Critics are often divided into two groups, like sheep and goats—Iliad people and Odyssey people; comedy people and tragedy people; Tolstoy people and Dostoevsky people—and we can divide them along the lines of art and magic too. When I was young, the two most obvious examples of these groups were Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom. Vendler was a practitioner of Art criticism: no word could be examined too closely, nor related too carefully to the rest of the poem. Bloom was a Magic critic, who believed poetry was what Keats called “A drainless shower/Of light”, which illuminated new realms.
Of course, all such distinctions are to some extent false. You might think Samuel Johnson was an Art critic, judging poets’ care for their meter and rhyme, but we find him under the sway of poetry all the time. He was often overpowered, especially by Shakespeare, who haunted him always, by what he called “the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter.” That force is the essence of poetry’s magic.
For some of the Magic critics, poetry gives us access to a divine realm, a place beyond this world, Platonic, eternal, higher. Poetry is Magic in the sense that it is spiritual, giving access beyond what we can ordinarily experience. For the Art critics, Kirsch says, following Poe, poetry is a kind of mechanism that plays upon our feelings and evokes sensations. Clearly, both sorts of critic believe in Johnson’s force of poetry, but for different reasons: one because of the spiritual power of the poet, the other for his ability to work a technical use of language.
Again, we are loaded with a false distinction, but still a useful one. It is merely a trick of the rhyme, or is there a “really real” dimension of poetry, something spiritual, closer to prayer? Is poetry Longinian or Aristotelian?
Trying to answer that question is important for poets—and especially for poet critics like Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot and Philip Sidney—but it should perhaps be of less concern to critics. Criticism is not like philosophy: the primary aim of both is to know a truth of the world; but to understand a poem and to express that understanding requires different standards, different methods. The critic notices differently. When criticism becomes more like philosophy, as it often does, it has to be bound to more philosophical standards, rather than allowing the principles of criticism to be a method of finding the truth.
If criticism isn’t going to be a half-formed philosophy by other means, what is it to be? Various answers have been given, but they converge on the subjective. Muriel Spark thought, for example, that some people have a sixth literary sense. This was a naturally arising ability, not one that could be taught. Some people were simply more attuned to poetry than others. I once read in the LRB a splendidly robust apology for this view of criticism, which asserted that it was an affront to the nature of art to talk about “texts” and to have such theoretical rules of criticism.1 Criticism is simply the intelligent discussion of literature and some people are better at it than others. We might call this the Common Sense school. Spark’s “sixth sense” doesn’t sound like common sense at first blush, but these phrases both denote something that can be honed and practiced, but not made into a method. In the end, there is only the reader and the poem.
Johnson was a member of this school—he worked by establishing principles, not by judging from them. He did not arrive with a set of ideas or methods, be they close reading or French Theory, but sought instead
to distinguish those means of pleasing which depend upon known causes and rational deduction, from the nameless and inexplicable elegancies which appeal wholly to the fancy, from which we feel delight, but know not how they produce it, and which may well be termed the enchantresses of the soul.
For Johnson, there is both Art and Magic in poetry, and the critic has to be able to see both the “rational” and the “inexplicable” side of poetry. It is this willingness to discuss the “inexplicable” that makes criticism a separate discipline from philosophy. The failures of Theory and critique largely center around this fact. Poetry does not wish for the world to be ordered to a theory, but for the world, our experience, to be ordered to a poem.
We can see this distinction most clearly using terms from A New Mimesis, in which A.D. Nuttall distinguished between opaque and transparent criticism. The opaque critics stay outside the art: they are formalist and make the formalities of “the text” opaque, so we can see how the trick is done, as it were. The transparent critics leave the formal techniques transparent, so that they can be inside the art.
This is an example of opaque criticism: “In the opening of King Lear folk-tale elements proper to narrative are infiltrated by a finer-grained dramatic mode.” This is an example of transparent: “Cordelia cannot bear to have her love for her father made the subject of a partly mercenary game.” To many critics, the opaque method is the only real criticism. But Nuttall is right:
If the critic never enters the dream he remains ignorant about too much of the work. The final result may be a kind of literary teaching which crushes literary enjoyment… The student who talks excitedly about Becky Sharp will find himself isolated in the seminar. Another student who is careful to speak of ‘the Becky Sharp motif’ tactfully assumes the central role in the discussion.
Both modes of criticism can be valid, but it is noticeable that the transparent has room for the opaque, but not vice versa. To talk of entering the dream of the poem is to put yourself beyond the pale of the opaque, formal, theoretical, Art critic. This might not be true of Vendler, but it is true of the Belseys, the Terence Hawkes, the Jamesons. Art critics often lack Magic.
What encompasses it all, of course, is Common Sense criticism. Once we accept that there is no role for criticism to do the work of philosophy—if we really wish for the truth, we must either enlist a philosopher, or practice philosophy in our criticism—criticism is free to be informal. We do not have to ordain a method, because we do not have a method-specific goal in mind. Scientists must work to particular methods if their experiments are to be successful. Critics are able to train themselves through wide-knowledge and to develop taste and the ability to develop principles and apply them, all as a means of being able to understand and react to a work of literature.
These arguments are recurring in criticism today. The question of “close reading” has become predominant in books like On Close Reading by John Guillory and Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century edited by Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant. Ever since the post-modernists and post-structuralists realized they had lost sight of the idea of beauty there has been an attempt to fuse what George Steiner called “the old criticism” with some more modern sensibilities. Elaine Scarry’s 1999 lectures On Beauty and Being Just were a turning point away from the detachments of people like Catherine Belsey, who believed Shakespeare’s plays are not works of art but “a location of cultural history”.
It was the rise of “close reading” in the early twentieth century that began so many decades of anxiously trying to justify the literary method. In the late nineteenth century, George Saintsbury was happy to list which of the heroines in nineteenth century novels he was in love with, and which of them he would marry, but by the time of William Empson, criticism became something more like an abstract game, in which the parts of the poem were constantly reorganized and juxtaposed, puns and ambiguities were “uncovered”, and everything began to drift away from human feeling, experience, and history. Saintsbury was a splendid critic, who was making serious claims about the nature of literary character, but it is Empson’s dance of the wits that has lasted.
There is something wonderful about close reading, as it began with I.A. Richards and was practiced by — indeed, still is practiced by — Christopher Ricks. This sort of reading brings so much of the mechanism of the poem to the surface, so that we can, in Johnson’s words, “improve opinion into knowledge”, and see that what gave us a sharp or spooky feeling was rhetorical trope, a hidden allusion, a series of sounds. Close reading can seem like the highest form of criticism, because it is about the words themselves. It cannot not be aesthetic, being so closely focussed on the reading of the poem.
Alas, that the world could be so simple! Even in the glories of Ricks, there is, at the worst moments, something detached about this method. Outside of a critic of his powers, close reading can often descend into a demystifying process. It has to be done as part of the overall belief in the force of poetry (a phrase Ricks used as the title of one of his best books). As Johnson said in the Preface to Shakespeare,
Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and its true proportions; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer.
Close reading is a sort of test of ability, a way of assuring ourselves that we have not misapprehended the poem, but it cannot replace the beauty or impression of the whole. If we wish to be truly aesthetic, to inhabit the dream of the poem, we have to accept that close reading is a very useful sort of analysis, a means of opaque Art criticism, but not necessarily a form of the literary sixth sense. That cannot be guaranteed by any method alone. It is a question of temperament.
Modern criticism often traces its roots back to Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica. Aristotle was a critic of forms, opaque. He produced theories of literature: plot, mimesis, catharsis, character. Horace was also a craft critic, interested in structure, rules, and canons of art (literature should delight and instruct; everything should be of the same type in a work of art—no mingling; writers should use strict craft). Contrasted to them was the critic and poet Longinus, who said,
Great writing does not persuade; it takes the reader out of himself. The startling and amazing is more powerful than the charming and persuasive, ... [and] greatness appears suddenly; like a thunderbolt it carries all before it and reveals the writer’s full power in a flash.
There is room and a need for all three of these ways of producing criticism, but as with the French Theory people, the new close reading (will it be called the New New Criticism?) sometimes lacks what Johnson called “inexplicable elegancies”. This absence of the startling and amazing is not a denial of the wonders uncovered by a Ricksian reading (he is, after all, the critic Auden said all poets dream of finding), but the closer a close reading gets to a scheme or schema, the more it is apt to lose sight of the thunderbolt of poetry.
There is another development in academic criticism today. Rita Felski is now writing on Substack about a potential new future for academic criticism that combines itself with common readers. As Felski says, to love literature was once viewed skeptically: now departments are dying as not enough people can be found with a deep love of reading. Today, that love is strong and vocal on the internet. But as with so many critics, Felski seems shy, to me, of putting the work of literature itself at the heart of things. Along with Toril Moi, she seems to be interested in the way “the text” works in the world, how it is read, how interpreted, and so on. (This dichotomy may not be how Felski would characterise her work. But I am stubborn in my good cause.)
But what about the glory and the grandeur? What about judgement, discrimination, discernment? What about the fact that a page of Milton is better than a page of almost anything else, whatever his current reader or readers may think?
This development is called “post critique.” It has been summarised on Substack by Walker Larson: “Postcritique allows us to examine two questions that critique overlooks or even disdains: what can we learn from literature and why are we moved by it?” I find some of this work to be interesting and impressive, but to my mind it is ultimately hopeless and convoluted as a mode of criticism. What is needed is a return to the old ways. I do not wish for criticism to become more sophisticated, to develop ever more theories about readers and attachments and experiences. I wish to take the return to “the text itself” quite seriously, quite literally, and quite simply. These things are large and difficult enough. What good does it do to remove the suspicion from the hermeneutics of suspicion only to replace it with some other set of extra-literary qualities? What need for all this bothersome discussion that tries to make a philosophy of criticism? Can we not be mere critics?
Yes, give me what Steiner said in his Paris Review interview:
Walter Benjamin said a book can wait a thousand years unread until the right reader happens to come along. Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger. The notion that students today read second- and thirdhand criticism of criticism, and read less and less real literature, is absolutely the death of the normal naive and logical order of precedence.
The need for terminology and schema is an act of professionalism: academics must have some respectable method of doing criticism under the constraints of “learning outcomes” and university administration. But the teaching problem is not my concern: criticism is a part of literature, not just a part of education and its discontents, and if we bend the art of criticism to the necessities of teaching, rather than making education a means of passing on the imperatives of literature, we may find that what is left is less than critical. Surely this is as much a problem for postcritique as it is for Belsey. This is why literature as a discipline has so often been historical, aesthetic, and philosophic, because that is the common ground on which Art, Magic, and Common Sense can meet.
One of the things that the criticism of Magic and Common Sense can teach us is that the secrets of literature can never be fully or satisfactorily known. Even the best close reading can only give us some part of the answer. If it were really the case that poetic effects could be explained away by meter and rhyme and ambiguity and rhetoric and verbal music and so on then it would be possible to learn how to write great poetry by learning close reading. It is hard to believe that poets can learn to be poets by practicing close reading. No doubt, it is necessary, and has been practiced by self-apprenticed poets for centuries, but in the manner in which close reading conducts itself today, it cannot be held a necessary part of a poet’s development. W.B. Yeats did not study at I.A. Richards’ knee, nor did W.H. Auden discover the muse by writing a commentary of an unseen passage. Let me make a provocation: in the century since close reading began, there have been some excellent poets, but no truly great poets: no Chaucer, no Milton, no Wordsworth.
In a good close reading, this is obvious—there is some sense of the unknowable part of poetry, the mystery of how mechanical things can swell the heart and tingle the brain. In a poem about poetry, A.R. Ammons wrote: “Yield to the tantalizing mechanism.” Yes! Criticism must yield as much as an entranced reader! Close reading is an attempt to get close to the tantalizing mechanism, but it in its inherent need for clarity, such analysis can fail to yield, fail to “arrive willfully in the deepest/fix.” Ammons was writing about the way a poem is written, but we must read in like manner, we must enter the dream of the poem, and “turn/round in the mazy terror and/question.”
This is why I am proud to be a member of Steiner’s old criticism, which takes not just Johnson as its lodestar, but, as Steiner said, Lukács’ insistence on totality, Leavis’s on moral substance, Sartre’s “postulate that a writer’s technique always refer us back to his metaphysics.” We might think of many members of this great school: C.S. Lewis, Barbara Everett, some parts of Frank Kermode, John Bayley, Iris Murdoch, Susan Sontag. I wish to reiterate, with Steiner, “certain banalities.” (Didn’t Johnson teach us that men more often require to be reminded than informed?) The poet is the reason for interpretation; the critic is a loving parasite; great literary works (I bloody well refuse to say “texts” on my own account, let it hang there in the cautious grip of speech marks) are not “self-contained word games”.2
They are life forms embodied in the person of their authors in the entire physical, spiritual, social realities of the age.
Sing it George! Literature is a part of life. It calls us to the things of this world. And we must be concerned with greatness. It is the critic’s vocation to distinguish between the great and the good. In Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, from which these ideas are drawn, Steiner said “we grow weary of our inheritance.” One role for the criticism I am describing is to be the curator of that inheritance. What will immediately be seen is that, as Steiner put it, this criticism is “philosophic in temper.” It takes us back to mythology, ideology, belief, metaphysics, ideas. Criticism is the twin sister to philosophy because they are both involved in the great human attempt to know the world. Following Steiner’s injunction, I have been happy to write this essay dogmatically:
All criticism is, in its moments of truth, dogmatic; the old criticism reserves the right of being so openly, and of using superlatives.
There are many other aphorisms that circulate through modern criticism. Poetry must be felt before it is understood. A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The currency of these phrases suggests that questions about analysis are still at the heart of the common reader’s experience: why must poetry end with the sort of wisdom most suited to the conclusion of an essay or work of criticism? Why can it not simply be? Frost’s original goes on to say that poetry must be a momentary stay against confusion—momentary. Frost also insists on the ending, as well as being discovered, being both wise and sad. We can take this too far, and there is a sort of popular reading of poems that involves such reverence for negative capability that nothing is ever, finally, deemed to have been settled. But in the settling of the poem’s accounts, there is some sadness that the exchange is over.
That exchange is the meeting of temperaments. Just as we meet the novelist in the middle-ground of the realistic novel, so in the momentary confusion and momentary stay against confusion—in the deepest fix and tantalizing yield—do we meet the poet, but whereas we meet the novelist as observer, we meet the poet as temperament. Criticism might be philosophic in temper but it is reacting to art, entering the dream, and as such must recognise that it begins in provocation. The future of the old criticism must begin with Emerson—“Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.”
Art is where the rational and the irrational meet. It makes us realise we know more than we can say. It shows us the emotions as a route to the understanding. It acts, as George Eliot said, as a companion in the struggle for thought. It is always saying Look! Look at what you did not know you could see! Art is provocation, not instruction. We must choose how we react. The force of poetry is not subtle, but nor is it an easy solution to the problems of living. Criticism is part of the way we react to the provocation. A great book can produce terrible readers, just as a wonderful mother can have dismal children. The job of criticism is to let the poems teach us how to read them.
If you think you know what I am talking about (maybe it wasn’t the LRB? Maybe it was Barbara Everett?) please tell me.
Of course, I always am saying texts.
as a lay person, who never studied literature beyond A level, and who loves books and literature. I read criticism because it illuminates what I love. I like Henry and his substack because he is comprehensible to a lay person. So much literary criticism to me is like reading Klingon, or a stern political instruction panel. So as a lay person, I liked Nabokov's lectures, in which he said we should approach the novel and understand it in terms of its spatial terms, chronology, geography, events, objects etc. And then re-read the novel. And to be wary of reducing it to an 'idea'. This is all very practical. But when you do that, I find, you notice many other things. He also said that re-reading is most important. At its best, literary criticism is like a best friend to the text and the person reading the criticism. It says, did you notice this? Not bad, is it?
To me, the best literary criticism is summarized nicely in your own words: It is always saying Look! Look at what you did not know you could see!