GOAT Literary Critics: Part 2, A discipline is founded (sorta’): Brooks & Warren, Northrop Frye, and S. T. Coleridge

I sent the first post in this series – which, BTW, now has its own tag: GOATLiC (GOAT Literary Critic) – to Tyler Cowen, and he got back with a brief response: “Samuel Johnson?” That unsettled me. I hadn’t even thought of Johnson and neither had the Chatster. What’s worse, though I’ve certainly heard of Johnson, knew about his dictionary and his poetry and that he’d done other stuff, I’d read none of it. I thought about it, took a brief look at his Wikipedia entry, and replied to Tyler: “doesn’t compute.”

As things turned out, that first post became Part 1a in the context of GOAT Literary Critics: Part 1b, Lit Crit Compared to Economics; Aristotle, No. In that post I distinguished between literary culture as a whole and literary criticism as an intellectual discipline, suggesting that the discipline only became possible in the wake of conceptual advances that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries and were brought into focus by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. People have been commenting on literature for as long as literature has existed, but only some of that commentary belongs in the intellectual discipline called literary criticism. Johnson – his poetry and criticism alike – belongs in that larger literary culture but not in the intellectual discipline.

My object in this post is to say a bit about how and why we have the modern institutional discipline of literary criticism. For that we must first turn to Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry (1939), which is not a book of criticism at all. It’s a collection of poems with annotations and exercises intended for use in undergraduate classes. A fourth edition came out in 1976, 37 years later. That cleared the ground for the modern discipline. Then we’re going to look at Northrop Fry’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957, same year as Syntactic Structures and Sputnik), which fenced the land in and tented it over. Then we move back in time to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who established the literary mind as a worthy subject of the deepest kind of intellectual inquiry.

Brooks & Warren: The New Criticism

The study of vernacular literature came late to the academy. If you went to college or university in the 18th and 19th century you could study the Classics, in the original Greek and Latin, but not English language literature. Perhaps a bit here and there, but not until late in the 19th century; but more likely the 20th century. The story is complicated, but in order to make any headway at all I’m simply going to bracket those complications and set them aside. If you’re curious, I suggest that you start with excellent review-essay that Michael Bérubé wrote about Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) by John Guillory.

The current academic discipline centers on the act of interpretation: What do these texts mean? That question is such an obvious one that it may be hard to imagine that it is only after World War II – at least in America, if not in England (another one of those pesky complications) – that interpretation became the sun around which the discipline orbited. Prior to that the academic discipline was mostly about philology and literary history. Those disciplines had their great figures, and they deserve consideration for a place in the More Inclusive GOATLiC Hall of Fame, but I’ll let someone else argue the cases for them.

Before considering Brooks & Warrant, the duo, Let’s take quick looks at them separately. Robert Penn Warren is one of the most decorated people in American letters, having won two Pulitzer’s for poetry and one for fiction, making him the only one to win both Pulitzers. Moreover, his prize-winning novel, All the King’s Men, was a best seller that has been twice made into a movie and once into an opera. He also wrote a variety of nonfiction, including critical essays and books. In 2005 U. S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in his honor (16 years after his death in 1989). Cleanth Brooks is primarily an academic literary critic. The Well Wrought Urn is the best-known of his dozen or so books of criticism. He was one of most important expounders of close-reading. While Warren’s public honors over shadow Brooks’s, both men might be plausible individual candidates for the GOATLiC list. But I think the case for the duo is more interesting and perhaps even stronger as well.

The movement Brooks & Warren championed was known as the New Criticism, a term that’s with us even today. The means by which they advanced this movement was, first of all, a reader, Understanding Poetry, first published in 1939. That first edition is 680 pages long, including table of contents and index. Most of those pages are given over to the poems themselves. After a short list of acknowledgements the book opens with “Letter to the Teacher”:

This book has been conceived on the assumption that if poetry is worth teaching at all it is worth teaching as poetry. The temptation to make a substitute for the poem as the object of study is usually overpowering. The substitutes are various, but the most common ones are:

1. Paraphrase of logical and narrative content,
2. Study of biographical and historical material.
3. Inspirational and didactic interpretation.

Of course, paraphrase may be necessary as a preliminary step in the reading of a poem, and a study of the biographical and historical background may do much to clarify interpretation; but these things should be considered as means and not as ends.

That second point is aimed directly at the existing academic discipline, which was based on literary history and on philology. The justification was a doctrine called formalism, which held that, by virtue of their form, literary texts carried their meaning(s) within themselves, free of biographical and historical context. The paragraph continues:

And though one may consider a poem as an instance of historical or ethical documentation, the poem in itself, if literature is to be studied as literature, remains finally the object for study. Moreover, even if the interest us in the poem as a historical or ethical document, there is a prior consideration: one must grasp the poem as a literary construct before it can offer any real illumination of a document.

The innovation of Understanding Poetry was simply to present the texts to students so they could learn to grapple and conjure with them as just that, literary constructs. Nothing more, nothing less, the texts themselves. THAT’s the innovation. It’s so transparent that one hardly notices it as such. I assume that a significant portion of Brooks’ methodological and theoretical writing was a defense and elaboration of the idea of the text AS literary construct, an act of mind in and of itself. Much of the academic discipline of literary criticism has been puzzling over the issue ever since.

This doctrine and the attendant New Critical practice became particularly important after World War II, when college enrollments ballooned with soldiers going to college on the G.I. Bill and with a more general increase in enrollments. What are we going to teach these students, and how? A literary criticism based on history and philology required you to wade through a lot of secondary material before you arrive at the texts themselves. It’s one thing to ask that of professionals, not to mention graduate students, but it’s unreasonable to put freshmen and sophomores through all that. If, however, the meaning of literary texts resides within the texts themselves, then you don’t need the apparatus. You can go directly to the texts.

As a result, we now live in a world where anyone with a college education can talk about the meaning of texts, texts of all kinds including movies, TV, advertising and whatever else is floating about, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, which it has become. It is also a world in which meaning has become the focus of academic literary criticism, which it hadn‘t been beforehand. Now that ordinary readers can trade in meanings, some are prone to be disgruntled when they hear that the academics are trading in meanings they can’t understand. And so, among other things, we have the annual sport of the New York Times poking fun at the titles of papers offered at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association.

When one reads a book or a poem, one participates in literary culture. Reading book reviews in the daily newspaper or articles on literary topics in The New Yorker, that’s another way of participating in literary culture. But, for better or worse, those secondary activities are not intellectually comparable to engaging in the secondary activity academic literary criticism. [Secondary in relation to reading literary texts themselves.] Similarly, we all engage in economic activity of various kinds. We may also read news articles on economic topics in the daily newspaper, not to mention more sophisticated venues such as The Economist and The New Yorker (here I’m thinking, for example, of the work of Ken Auletta, who wrote Three Blind Mice, a book about the three major TV networks of the previous century). But engaging in economic activity is no more doing economics than engaging in literary activity is doing academic literary criticism.

Moreover, the fact that the economist Tyler Cowen can casually offer one-two-and-three-line “Straussian readings” of various texts by the handful at his blog may owe at least at much, if not more, to Brooks & Warren than to Leo Strauss himself (a philosopher, not an economist). That such readings – few of which seem tethered to the specific doctrines promulgated by Strauss – can be intelligibly offered on a blog read by thousands of people, few of whom are professional academics of any kind, piggybacks on the reading practice advocated and promulgated by Brooks and Warren. The reading practice they furthered through Understanding Poetry, and a later companion, Understanding Fiction, thus has echoes far beyond literary criticism.

Understanding Poetry rested on the assumption that interpretive reading requires little beyond will, curiosity, and a few modest pointers. No special learning required. If that is so, then is any special learning required of those who use Understanding Poetry as a vehicle for teaching inquiring young minds the craft of reading? One of the faculty, Bill Sylvester, at SUNY Buffalo where I got my degree, was fond of saying that “interpretations were invariant under transformations of sophistication.” What’s the source of that sophistication?

The profession has spent the last 75 years developing answer upon answer and still more answers to that question as schools of literary theory and method have dashed madly after one another like lemmings to the sea. Whatever the particular critical lens, it is always used to reveal a close reading. In the ideal case, when the reading is ever so close, it disappears, leaving only the text.

I digress.

Northrop Frye: How can we have literary criticism?

Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic who first gained notice through a book about Blake and who published on a wide range of topics in English literature, but also the Bible. But he is best-known for The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Despite the title, the Anatomy reads as much if not more like an anatomy of literature than of criticism. In that he had the audacity to see the study of literature as a (unified) whole. To be sure, the literature he surveyed is almost exclusively Western (though there is a mention of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana), but still, that’s quite a lot to take-in at one gulp. As far as I know, no one else has attempted it, save perhaps Harold Bloom.

Moreover, and this is crucial, he took the imaginative leap in 1957, when the profession was trying to figure out what it was up to in the wake of all the close readings occasioned by Brooks & Warren and their many acolytes. Just what are we to do with all these interpretations, these readings? Are they knowledge? If so, what kind of knowledge? For one thing it’s knowledge of all those texts and the truths they embody. That’s implicit in the book.

But the “Polemical Introduction” made an explicit argument for informed and learned, even “scientific,” literary criticism. Thus (page 7):

If criticism exists, it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field. The word “inductive” suggests some sort of scientific procedure. What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a “pure” or “exact” science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us. The writing of history is an art, but no one doubts that scientific principles are involved in the historian’s treatment of evidence, and that the presence of this scientific element is what distinguishes history from legend. It may also be a scientific element in criticism which distinguishes it from literary parasitism on the one hand, and the superimposed critical attitude on the other. The presence of science in any subject changes its character from the casual to the causal, from the random and intuitive to the systematic, as well as safe¬ guarding the integrity of that subject from external invasions.

The rest of the Anatomy is that “inductive survey.”

To achieve this inexact science of criticism we must separate it from opinion and taste (p. 9):

In other words, there is as yet no way of distinguishing what is genuine criticism, and therefore progresses toward making the whole of literature intelligible, from what belongs only to the history of taste, and therefore follows the vacillations of fashionable prejudice.

Somewhat later (p. 20):

Shakespeare, we say, was one of a group of English dramatists working around 1600, and also one of the great poets of the world. The first part of this is a statement of fact, the second a value-judgement so generally accepted as to pass for a statement of fact. But it is not a statement of fact. It remains a value judgement, and not a shred of systematic criticism can ever be attached to it.

The profession was happy to see in Frye’s statement a statement of its aims and desires, though of course, the journalistic reviewers of books and movies did not hesitate to make aesthetic and ethical judgements about the works they reviewed.

Finally, toward the end, Frye distinguishes between the act of reading and the act of writing about what one has read (pp. 27-28):

The reading of literature should, like prayer in the Gospels, step out of the talking world of criticism into the private and secret presence of literature. Otherwise the reading will not be a genuine literary experience, but a mere reflection of critical conventions, memories, and prejudices. The presence of incommunicable experienced in center of criticism will always keep criticism as art, as long as the critic recognized that criticism comes out of it but cannot be built on it.

Frye would not have penned those words if the distinction between reading and criticism was not itself problematic. There were those who believed that writing about literature was necessarily intrusive and therefore not to be done. One was to appreciate the text in silence.

But one cannot build an intellectual discipline on silence, can you?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Theorizing the Literary Mind

No one chattered more than Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though he is best-known to us as a poet, he was a formidable and prolific essayist and philosopher. Here is what John Stuart Mill said about him in an essay he wrote in 1838 (brought to my attention by Tyler Cowen), four years after Coleridge’s death:

It will take many years for there to be anything like unanimity in the estimation of Coleridge and of his influence on the intellect of our time. As a poet, he has taken his place. The healthier taste and more intelligent canons of poetic criticism that Coleridge was himself mainly instrumental in spreading have at last assigned to him his proper rank as one of the great names in our literature—and, if we look to the powers shown rather than to the amount of actual achievement, one of the greatest. But as a philosopher, the class of thinkers has scarcely yet arisen by whom he is to be judged. [...] This time has not yet come for Coleridge. The spirit of philosophy in England, like that of religion, is still rootedly sectarian.

I believe Mill’s succinct and insightful judgment about Coleridge’s poetry still stands, but that’s all he says about it. In the rest of the (rather long) essay Mill evaluates Coleridge’s philosophical contributions on a wide variety of issues pertaining to politics and society, but he has nothing to say about Coleridge’s literary criticism. However, he does have one observation that is relevant that matter. In a section entitled “The dispute about sources of knowledge” Mills notes:

Yet though I think the doctrines of Coleridge and the Germans, in the pure science of mind, to be erroneous, and though I have no taste for their peculiar terminology, I am far from thinking that even in respect of this least valuable part of their intellectual exertions those philosophers have lived in vain. The doctrines of the school of Locke needed an entire renovation. To borrow a physiological illustration from Coleridge, they required, like certain secretions of the human body, to be reabsorbed into the system and secreted afresh. In what form did that philosophy generally prevail throughout Europe?

Coleridge owed a lot to those Germans, and played a role in bringing their thinking to England, sometimes, alas, surreptitiously, as his own. He plagiarized whole passages from Schelling in his Biographia Literaria, which was something of a literary autobiography and sampler of his many and various thoughts.

One of the best-known phrases in our critical armamentarium is from the Biographia: “willing suspension of disbelief,” often just “suspension of disbelief.” That’s what happens when we read literary works, attend plays, or watch TV or movies. The phrase comes from Chapter XIV, where Coleridge is discussing Lyrical Ballads, the collection of poems that he and Wordsworth had published in 1798:

It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.

In that passage he is talking of the literary mind, of Wordsworth’s deployment of it and his somewhat different deployment of it. That was his subject.

In Chapter XVIII of the Biographia he speaks of spontaneous impulse and voluntary purpose and of how poetry must bring about “a union; an interpenetration of passion and of will.” That was perhaps his central theme. We see it in ”Principles of Genial Criticism,” where the contraries that must be unified are called “FREE LIFE” and “confining FORM.” In The Statesman’s Manual Coleridge talks of the imagination as 

that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols . . . of which they are the conductors.

When, in 1985, Robert Penn Warren wrote an encomium about his confrére, Cleanth Brookes, he referenced an ongoing conversation they had been having about the nature of poetry:

Both [T.S.] Eliot and [I.A.] Richards denied the necessity of what might be called "poetic" material as such. In their different ways they held to the doctrine of “inclusion,” not “exclusion,” for poetry. Or as Coleridge had phrased it, the imagination is to be defined as the “faculty” that achieves the “balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities.” And, of course, this general notion was to lead to Cleanth’s later studies of irony as a structural principle.

There’s STC, as he sometimes styled himself (it's a pun on "ecstasy"), right in the thick of it, informing the minds of Brooks & Warren, whose influential reader was foundational to the enterprise of literary criticism. Coleridge gave us a new way to think about why literature is important, not in terms of beauty or moral uplift, but in terms of how it informs and exercises the mind.

What could be more important than that, the power of the human mind?

Now, what about Samuel Johnson and all the rest?

Simple, Johnson is a towering figure in our literary culture. His Wikipedia entry lists him as “a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer.” Can’t beat that with as stick, as the kids say. But that doesn’t make him a literary critic in the academic sense of the phrase. For better or worse, that’s a different kind of beast, one defined by a set of institutions – universities, professional associations, journals and presses, that didn’t exist in Johnson’s day. His word is an object for study in those institutions. No more, no less.

Let me turn to Michael Bérubé’s essay, which has the delicious title “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About English Departments (But Were Too Overcommitted to Ask).” Once he has worked up a head of critical steam, Bérubé notes:

Indeed, there is a history of literary criticism here, kind of—but you have to piece it together from tantalizing glimpses. It begins, as it should, with the jettisoning of philology and literary history and the rise of the critics—who, Guillory correctly argues, established their idea of the discipline by throwing a lot of stuff overboard.

That’s the part of the story I had in mind with the discussion of Brooks & Warren. Bérubé continues:

Not only belles lettres, philology, and positivistic literary history, but also the relatively new forms of popular “genre” writing like detective fiction and science fiction (210) and, mirabile dictu, the nonfiction essay: “It is one of the great ironies of literary history that the essay, as a literary form, later fell out of the domain of canonical transmission. The essay form survives into the present, but for the most part as the signature genre of ‘belletrism,’ a form of ‘light’ literature” (178–79). (I would argue that it has surreptitiously reemerged over in the creative writing wing, disguised as “creative nonfiction,” but the point holds that we no longer spend a lot of time, as a profession, with Addison and Steele or Hazlitt or Carlyle.)

That’s where Samuel Johnson’s critical essays get thrown into the drink where they toss and turn with all the other essays, all those documents in that “history of taste” that Northrup Frye has trimmed away. Finally:

And composition was consigned to the basement, many its practitioners relegated to the Adjunct Building with neither private offices nor professional wages, even though “this least prestigious of the English department’s tasks would nonetheless go on to secure the department’s future in the American university”

There’s the rub. The activity that pays the bills, teaching undergraduates how to write, exists in a whole other world, one that has little to do with literature beyond the fact that both involve writing. Literary scholars belong to the Modern Language Association (MLA) while those whose research is about writing and how to teach the skill, they have a different professional organization, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).

Bérubé then goes on to note:

But the really astonishing thing about this radical delimitation of “literature” [...] is not how successful it was, but how temporary. The disciplinary consensus underwriting the delimitation lasted a couple of decades, arguably culminating in 1957 in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, whose ambition to account for all the “modes” of literature was accurately appraised by Vivian Mercier in Commonweal: “Here is a book fundamental enough to be entitled Principia Critica” (618). But no sooner had the laws of physics been laid down for literary criticism than they were shattered by the relativistic and quantum phenomena cumulatively known as ‘Theory,’ arriving about a decade later and throwing the mechanics of the discipline into disarray.

That’s the story I’ll take up in the next post in this series: GOAT Literary Critics: Part 3, Three Frenchmen, A Colloquium + Others.