Identity and Society in American Poetry: The Romantic Tradition B ...

Emerson shows his straightforward side in calling poetry a “meter-making argument” and his mystical side in saying that “poetry was all written before time was.” John Stuart Mill, a late empiricist who liked Wordsworth, sees a somewhat lesser social role for poetry than does Shelley, but nonetheless makes one of the most telling definitions: “poetry is eloquence overheard.” Perhaps the most central, or typical, comment may be typified by Octavio Paz: “Poetry is not what words say but what is said between them, that which appears fleetingly in pauses and silences.” If this is true, where does it leave the critic?

The critic who, following Matthew Arnold, sets up as a guardian of social values, moderates the wildness of the poet’s intuition and tendency towards ambiguity. T.S. Eliot, who set the standards for successive commentators to follow or rebel against, shares this stance with Arnold. Both men approached poetry more rationally as critics than they had as younger poets. (While this may seem inevitable, it is not true of later poet/critics.) The critic like Cleanth Brooks or John Crowe Ransom seeks to protect the ambiguous quality of poetry by refusing to paraphrase what is, after all, unsayable in prose. These critics focus, instead, on the structure and techniques inherent in poetry, which serve to construct that ambiguity. In this way, these critics respectfully keep their distance from the unexplainable or mystical aspects of poetry, even as they provide a language with which it is possible to partially explain these effects. By insisting on the poem’s separateness from the poet or the world around it, these New Critics virtually remake the poem as a mystical object, immune to final interpretation. Although recognized as literary and cultural conservatives, they actually set the stage—allied with Eliot’s traditionalism and through their interest in nearly obsessive close reading—for later, language-oriented critics. Additionally, their theories were compatible with modernist poetics, as they tended to emphasize the separateness and materiality of the poem—although in a different way than did Williams or Pound. The New Critics banned any discussion of the historical poet from the conversation, a prohibition that has largely stuck, in spite of the “psychological” criticism of Harold Bloom.