Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism / Edition 1

by Garrick Davis, William Logan

Overview

Marked by a rigorously close textual reading, detached from biographical or other extratextual material, New Criticism was the dominant literary theory of the mid-twentieth century. Since that time, schools of literary criticism have arisen in support of or in opposition to the approach advocated by the New Critics. Nonetheless, the theory remains one of the most important sources for groundbreaking criticism and continues to be a controversial approach to reading literature.

Praising It New is the first anthology of New Criticism to be printed in fifty years. It includes important essays by such influential poets and critics as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, and Robert Penn Warren. Together, these authors ushered in the modernist age of poetry and criticism and transformed the teaching of literature in the schools. As the American poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted: “I do not believe there has been another age in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry has been written.”

This anthology now makes much of the best American poetry criticism available again, and includes short biographies and selected bibliographies of its chief figures. Praising It New is the perfect introduction for students to the best American poetry criticism of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804011082
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	05/13/2008
Edition description:	1
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Garrick Davis is the founding editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review, the largest online archive of poetry criticism in the world (cprw.com). His poetry and criticism have appeared in the New Criterion, Verse, the Weekly Standard, McSweeney’s, and the New York Sun. He also edited Child of the Ocmulgee: the Selected Poems of Freda Quenneville. He is the literature specialist of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC.

Table of Contents

Foreword   William Logan
Forward into the Past: Reading the New Critics     ix
Acknowledgments     xvii
A Note on the Editor's Method of Selection     xix
Introduction: The Golden Age of Poetry Criticism   Garrick Davis     xxi
Where to Begin?     1
The Ideal Approach to Criticism
Introduction to The Sacred Wood   T. S. Eliot     3
The Perfect Critic   T. S. Eliot     7
The New Syllabus
How to Read   Ezra Pound     16
Against the Historical Method
Miss Emily and the Bibliographer   Allen Tate     39
Teaching Literary Criticism
Criticism, Inc.   John Crowe Ransom     49
Is Literary Criticism Possible?   Allen Tate     61
The New Criticism     73
First Principles
Preliminary Problems   Yvor Winters     75
The Formalist Critics   Cleanth Brooks     84
Against the Fallacies
The Affective Fallacy   W. K. Wimsatt   Monroe C. Beardsley     92
The Intentional Fallacy   W. K. Wimsatt   Monroe C. Beardsley     102
The Purity of Poetry
Pure and Impure Poetry   R. P. Warren     117
TheObjective Correlative
Hamlet and His Problems   T. S. Eliot     138
The Dissociation of Sensibility
The Metaphysical Poets   T. S. Eliot     143
The Isolation of Modern Poetry   Delmore Schwartz     151
Close Reading
Texts from Housman   Randall Jarrell     161
Some Post-Symbolist Structures   Hugh Kenner     169
Techniques and Truths     183
Breaking the Pentameter
A Retrospect   Ezra Pound     185
Reflections on Vers Libre   T. S. Eliot     195
Making it New
Poets Without Laurels   John Crowe Ransom     202
The End of the Line   Randall Jarrell     213
The Problem of Form   J. V. Cunningham     220
Poetry as a Moral Discipline
Foreword to Primitivism and Decadence   Yvor Winters     224
The Morality of Poetry   Yvor Winters     233
Appraising Poets and Periods     245
The Correction of Taste
T. S. Eliot: Thinker and Artist   Cleanth Brooks     247
Religious Poetry in the United States   R. P. Blackmur     260
Towards a Post-Kantian Verbal Music   Kenneth Burke     272
Coda
Lord Tennyson's Scissors: 1912-1950   R. P. Blackmur     286
Selected Biographies and Bibliographies     303
Source Credits     331

Editorial Reviews

Given our long-term disregard of the New Criticism, Davis‘s compendium is especially welcome.... Davis provides richly informative, well-argued, and elegantly styled introductions, head-notes, and annotations, as well as discriminating suggestions for further reading.”
— Virginia Quarterly Review


“In Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, Garrick Davis offers poets and students an exceptionally well chosen selection from the theoretical essays of the New Criticism in hopes that it will remain an available influence. They are far more interesting than such essays generally tend to be—a strength of the best of the New Critics and one that will continue to serve them well with both an academic and a general audience.”
— Eclectica Magazine


“This anthology is both important and necessary. No other collection gives us such an excellent opportunity to go back to the New Criticism and see it again, as if for the first time.”
— Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing


“Just how seriously the New Critics took poetry, and how much subtlety and conviction they brought to reading it, can be seen on every page of Praising It New, an excellent new anthology of the New Criticism edited by Garrick Davis.”
— The New York Sun


“It is clear from reading the lapidary works in Praising It New that the New Critics were not stern moralists upholding rigid orthodoxies, as their opponents imply. Like other critics of the period — not least Trilling and Wilson — they saw poems and novels opening out into life in all its variety, nuance and incompleteness.”
— The Wall Street Journal


“The essays in Praising It New still carry a potent charge for anyone interested in what makes the best poems tick. Davis has performed a service to readers (often in the face of recalcitrant publishers unwilling to make works available for reprint at reasonable rates), and the book will be of particular interest to poets and students of poetry. Whether or not teachers will have the good sense to assign it remains to be seen.”
— The New Criterion


“Davis’s notes are excellent: how charming to be told that, as a young instructor, Jarrell coached the tennis team at Kenyon.”
— Howard Junker,  ZYZZYVASPEAKS blog

From the Publisher

T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, expatriate Americans living in England in the early 20th century, are credited with having inspired the movement known as new criticism. As editor Davis (literature specialist, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC) here explains, this criticism "would focus on the techniques and forms of poetry, not on its uses as social comment, political statement, or historical document." Davis collects essays by Eliot and Pound as well as other American poet-critics of the period, such as R.P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, J.V. Cunningham, Randall Jarrell, John Crowe Ransom, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, Yvor Winters, and Hugh Kenner (the lone Canadian). Preceding each of the volume's four parts is a brief overview with commentary and analysis. For each featured essay, Davis provides the provenance and a forceful evaluation (e.g., "most influential," "truly indispensable," and "sublime overview"). The helpful appendix includes succinct biographies of each writer with selected bibliographies. Useful for readers interested in American poetry criticism of the 20th century; recommended for academic libraries.
—Kathryn R. Bartelt

Library Journal