[Milton-L] interpreting poems variously [was Satan etc.]

[Carrol Cox]

"Watt, James" wrote:
> 
> Carol:
> 
> re: 20th century history.
> 
> thanks, you got a big laugh out of me. especially your dismissal
> of William Empson.  saying Brooks & Warren invented new
> criticism is, really, like saying that Stanley Fish originated
> 'reader-response' criticism.

Er, I presume a typo here -- I was dismissing Brooks, but not Empson.
Not very many critics can be as illuminating when they're wrong as when
they're right, but Empson can be.

His chapter on Pope's Essay on Criticism in _Structure of Complex Words_
is a little masterpiece.

There was also the Warren (Austin) of Wellek and Warren. That Warren was
the director of my dissertation, and earlier it had been in his Major
American Writers class that I had learned to read, or rather, perhaps,
learned that I could read. I disagreed with him on many matters at the
time, and more since, but he was one of the most wonderful human beings
I have ever known, and a great teacher. He would ramble along, quite
digressively, but after two or three weeks one would suddenly realize
that a text was coming alive for one. It was useless to take notes; in
fact he warned against it, saying "Open your notebooks and close tyour
minds." One merely listened and thought as the world grew richer.

The New Critics were a varied bunch. Tate (whose _Man of the Letters in
the Modern World_ I read till the pages were worn) was an admirer of the
Klan, and all in all a reactionary slimeball. But I learned that later.
I nearly memorized his essays at the time.

Even at the time (and, apparently, increasingly since then) there was a
tendency to identify the "New Criticism" simply with "close reading,"
but that identification was confusing 50 years ago and is confusing now
I think.

Carrol

P.S. A bit of ancient academic history not elsewhere recorded. I believe
it was in 1958 that a friend of mine was enrolled in Norm Nelson's
seminar in literary criticism at Michigan. Nelson assigned as a text
Murray Krieger's "New Apologists for Poetry," praising the book highly
-- at the first meeting. At the second meeting of the seminar he
announced that he had some rsservations. (Apparently he was reading the
book rather than the reviews by this time.) At the third meeting, he
declared that the book had serious flaws. And at the fourth meeting, he
suggested they try to get their money back. There has from the beginning
been extensive debate over just what the "New Criticism" was.