Lee Wrote:
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> > Hi, Sue,
>
> Yes, we read rafts of new critics, Brooks, Wellek
> and Warren, R.P. Blackmur and on and on, as well
> as earlier critics — the focus was on Boileau,
> Johnson and Dryden, Reynolds, with poor Shelley
> (rightly, I think) taken to the chopping block as
> a critic, not as a poet — though he did come in
> for some whacks there as well. Of course we also
> read all the so-called formalist criticism of the
> Chicago critics themselves.
>
> As for being a comparativist, there are many
> senses in which I was and remain one as a thinker.
> I don’t want to discard any critical method that
> may yield something useful, including history and
> biography, nor did the formalists, necessarily;
> the Chicago method wasn’t merely “formal,” it was
> highly pluralistic. R.S. Crane, one of the
> founders, said ”we ought to have at our command,
> collectively at least, as many different critical
> methods as there are distinguishable major aspects
> in the construction, appreciation, and use of
> literary works." They did, however, have an
> appreciation for works of literature as verbal
> structures, with particular goals in mind. In
> that sense they were “Aristotelian,” or better,
> “Neo-Aristotelian.”
>
> Elder Olson, the only one of the founding Chicago
> critics with whom I studied, explained it somewhat
> this way in his class on poetics. The work of
> art, in Aristotelian terms, is like an axe, i.e.,
> it has a final, formal, material, and efficient
> cause because it is: (1) made for a particular
> purpose (2) in a particular shape (3) out of
> particular materials (4) by someone. By examining
> whether the maker chose wisely with respect to
> each of the remaining “causes,” we can tell
> whether the maker did a good job in creating the
> product, regardless of whether the product is an
> axe or poem, or a novel. We can thus say that a
> toolmaker who made an axe to cut trees with a
> blade of 22K gold and a friable ivory handle is
> not a good toolmaker; but one who made the same
> object with a different final cause might be a
> good one indeed. The same is true of a work of
> art. The poet who wants to induce you to feel a
> protagonist’s pain (and intentionality is a big
> concept in the Chicago school – the poet has an
> effect in mind and has to choose the right
> materials) should not write his poem in limericks;
> the poet who wants to satirize that pain may do
> exactly that. You know that a writer or poem has
> failed when you get mixed signals from the piece
> and the “materials” are not clearly or
> consistently chosen to meet the particular end.
> It’s that equivalent of finding an axe with a good
> steel blade and a plastic handle that would break
> if you tried to chop anything: what was the damned
> thing made for?
>
> A corollary of the assumption that literary
> meaning is to be found in the (generic) intention
> of the text is that, like Aristotle, they
> subordinate the function of literary language to
> the larger structure of the work as a whole: "The
> words must be explained in terms of something
> else, not the poem in terms of the words; and
> further, a principle must be a principle of
> something other than itself; hence the words
> cannot be a principle of their own arrangements."
> I know this sounds rather cold. It wasn’t.
> These people were passionate about literature. I
> remember Olson asking someone what poems he
> particularly enjoyed and being told that they
> aren’t meant to be enjoyed: they’re meant to be
> analyzed. Olson was shocked.
>
> I think what really characterized my teachers was
> a very strong impatience with sloppy, dogmatic, or
> merely skeptical thinking. Start with the notion
> that the work you are looking at stand alone, was
> made for a reason, and has something to say. No
> criticism can be universal. For that reason,
> criticism based on universal philosophic systems
> (Hegel, Freud, Marx, Sartre) was a special of
> distrust, though their most extensive critique was
> reserved for the New Critics, whose almost
> exclusive concern with figurative language and
> irony they thought was limiting and reductive. The
> essays in Critics and Criticism on I. A. Richards,
> William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn
> Warren (Olson) probably represent the core of the
> formalist critique of this group.
>
> Olson and the others were not totally averse to
> using history or biographical information, but
> believed them on the whole irrelevant in
> discussions of the work itself, even likely to
> distract from the central issues of literary
> structure and meaning. When someone failed to see
> this, he could be scathing. Thus he called
> another graduate student in one of my classes a
> “fool.” when she stated that he had destroyed
> Auden’s “Lay Your Sleep Head,” — one of the most
> heart-rendingly gorgeous of English lyrics — for
> her by telling her Auden was gay. If you read
> that lyric and care about that one way or the
> other, you have no right to read poetry.
>
> Lee
>

Thanks, Lee.

Great post. Here is the link to Mr. Swilley's remarks at KDH Tolkien if you care to discuss this with him. I'd love to see you two duke it out. I stuck your post over there to see what he'd say. (I moderate that site too, so there won't be a problem.)

[siliconvirtue.com]

Also, have you read Coleridge, Keats, and Eliot on their critical views?

If I say the truth, I'm a rather hit and miss critic, but I do know how to have fun with literature.

Sue