Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"Miss Emily and the Bibliographer"
[A graduate student in English] cannot discuss the literary object in terms of its specific form; all that he can do is to give you its history or tell you how he feels about it. The concrete form of the play, the poem, the novel, that gave rise to the history of the feeling lies neglected on the hither side of the Styx, where Virgil explains to Dante that it is scorned alike by heaven and hell.
Burn. In this passage, Tate skewers on the way people were doing literary study before the New Critics came along. Since Tate wrote this little gem back in 1938, of course, the system is totally changed now. But according to Tate, back in his day, the universities were full of professors who were basically studying literary history.
If you asked one of these old school professors about, say, The Tempest, all he would do is "give you its history or tell you how he feels about it."
Never fear, young Shmoopers. Tate has a solution. It's time to discuss "the literary object in terms of its specific form." We have to start with the form before we talk about feelings, he says. And, ideally, the two should be linked.
We should study how "the concrete form" of a poem gives rise to readers' evaluations of a work. So if you want to talk about how you were on the edge of your seat while reading Edgar Allan's Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, don't just describe your suspense to us. Tell us about how the story builds that suspense.
To do a reading à la New Criticism, just imagine Allen Tate standing on your shoulder with a pipe and asking: "Ah yes—but how?"
(Not that we've ever done that… Um…)
Although Tate doesn't get into tons of specifics in this quote, he does give us a roadmap for how to approach poems anew. Literary study was at a crossroads in 1938, and Tate didn't want it to go down the rabbit hole of history, or to languish on the other side of the Styx. He wanted lit crit to go up the heavenly path, that's paved with well-founded, text-based analyses of famous works.
To each his own heavenly path, are we right?