Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
The New Critics weren't afraid of controversy. Really, the whole movement arose because they wanted to contradict the methods of previous critics, and forge a new path. This Crew o' Lyrical Superheroes believed that literature wasn't getting enough attention as literature, and it was time to put the lit first.
But what about everything else that scholars had been busying themselves with for centuries? Like, um, the bearing of the whole of human history on a given text? So, a lot of the New Critics' big debates revolved around how much they were willing to abandon in their pursuit of a purely text-based method for literary analysis. The usual debates went something like this…
You Gotta Put Your Behind in the Past
"Old" criticism was all about history. First, people would study the history of how the words in a given text were used way back when—etymologies up the wazoo, without the convenience of your up-to-date Oxford English Dictionary. Then there was the history of the work. Who was the first to read it? What did its early drafts look like? Sigh.
And finally, there was the history of the author. Like: Did he like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when he was little? Can you see evidence of his youthful peanut butter and jelly fanaticism, even in this late-career poem of his? And so on.
The "old" critics would gather all of this information together, mix it up in a great big bowl o' analysis, and offer up an understanding of a text's major themes. Now, even though the New Critics didn't sign a manifesto in blood saying they'd never consider anything outside of the text ever again, they did agree that history had become a major distraction.
The New Critics wanted to set history aside for a moment and just look at the lit. What would happen, they wondered, if you put the text first—and everything else second?
Now, despite some extremists' interpretation of this move, the New Critics didn't want to throw out all of history with the bathwater. They didn't shy away from using extra-textual facts to make a point. But they always made everything outside of the text take a backseat to the text itself.
For example, if you read "They Flee from Me," the real intellectual and emotional payoff isn't learning more about Anne Boleyn's love life. Though obvi, we're always interested in other people's love lives. The really cool part is figuring out how Wyatt's sonnet works to create meaning—from its metaphors and paradoxes, to its meter and rhyme.
What About That Closeted Love of Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches?
Remember when we said that "old" critics were really into reading every fact about an author into her work? Well, nothing riles up a New Critic like one of those biographically driven analyses. The New Critics believed that the author's life just isn't that important compared to the text itself, because the text will always transcend the author.
Let's say we suddenly unearthed more of Jane Austen's letters. Even if we found real-life equivalents for every single character in Sense and Sensibility, would that really help us read Sense and Sensibility in a more sophisticated way? Probably not.
These insights into authors' lives are just like tabloid gems about our favorite celebrities; they're delicious little "human interest" treats, but they're neither particularly meaningful nor particularly enduring. And a text will be around long after the author's death.
Wimsatt and Beardsley took a special beef with people who studied authorial intent in "The Intentional Fallacy." They argue against studying what the author intended to say, in favor of just sticking to what they actually said. After all, there's likely a lot of stuff in the text that the author wasn't even consciously aware of writing.
(As writers ourselves here, we at Shmoop have to admit: we end up writing a lot of stuff that we don't even mean to. It happens. We'd like to call it "accidental genius," but we'll allow you your own readings.)
A key example from Wimsatt and Beardsely's essay relies on John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." W&B quote a couple lines of the poem in which the speaker wonders why people get so scared of earthquakes ("moving of th' earth"). After all, they never bother to think about how the entire universe is full of planets on the move (the "trepidation of the spheres/ Though greater far, is innocent").
Then W&B take down the latest, scholarly analysis of the text. Some Poor Professor Who Shall Not Be Named had tracked down all of Donne's references to astronomy. And That Dude said something like: "Guys! Look here! Donne was reading Kepler and Galileo when he wrote 'A Valediction.' So he must have been trying to make some commentary about the progress of astronomy as a science in this piece, right?"
Wrong. W&B were having none of that. Sure, these New Critics wrote, we could reconstruct an author's reading list and go crazy reading between its lines. Maybe we could even rebuild their library.
But after all that work, we'd just add "another shade of meaning, an overtone to the stanza in question." In other words, that sort of criticism isn't really helping us to understand the poem better. Biography-driven analyses are often just a series of fanciful, improvable insights—fun to make, but usually frivolous.
Bells and whistles are, in the end, just bells and whistles.
That Little Thing Called "Relevance"
Some critics were worried about paying too much attention to the text. If you were reading literature purely as literature, were you relegating potentially revolution-starting works to the dusty shelves of mere "art"?
And what if a good poem contains a terribly immoral message? Should we still ask whole classrooms of students to read it—and tell them to just ignore the moral of the story? These are the kinds of questions that kept our beloved New Critics up at night. (They clearly never had Werner Herzog read them a bedtime story.)
To be honest, though, a lot of their concerns were directed more at straw men than at any practicing New Critic. Most New Critics didn't want to entirely ignore social relevance, ethics, and politics—though some of their detractors accused them of desiring exactly this.
In fact, one critic associated with the movement, Yvor Winters, was committed to closely analyzing literature and morality (or: the balance between reason and emotion). The thing was, he wasn't on an Easter egg hunt for a moral that could be conveniently lifted out of a poem and applied elsewhere. Instead, he wanted to explain how a whole poem—from its meter to its rhyme to its word choices—was working to construct a particular brand of morality.