John Crowe Ransom's Quarrel With Himself

This afternoon the latest issue of The Hudson Review landed in my mailbox with the satisfying thump of old-school print media, and it's a fine issue, with writing by Alfred Corn, William H. Pritchard, Dean Flower on Nabokov's letters, Carol T. Christ on Jeanette Winterson, and much else, including my own essay, "John Crowe Ransom's Quarrel With Himself."  It starts like this:

Once, in the waning days of the nineteenth century, a southern preacher’s son quarreled with his father about the place of human happiness in God’s plan. He pointed defiantly to the world’s disorder as proof that God cared little for our desires, but he was too much his father’s son not to doubt his own position, not to wonder if benevolent Providence could be real. He carried his doubts with him when, years later, he sat down to write. That preacher’s son was John Crowe Ransom, and the quarrel with the father became a quarrel with himself, from which sprang his poetry. Later, his doubts resolved, he took up quarrels with the world and modernity. From this sprang prose and, eventually, disciples both political and literary. The poetry of the old inner quarrel was never quite abandoned, though the font of inspiration ran close to dry. Instead, the poems were rewritten, ironed smooth, the self-division suppressed, chastened, or ironized. What remained was assured, refined, supple—but somehow confined.  One thinks of Rilke’s panther in its cage.

            During Ransom’s lifetime, many thought that what he’d wrought in poetry was great, and numbered him among the storied names.  Robert Lowell, speaking of the generation of American poets born in the 1870s and 80s, listed Frost, Williams, Pound, Moore, Eliot, and Ransom as the masters, sure of lasting fame, adding only “who outranks whom will be disputed.” Randall Jarrell said Ransom’s poems would “outlive Mother Goose.” And at the height of his own fame Robert Frost told a fawning audience at Kenyon to redirect their enthusiasm, because the greatest living poet was their own Professor Ransom.

            From certain perspectives, Ransom’s legacy may count for more than that of more enduringly famous poets. 

The rest is available in the Spring 2016 issue of the magazine, available now!

Frankfurt on the Farm: Southern Agrarianism Meets Adorno & Co.

The American south really is another country, or so I’ve thought from time to time.  And I thought it again earlier today, when a guy I know who recently took a teaching position in Mississippi told me how everyone at the university with a PhD insists on being called “Doctor,” and on signing emails with their full names followed by “PhD.”  It’s been my experience at my home institution, and at other colleges and universities in the north, that only a few professors insist on doing this, and that it tends to provoke a little behind-the-back eye-rolling on the part of their colleagues.  I’ve generally filed all this under the heading “cultural differences that don’t really matter but that probably reflect the more hierarchical social background of the south, with its roots in the agrarian world of the plantations” (the only other item in this slim file, with its elephantine heading, is “they do tend to call you sir or ma’am down there, don’t they?”).


The gentility I’ve encountered in the south probably is left over from a pre-industrial social order that would strike a Chicagoan, whose heritage is industrial mayhem, and whose future is the post-industrial unknown, as entirely alien.  But what about the intellectual traditions indigenous to the south?  What, more specifically, about the Southern Agrarians, that group of poets and literary intellectuals who made the 1930 collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand their manifesto?  They’ve often seemed distant to me: New Critical, conservative, and nostalgic for a vanishing social order based on the morally indefensible slave economy of the plantation — what could they have in common with the kind of left-wing, critical theory-devouring, Europhile with whom you and I sulk around the coffee joints and bookstores of big cities and college towns?


More than one might assume, it turns out.  While they certainly trafficked in nostalgia, when one looks at their actual writings, as often as not one finds significant overlap between what they believed and what the Frankfurt school critical thinkers — darlings of my sullen people, the liberal arts professoriate—believed.  I’m not saying that the two groups would want to amalgamate, but I do think they had many of the same ideas about what was wrong with the world in which they lived.


Consider a few examples.


Against Commodification and Exchange Value


“A farm is not a place to grow wealthy,” says Andrew Nelson Lytle in his contribution to I’ll Take My Stand, “it is a place to grow corn.”  He is appalled by the notion that the individual qualities of the products of life on a farm can be erased and replaced by a numerical, and easily manipulated, dollar value.  This erases the true use-value of the object, but more than that, it destroys the individuality of objects, reducing them to exchange value, and turning them into commodities.  “What industrialism counts as the goods and riches of the earth the agrarian South does not, nor ever did,” said Lytle, taking aim against industrial capitalism’s emphasis on the commodity as the means of measuring true wealth.


One hardly needs to quote Marx or Adorno for the similarities in outlook to be apparent.  But if Dr. Lytle and Drs. Marx and Adorno agree on their diagnosis (“the patient has a bad case of commodification!”) they disagree radically on the nature of the proper treatment.  No critical theory for Lytle, still less any form of labor organizing.  Rather, he calls for an economic and cultural movement, in which the people of the south “return to our looms, our hand crafts, our reproducing stock.  Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall!”  It’s more like what one would find in the writings of William Morris than in the works of Max Horkheimer, but even so, we should remember Morris wasn’t just a great wallpaper designer and furniture maker: he was a committed socialist.


The Nature of Utopia


The Agrarians were famously backward-looking, but when we look at why they yearned for the past, we see that it was generally as a way of criticizing the industrial capitalism of the present.


Robert Penn Warren, at a 1956 reunion of the Agrarians, said the past is “a better rebuke” to the present “than any dream of the future,” because “you can see what some of the costs were, what frail virtues were achieved in the past by frail men." For other Agrarians, there was an even stronger emphasis on the critique of modernity over any positive vision of what Utopia ought to be. As Lyle Lanier put it not long before the reunion at which Warren spoke, “I don’t feel overly confident now that I can have anything to say about what I stand for in these dismal times.  As in 1930, what to stand against seems much easier to identify.”  And that enemy was modern industrial capitalism. Lanier claimed to read the Wall Street Journal only “to keep up with what the enemy is up to,” and the opening statement of I’ll Take My Stand, attributed to all of the book’s contributors, says “it is strange…that a majority of men anywhere could even as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that has so little regard for individual wants.”  One might attribute some of this anti-modernity to the culture around the Vanderbilt Agrarians: Nashville was undergoing a belated but rapid industrialization, establishing a mode of life very much at odds with the Agrarian ideal: it was as if the poets were surrounded by countless versions of Faulkner’s Flem Snopes on the make.


Of course any orientation to the past is fundamentally at odds with the Frankfurt school, which made much of futurity. As Simon Jarvis put it, Adorno wanted “to resist the liquidation of the possibility of really new experience,” and saw Utopia as a necessarily unachievable aspiration, a yearning for a newer, better world, beyond exploitation and oppression. But here, too, the emphasis is on Utopia as a critique of the present, rather than as an achievable reality in some particular form. Utopia, in Adorno’s view, could never be fully embodied, nor even formulated.  Irreducible to concept, let alone to political realization, it was an absolute for which to yearn. But we must walk in fear of anyone claiming to have produced it, in blueprint or in actualization.


Moreover, even in the disagreement about whether to look forward or backward in time, we can see a certain similarity: both Robert Penn Warren and Theodor Adorno approach Utopia with caution, with an eye open to the frailty of the vision and the human costs paid in attempts to embody it.  There’s caution to both visions, Agrarian/reactionary and the Marxian/radical.  This puts both on a moral footing well ahead of many ideologues of the mid-century right and left.


Obligation to the Lost Cause


A strange mournfulness hangs, mist-like, over the essays of I’ll Take My Stand: a mournfulness over the sacrifices of so many soldiers in the Civil War. A good part of the nostalgia for the past, and the sometimes hard-to-read defense of the old plantation society (John Crowe Ransom writes of slavery as “humane in practice” if not theory), is a powerfully felt sense that the sacrifices of one’s ancestors must not have been in vain.  While, with the exception of an essay by Allen Tate, there’s little in I’ll Take My Stand by way of calls for violent political action, there’s a real sense that one must remain loyal to the past, and keep the flame alive until conditions once again become propitious for one’s cause.


This sense of one’s place in history is surprisingly close to some moments in Negative Dialectics, where Adorno speaks of the revolutionary moment predicted by Marx as having come and gone, contained and defused by capitalism. In 1966, the year Negative Dialectics was published, Adorno saw capitalism more dominant than ever, and felt that critical thinking was the best way to maintain a kind of critical consciousness that will be essential for any future action on behalf of the great cause.  Both Adorno and the Agrarians looked back at lost opportunities and failed causes, and saw themselves as keepers of the flame.


The Group and the Individual


The Frankfurt school was unexceptional in Marxist thought in being deeply skeptical of the claims of individualism and individual agency, emphasizing the power of large social and economic forces, and the actions of classes rather than charismatic individuals.  On the surface, the Agrarians seem to believe in very different things.  They make much of the term “individual,” and can at times sound almost like Margaret Thatcher when she claimed “society does not exist.”  The opening statement of I’ll Take My Stand, for example, claims “the responsibility of men is for their own welfare and that of their neighbors; not for the hypothetical welfare of some fabulous creature called society.”  But even in the rejection of the notion of society, we see something other than individualism at work: there’s a notion of mutual obligation in much Agrarian thinking, albeit one based not on class solidarity but on family and region.  Lyle Lanier, for example, despised industrial capitalism for creating “personal isolation, and a fractioning of life functions.”  He feared capitalism would dissolve the bonds of extended family which formed a kind of social support network, leaving people uprooted, deracinated, and subject to the “convulsions of a predatory and decadent capitalism.”


Agrarian talk of individualism often masked an emphasis on social forms larger than the individual.  These social forms were by no means egalitarian, and they were based on a system of racial oppression, but they were far from individualistic.  As the historian Paul V. Murphy put it, the old southern social order “demanded of members, white and black, not only conformity to written and unwritten rules but also loyalty to an often informal but clearly defined social hierarchy.  In return, the white southerner gained a deep sense of community, identity, and family connection.  Black southerners,” Murphy continues, in deep understatement, “gained quite a bit less.”  Be that as it may, it wasn’t an individualist order the Agrarians promoted, despite their love of the term “individual.”  It was a form of group-consciousness they wanted to protect, against the atomizing forces of capitalism.


Art, Alienation, and Social Life


Another way the Agrarians distanced themselves from individualism was in their view of the proper social position of art.  Donald Davidson, for example, demanded art be integrated into the social world around it, growing out of and contributing to the life of a community, rather than serving some private vision or languishing in the aesthete’s private garret of l’art pour l’art.  “What is a picture for, if not to put on a wall?” asked Davidson.  A true artist, in his view, doesn’t produce work in which “the aesthetic experience is curtained off” but rather makes work that will be “mixed up with all sorts of instruments and occupations pertaining to the round of daily life.”


I suppose one could try to work out some relation to the Frankfurt school insistence on the social nature of all art, perhaps invoking Adorno’s well-known claim, in “Lyric Poetry and Society,” that even the seemingly private form of expression that is the lyric poem, a form of expression at odds with any social pressure represents a kind of shared social experience.  “The lyric work of art’s withdrawal into itself, its self-absorption, its detachment from the social surface,” says Adorno, “is socially motivated behind the author’s back.”  But that’s not where the really striking connection is.  The really striking connection is between Davidson’s Agrarian thinking and the avant-gardism of Dadaist and Surrealist thinking. 


Consider this: Davidson wants to return art from its ivory tower to the world of daily, lived experience, integrating it into daily life.  While his particular paths to this goal differ from those of Tristan Tzara or André Breton, his general goal is exactly that of these considerably freakier figures.  Dada and Surrealism were dedicated to breaking down the barriers set up by aestheticism, and by institutions like museums, between art and daily life.  For Breton, this was the true path of revolution.  For Davidson, it was a return to a more genteel past.  But for both, the goal was to end the alienation of the poet or artist from society.


*


In the end, we can think of figures as diverse as Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, on the one hand, and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, on the other, as people working in good faith with the different traditions they inherited to fight the excesses of the global system in which they found themselves.  Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that they have not only profound differences but very real similarities.


*


[Note that I am having a secret argument with myself here: an article I wrote some time ago, "Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism" begins with the claim "no one would confuse the political dreams of the Fugitives with those of the Frankfurt School."  If you want to see that line of reasoning, it'll be out in 2012 in a book called Re-Reading the New Criticism, edited by Miranda Hickman and John MacIntyre (Ohio State University Press)].

Beyond Close Reading and the G.I. Bill: A Secret History of the New Criticism

What's that you say? You can't make it down to Tulsa, Oklamoma next week to hear me talk about the New Criticism and read my poems at the eighth annual Modernist Studies Association Conference? You're kidding! What are we going to do about this terrible state of affairs? Oh, come on. No whining. Okay, fine. But only since you insist. Here's the paper I'm giving.

If any of you ever want to cite it in some dusty academic article, or perhaps attack it in a firey editorial, you can pretend you were in Tulsa and give it the full treatment:

Archambeau, Robert. "Beyond Close Reading and the G.I. Bill: A Secret History of the New Criticism," Modernist Studies Association Convention, Tulsa Oklahoma, October 22, 2006.

The essay is based on some material I was asked to eject, as irrelevant to my main argument, from the Laureates and Heretics manuscript. I did so at the behest of the very sharp and well-informed anonymous reader evaluating it for the press, a reader I'm increasingly convinced has to be Keith Tuma (J'accuse, Keith!).

Oosh. I just realized that I'll have to come back to this post and fix all the formatting errors my cut-and-paste job is sure to introduce. No italics, and no footnotes will appear (and some of the "works cited," will seem irrelevant, as the works were cited in the footnotes).If you're reading this in 2008 and the italics still haven't reformatted, odds are I've given up on actually getting around to the task.

Anyway Here it is:

Beyond Close Reading and the G.I. Bill: A Secret History of the New Criticism

As I hope my attempt at a sexy title makes clear, I want to talk a little about some of the less-frequently-discussed elements of the rise of the New Criticism. The story of that rise has been told countless times in many a graduate seminar, and tends to go something like this:

Once upon a time there was a small group of men who cared about poems, but not much else. They wanted to discuss poems in terms of their form, and such was their love for poetry they wanted these poems to be perfect, for every detail to balance out every other, and for the poems to come together in wonderfully ironic wholes. They worked hard reading those poems, searching for unities and ironies and balances, and they called this hard work “close reading.” This was all a terrible mistake, but they didn’t know it, because Derrida had yet to come down from his mountain with the ten commandments of deconstruction. And the men so loved poems that they didn’t want the messiness of the world to enter into the poems, so they read the poems they loved without reference to context. They worked hard to avoid looking at history and ethics and politics, and they called this hard work “formalism.” This too was a terrible mistake, but they didn’t know it because Greenblatt had yet to come down from his mountain with the ten commandments of the New Historicism. But these men, misguided as they were, came to dominate our English Departments, because something called the G.I. Bill came along, leading behind it a long line of eager and ambitious people, a new generation of students who hadn’t been prepared for college at fancy prep schools. Someone had to find a new way to teach them, a way that didn’t depend on the students having prepped for college at Groton or Choate or some provincial equivalent. And the New Critics came forward and said they didn’t need for their students to do anything but closely read a few short poems and all would be well. But all was not well until the New Critics were driven from the land by Derrida and Greenblatt, for whom we should all give grateful thanks.

Anyone likely to be reading this — that is, anyone attending a seminar called “New Approaches to the New Criticism” — is likely to be dissatisfied with stories of this ilk. My own dissatisfactions with such stories are legion, but for the present context let me concentrate on just one: the insistence on unity where there is none to be found, really. In an oddly ironic way, those who tell stories like the one above are doing to the story of the New Critics exactly the sort of thing they are likely to condemn the New Critics for doing to a poem: taking a contradictory and dissonant thing and hammering it into something coherent, where all the parts are subordinated to an interpretive whole. What I’d like to do here, by way of chipping away at the dominant story of the New Criticism is this: I’d like to point out how the institutional imperatives that gave rise to the New Criticism within our universities also helped to exacerbate divisions that were latent in the movement from the beginning. The important institutional imperative, for my purposes, is not the need to serve a new generation of returning G.I.’s: it is the need to establish English as an autonomous discipline, a need created by the Germanic model of the university that became dominant in America in the twentieth century. My case study will be that of Yvor Winters, a New Critic who came to seem a marginal figure in the movement because his poetic and critical practices were at odds with this institutional imperative. Since I’ve indulged myself in this elaborate introduction, my demonstrations will of necessity be brief, but fret not: should you be so sadly addicted to this arcane topic that you hunger for more, I’ll be happy to inflict large chunks of my manuscript on you via email.

Autonomous Disciplines: Legitimating the Midcentury English Department

While the common story of the rise of the New Criticism isn’t wrong in emphasizing the democratizing of higher education in postwar America, there is another factor to be considered in understanding that rise. This second factor in the success of the New Critics is the emphasis of many — but, as we shall see, not all — such critics on the autonomy of literary study, and their accompanying emphasis on the autonomy of the literary object. The American university, like its German model, is predicated on the assumption of discrete and autonomous areas of knowledge, and was therefore receptive to New Critical ideas of literary study as an autonomous endeavor.

In addition to the need for a pedagogy that would suit the postwar student body, the American university turned to the New Criticism because it seemed that movement shared the universities’ amenability to an autonomous view of literature. The division-and-department administrative model of the university was one that favored the idea of autonomous areas of inquiry . This idea of clearly divided and administered knowledge-areas implies, as Gerald Graff puts it in Professing Literature, “the isolation of literature as its own autonomous mode of discourse with its own autonomous ‘mode of existence.’” Moreover, as Graff points out, the English Department’s mode of discourse and existence must, in this view, be “distinct from that of philosophy, politics, and history” and put a premium on “methods that seemed systematic and could easily be replicated” (145).

This predisposition of the American university to autonomous rather than heteronomous views of knowledge predates the New Criticism considerably, having its origins as far as the founding of Johns Hopkins University on German educational models in 1867. By and large, though, literature departments lagged behind the sciences and social sciences in developing autonomous principles for the study of their subject matter. But by the mid-1930s (just as New Critics like Brooks and Warren were launching their fledgling academic careers) the institutions were ready for change. R.S. Crane of the University of Chicago, for instance, looked to reform his own department on the autonomous principle, calling, in 1935, for a faculty that did not subordinate formal to political or moral concerns: “…men of the type of the older impressionists we could hardly use, and as for the remnants of the Humanists, there is little to be hoped for from the kind of principles — essentially political and ethical rather than esthetic in character — for which they mainly stood” (4).

Crane may not have known exactly what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t want: heteronomous principles of literature, the prevalence of which seemed to threaten to subordinate literature to politics and ethics. It should come as no surprise that three years later, in the year of Understanding Poetry’s first edition, John Crowe Ransom would look back on Crane as a visionary, and praise him as a great reformer in the famous essay “Criticism, Inc.”. By 1950, many proponents of heteronomous principles of literature and literary study in the academy had come to feel that the reformers had them up against the ropes. MLA president and Harvard professor Douglas Bush’s address to the MLA two years earlier (“The New Criticism: Some Old Fashioned Queries”) had been less an act of resistance than an angry surrender to an enemy that dismissed his own ethical and humanistic views as nothing more than “the didactic heresy” (19-20). Then, as at many an MLA conference since, the desperate pleas of the president were ignored by the eager young assistant professors, ready to make names for themselves by following the next new thing.

In an institutional environment that called out for a method of study based on autonomous principles of literature, critics like Tate and Ransom were there to supply what was needed. This is not to say that the they were nothing more than opportunists, merely that the ideas they produced happened to fit the demands of the academic/literary marketplace of the time. Then again, one can sometimes detect a whiff of opportunism in private correspondence, as when Ransom writes to Tate in 1937, saying that “I have an idea that we could really found criticism if we got together on it” and that “the professors are in an awful dither trying to reform themselves and there’s a big stroke possible for a small group that knows what it wants in giving them ideas and definitions and showing the way” (Young, John Crowe Ransom 85).

Regardless of how deliberate any particular New Critics may have been in exploiting the universities’ need for a theory of literature as an autonomous object of study, those who prospered most seemed to embrace the idea that both the method and object of literary study were autonomous. Ransom’s “Criticism, Inc.,” for example, echoes R.S. Crane’s criticism of non-autonomous methods of literary study in claiming that the unreformed English department could “almost as well announce that it does not regard itself as autonomous, but as a branch of the department of history, with the option of declaring itself occasionally a branch of ethics” (Graff 148). A year later, in 1939, Cleanth Brooks would write in The Well-Wrought Urn that, without an insistence on formalist methods, professors of literature would wake up one day to find that they had been “quietly relegated to a comparatively obscure corner of the history division” or were being “treated as sociologists, though perhaps not as a very important kind of sociologist” (235). Against these dire consequences, Brooks held up a strictly formal method of literary study. By 1951, he felt able to codify the method in a number of “articles of faith” published in The Kenyon Review under the title “The Formalist Critic.” No minor sociologist he, but a professional practitioner in a proper field of inquiry.

The literary object of New Critical literary study, too, was to be an autonomous. When W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley wrote, in “The Intentional Fallacy,” that “poetry is a feat of style,” (The Verbal Icon 4) they were codifying a position at a far pole from any notions of the poem as, say, a moral statement, an intervention in (or product of) history, an establishment of identity, or the like. This sense of the autonomy of the poem-as-poem was central to the idea of English as an autonomous discipline, and of great importance to the rise of critics like Wimsatt and Beardsley. But the triumph of this idea, fostered by an institutional structure with which it was eminently compatible, also created, or at any rate exacerbated, schisms within the New Criticism. One of these, to which we will now turn, involved the marginalization of one poet-critic associated with the movement: Yvor Winters.

The Heretic of Paraphrase

In 1951 Randall Jarrell wrote:

Is Clarity the handmaiden of Popularity, as everybody automatically assumes? How much does it help to be immediately plain? In England today few poets are as popular as Dylan Thomas — his magical poems have corrupted a whole generation of English poets, yet he is surely one of the most obscure poets who ever lived. Or take an opposite example: the poems of the students of Yvor Winters are quite as easy to understand as those which Longfellow used to read during the Children’s Hour; yet they are about as popular as those other poems (of their own composition) which grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, And Edith with golden hair used to read to Longfellow during the Poet’s Hour. If Dylan Thomas is obscurely famous, such poets as these are clearly unknown. (18-19).

These comments, published four years later in Poetry and the Age are flippant but telling, in that they encapsulate much of the New Critical critique of Wintersian poetry and poetics. That critique, in most instances, boiled down to a preference for the interestingly obscure over the plainspoken or easily paraphrasable. While Winters, in one of his less tolerant moods, could write that “many poems cannot be paraphrased and are therefore defective” (see Von Hallberg, “Yvor Winters” 804), it would only be stretching things a little to say that the standard New Critical assessment of Winters was that his later poems were defective because they could be too readily paraphrased.

This was the basic substance of John Crowe Ransom’s quarrel with Winters, and the substance of the critique that his student, Cleanth Brooks, would level at Winters. Both Ransom and Brooks objected to the statement-oriented, paraphrasable side of Winters’ poetics, and for the same reason: Winters’ work violated the autonomous principle of poetry. Two other New Critics, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, would also object to Winters’ work on the same grounds. The repeated rejections were strong enough to sting even the thick-skinned Winters, who remarked in 1953 that the young Turks of Ivy League thought of him as “lower than the carpet” (Hall 224).

Ransom explicity objects to Winters’ heteronomous principles of poetry — his subordination of formal concerns to moral concerns — in the 1941 volume that became the namesake of a movement, The New Criticism. Here he maintains that “Winters believes that ethical interest is the only poetic interest” (214). This is a problem, Ransom argues, because it looks to poetry for reasons other than “poetical interest” itself (that is, the autonomous principle of poetry):

Now I suppose [Winters] would not disparage the integrity of a science like mathematics, or physics, by saying that it offers discourse whose intention is some sort of moral perfectionism. It is motivated by an interest in mathematics, or in physics. But if mathematics is for mathematical interest, why is not poetry for poetical interest? A true-blue critic like Eliot would certainly say that it is, though he would be unwilling to explain what he meant. I think I know why all critics do not answer as Eliot would: because criticism, a dilettante and ambiguous study, has not produced the terms in which poetic interest can be stated. Consequently Winters is obliged to think that mathematics is for mathematical interest — or so I suppose he thinks — but that poetry, in order that there may be an interest, must be for ethical interest. And why ethical? Looking around among the stereotyped sorts of interest, he discovers, very likely, that ethical interest is as frequent in poetry any other one. (214).

The passage reverberates with the energies that were to bring the New Criticism to power in the universities: the science-based emphasis on a division of knowledge into discrete, autonomous fields; the condemnation of “dilettante” critics; the call for an articulation of “terms in which poetic interest can be stated” (terms, one imagines, like irony, balance, and unity — terms that stress complex structure over moral statement). Ransom takes a position that will advance New Criticism to the center of academic and literary authority. A great deal, in fact, depends upon his ability to establish the autonomous principle of literature: “there’s a big stroke possible for a small group that knows what it wants in giving [professors of English] ideas and definitions,” as Ransom wrote to Tate four years earlier. Winters, in this process, serves as a foil: he is the poet-critic who fails to grasp the autonomous principle; the representative of an outmoded, heteronomous aesthetic.

Winters, never one to let a criticism of his own work go unanswered in print, objected to Ransom’s criticism in his scathing essay “John Crow Ransom, or Thunder without God” from The Anatomy of Nonsense. Here, he claims quite rightly that Ransom has a truncated notion of Winters’ moralism, which was never as simple a matter as demanding that a poem make an overt moral statement. Instead, the poet’s responsibility is to co-ordinate rational statements about the world with the emotional connotations appropriate to those statements (In Defense of Reason 502-507). Nevertheless, Winters still maintains that the subject matter of poetry is inevitably human experience and that “it can therefore be understood only in moral terms” (506). That is, “the act of the poet” should always be “an act of moral judgment” (503). The poet, in this view, is ultimately responsible to morality, rather than to internal or formal “poetic interest” alone. This is a profoundly heteronomous idea of literature, and it is heteronomy itself, rather than any particular definition of morality, to which Ransom objects.

Brooks’ major contribution to the anti-Wintersian argument comes in the middle section of his famous essay of 1947, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” where Inquisitor Brooks fingers Winters as the leading heretic. Like Ransom, Brooks objects to Winters’ emphasis on statement on the grounds that it violates the autonomous nature of literature. “Mr. Winters’ position will furnish perhaps the most respectable example of the paraphrastic heresy,” intones the Inquisitor, naming Winters as a heretic because “he assigns primacy to the ‘rational meaning’ of the poem” (963). This is a violation of the autonomous principle of poetry because “to refer the structure of the poem to what is finally a paraphrase of the poem is to refer it to something outside of the poem” (964). For true believers free from heteronomous heresies, poems are to be judged in terms of structure and “internal order” (964) only. In addition, Winters’ is condemned for conceiving of the language of poetry as continuous with the language of “science or philosophy or theology” (964). Brooks, like Ransom, holds to the dogma that poetry is a special kind of language, and so is unsympathetic to Winters’ idea that poetry does not differ in essence from prose. While no dunking stools were available for use on heretics academy, the most powerful weapon available was deployed against the heretic Winters: he was derided, and worse, ignored.

One of last major attacks on Winters — or perhaps we should say, one of the last moments when Winters’ work is taken seriously enough by a New Critic to merit sustained attack — comes in W.K. Wimsatt’s 1954 study The Verbal Icon. Even here much of the material devoted to Winters comes in a which Wimsatt co-wrote with Monroe C. Beardsley in 1946. In addition to making light of Winters’ concerns about improperly motivated emotion, they repeat the standard New Critical case against Wintersian poetics when they say they will not embrace “the extreme doctrine of Winters, that if a poem cannot be paraphrased it is a poor poem” (35). While they are willing to use some of the ideas about the emotive qualities of poetry, they share neither Winters’ sense of the dangers of unmotivated or spontaneous emotion, nor his sense of the poem as statement. He is, for them, largely passé.

For critics like Ransom, Brooks, Wimsatt and Beadsley, the poems most favored were “obscurely famous,” centered on formal concerns, and consecrated because of those concerns. Had the Robert Lowell of Lord Weary’s Castle not been born, the New Critics would have had to invent him in a secret laboratory beneath Kenyon College’s biology building. But the poems of Yvor Winters, like those of his unnamed students in Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age, were “clearly unknown.” It was their clarity, in fact, that kept them that way. And it was his insistence on such clarity, and on a heteronomous poetic, that made him marginal in an movement that was riding high on the American university’s autonomous imperatives.

Works Cited

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