No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
As i understand the assignment given to me, it is to suggest a definition and defence of Historical Criticism as applied to Milton, while Mr. Brooks is to tell us how the New Criticism (as it is called) would deal with the poet. So short a time has elapsed since Mr. Eliot took down the sign reading “No Thoroughfare,” and directing an elaborate detour around Milton, that Mr. Brooks enjoys, I imagine, a freedom from embarrassing examples, which I can only envy. Again, he has at command a growing body of theory; for the New Critics have been concerned to provide their own dialectic, whereas historical students of literature have tended to work by a silent instinct of accumulation like the bee. Obviously, no one can hope to supply in a thirty-minute paper a theory of Historical Criticism, though I shall try to set down a few points towards the formation of such a theory. Nor is it any part of my purpose to attack the New Criticism in its theory or practice. First, because I do not know enough about it, being indeed somewhat in the case of Lord Monboddo. (“Have you read my last book?” asked Lord Kames. “No, my lord,” said Monboddo; “I can't read as fast as you can write.”) But secondly (and seriously) because we have had enough, I think, of mutual recrimination, and it is time for each side to make plain, without polemics, what it can do for the elucidation of Milton, in the hope that students who care more for literature than for labels may find something of use to them in both schools. For criticism, of whatever school, is a means, not an end; and the test to be applied to it is purely pragmatic: Does it or does it not throw new light on, or minister to an understanding of, the work or the author under examination? By that test alone it must stand or fall.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.