Abstract
Writing about the changes in Renaissance and early modern literary studies, Leah Marcus says: “Pace T. S. Eliot and the New Critics, the lyric has lost its centrality in seventeenth-century studies and been replaced by less elitist genres such as the drama.”1 The elitism to which she objects has less to do with the status of lyric poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than with its status in modern criticism. It is certainly the case that modernist criticism privileged lyric poetry and that, for both the New Critics in this country and the Scrutiny group in England, poetry mattered because it implicitly resisted the forces of democracy, industrialism, and technology. Since the 1960s, there has been a widespread reaction against the values and procedures of modernist criticism, which are frequently stigmatized as formalist. Some of the main forms of current interest in Renaissance lyric—such as the attention to poetry as courtly display and maneuvering and to manuscript circulation among various coteries—are consciously antiformalist. Hence Marcus says, “It is arguable that the new work on the cultural construction of the lyric will stimulate a revival of critical and pedagogical interest in the genre, but the lyric will not be the same transcendent, serenely aloof artifact it was for earlier generations of scholars.”2 Putting the case this way simply reinscribes the problem. It brings out how much today’s historicizing interests are motivated by antagonism to yesterday’s New Criticism.
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Notes
Leah Marcus, “The Seventeenth Century,” in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: The Modern Language Association, 1992), 48.
Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, eds., Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
John Crowe Ransom, “Shakespeare at Sonnets,” in The World’s Body (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 270. This essay was first published in The Southern Review 3 (1938): 531–53.
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), ix.
Poetry 53 (1939): 258–72, 320–35; 54 (1939): 35–51; reprinted in Paul Alpers, Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 93–125. The discussion of Shakespeare is in the last of these essays (pages 120–22 in Alpers).
John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk: New Directions, 1941), 211.
John Crowe Ransom, Selected Essays, ed. Thomas Daniel Young and John Hindle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 197. Ransom’s essay, “Poetry: I, The Formal Analysis,” first appeared in Kenyon Review 9 (1947): 436–56.
Kenneth Burke, “Key Words for Critics,” Kenyon Review 4 (1942): 126.
Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969),
and Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Booth responds to the “red flag” of “Shakespeare at Sonnets” by saying, “I propose to implement Ransom’s complaint, to expand it, and to redefine the failure as a strength” (Essay, 24–25).
Yvor Winters, “Poetic Styles, Old and New,” in Four Poets on Poetry, ed. Don Cameron Allen (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), 51.
Allen Tate, “Tension in Poetry” (1938), in The Man of Letters in the Modern World: Selected Essays, 1928–1955 (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 68.
Jonathan Culler, “The Modern Lyric: Generic Continuity and Critical Practice,” in The Comparative Perspective on Literature, ed. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 292.
L. C. Knights, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Explorations (1946, reprint New York: New York University Press, 1964), 62. This essay first appeared in Scrutiny 3 (1934): 133–60. Knights is speaking of lines in Richard II’s soliloquy at Pomfret (RII 5.5.45–60), but he means this formulation to apply generally to early Shakespeare.
Arthur Mizener, “The Structure of Figurative Language in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” The Southern Review 5 (1940): 730–47; revised in A Casebook on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Gerald Willen and Victor B. Reed (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1964), 222.
In reporting what editors say, I have in mind the following editions of the Sonnets: ed. Willen and Reed (above, note 38); ed. Booth (note 19); ed. W G. Ingram and Theodore Redpath (London: University of London Press, 1964); ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986); ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, “The Arden Shakespeare,” 3rd series (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997); ed. Helen Vendler (below, note 45).
Michael Drayton, Idea 9, in Alastair Fowler, ed., The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 38.
See, for example, “Shakespeare’s ‘Perjured Eye’“ in Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western literary Tradition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 91–119, esp. 111.
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of literary Form, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 1. Original edition published 1941.
H. M. McLuhan, “Poetic vs. Rhetorical Exegesis,” The Sewanee Review 52 (1944): 268.
Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). As with Booth’s commentary, I do not give page references for Vendler’s discussions of individual sonnets.
William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk: New Directions, 1960), 96.
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© 2002 Mark David Rasmussen
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Alpers, P. (2002). Learning from the New Criticism. In: Rasmussen, M.D. (eds) Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07177-4_6
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