New Critical Approaches to Poetry

From Analysis to Critical Essay

This Is Just To Say (Intrinsic)

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold.
  

Lack of punctuation; The title irregular syntax

This Is Just To Say (Extrinsic)



William Carlos Williams experimenting with type-writer the influence of Imagism and Haiku Comparison with Shall I Compare Thee to a Summars Day?

Free Associations?

This Is Just To Say : Main Idea for Paper Writing?



1. Despite the apparently casual title and syntax matching the banality of its topic, the poem reveals and celebrates the sensual beauty of daily objects.

The Welsh Hill Country: reading process & Paper writing

1. Find out the contrast between sheep . . . Arranged romantically and the fluke, the foot-rot and the fat maggot  Do we write down the summary right after the first reading?


The Welsh Hill Country

Images of decay and death:  The fluke and foot-rot and the fat maggot;  The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys,  The nettles growing through the cracked doors,  The houses stand empty  the slow pthisis Wasting his frame

The Welsh Hill Country

Further contrasts:  Gnawing grazing a man farming  arranged romantically contribute grimly to the accepted pattern

Before New Criticism

Extrinsic studies: e.g. biographic studies, textual scholarship (historical studies), Impressionist approach,  New Criticism: set up literary studies as a profession  // Russian Formalism


New Criticism: Historical context

After the second world war  Like existentialism, New Criticism tries to retain human values.  New Critics 1. re-direct critical attention from the external to the internal (textual), 2. Upholds liberal humanism in face of worldly chaos. (The most valuable is our free will.)


New Criticism: Basic Principles

   

1. "the text and the text alone" approach 2. a poem as an autonomy 3. objective correlative (T.S. Eliot) 4. intentional fallacy v.s. the poets mind as a catalyst 5. affective fallacy :

New Criticism: Basic Principles (2)

  

6. The texts meaning -- reside within its own structure. 7. organic unity. ** organic unity--all parts of a poem are interrelated and interconnected, with each part reflecting and helping to support the poem's central idea. ...allows for the harmonization of conflicting ideas, feelings, and attitudes, ...

New Criticism on Poetry



 

1. Search for oppositions in the text: e.g. paradox, ambiguity, irony 2. Study the poetic elements closely. e.g. prosody 3. From Parts to an Organic Wholeness