“He whom nature has made weak and idleness
keeps ignorant may yet support his vanity by the
name of a critic.”
—Samuel Johnson

Not too long ago we devoted an issue to the death of serious art. While there may be many objections to the thesis that popular culture has replaced painting, the symphony, and the drama, there is no doubt that the estate of poetry is as low as it has ever been in the long history of our civilization. The decadence of poetry is a more serious affair than similar developments in music, painting, and sculpture. Of all high arts, poetry best expresses the character of a civilization. Heroic poetry embodies the living history and traditions of a people, while other genres like tragedy and satire provide the most powerful weapons for attacking pressing problems of politics and social ethics. Unlike philosophy or science, which can have a direct influence only on a tiny minority, poetry is a part of everyone’s life from the time we first hear “Little Boy Blue.”

These sentiments are hardly novel. They were not even original with Matthew Arnold, who did so much to give them currency. In his own lifetime, Arnold had witnessed the moral collapse of Christianity in England and the rise of a scientific world view that threatened to undermine all systems of value. Against both these forces, old and new, Arnold put his faith in culture, specifically poetry:

More and more mankind will discover that we have to tum to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

—”The Study of Poetry”

It was a noble-albeit blasphemous-answer to a generation that had begun to doubt of everything received. Arnold had strong reservations about even the best poetry of the I 9th century, including his own. The problem with nearly all of English verse, he believed, was a lack of discipline. The remedy lay in criticism, whose function is to make us “perpetually dissatisfied with these works, while they perpetually fall short of a high and perfect ideal.” The Victorians did not, he insisted, live in anything like a Golden Age—”the promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon” (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”). Arnold clearly saw himself as a Moses able to lead his people out of the desert but unable himself to pass over Jordan.

It is hard to avoid the feeling that a great deal of modem literary history, in England and the U.S., has been a series of efforts to fulfill (or refute) Arnold’s magisterial pronouncements. While A. E. Housman thought the critic was the rarest thing on God’s green earth, criticism has, in fact, become the occupation of thousands of English professors and literary interpreters, whose published works would more than fill the shelves of a decent-sized college library. Apart from the more obviously prominent journals like the PMLA and distinguished period journals like Victorian Studies, there are literally thousands of publications devoted to every imaginable author and period and edited from nearly every conceivable perspective. For a young assistant professor, it must be glorious: How could he fail to place at least two articles a year? Who will read them is another matter.

And yet, for all this activity and busyness since Arnold’s time, there is rather clear evidence that poetry does not play the role he had imagined for it. So far from replacing religion, the faith endures—at least in the more backward sections of the U.S.—while the influence of the sciences has continued to wax strong, and not just in the academy. Now, during this period, we have witnessed the rise and fall of New Criticism (and much new poetry), the projectivist theories of Charles Olson and his friends, Freudian interpretations—especially as mystified by the French—sociological criticism, and currently the antics of professors who are paid to go about the world “deconstructing” everything except their own inflated prose.

The older generation of critics is understandably disturbed by literary hooligans who make smug pronouncements on texts and subtexts and airily dismiss aU considerations of genre and tradition while at the same time destroying the distinction between writing and reading. In principle, “deconstruction” is an attack on the professional privileges of critics and professors: if every interpretation is valid, if every reading constitutes a “text,” what do we need critics and teachers for? In practice, however, it doesn’t work that way. As Michel de Certeau points out:

By its very nature available to a plural reading, the text becomes a cultural weapon, a private hunting reserve1 the pretext for a law that legitimizes as “literal” the interpretation given by socially authorized professionals and intellectuals. If the reader’s expression of his freedom through the text is tolerated among intellectuals (Clercs) (only someone like Barth es can take this liberty), it is on the other hand denied students (who are scornfully driven or cleverly “coaxed” back to the meaning “accepted” by their teachers) or the public (who are carefully told “what is to be thought”).

In this respect, deconstructionists are a great deal like those Marxist revolutionaries who monopolize all power in the name of the people. To this extent they are simply behaving like other critics. But on the other hand, for all their foolishness and the subliterate slang they prefer to English and French, they have a point: the main function of criticism in the 20th century has been to establish a clerical elite authorized to tell us what literature really means. Whatever their political views, most critics have functioned as cultural conservatives.

This comes out clearly in the case of F. R. Leavis, who viewed himself as part of that tiny minority on whom “the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends.” In several respects, Leavis was a reactionary: he hated ma chines, mass culture, and the pretensions of American upstarts like Max Eastman. But he was not alone in viewing critics as a literary aristocracy charged with preserving the best of the past and browbeating the mob into submission. Many of the American New Critics-John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Allen Tate-held similar views about 20th-century civilization.

But faith in tradition cannot be translated directly into social influence. T. S. Eliot was, after all, the most influential poet and critic of the years before the Second World War, but Eliot tended to influence individuals, not groups. He went so far as to express aversion to the idea that his works should be required reading in schools. For all his ponderings of literary questions, Eliot never worked out a system-a flaw which was detected and held against him by the New Critics who came to prominence in the 30’s. In fact, there is a great difference between the kind of critical writing practiced by Eliot and the sort that has been espoused by full-time critics (Eliot was kept busy as poet, dramatist, and businessman). While most modem critics have attempted to elevate their art up to (and sometimes beyond) the level of poetry and fiction, the author of The Waste Land was more concerned to defend the honor of his craft.

Eliot at first maintained a very restricted view of criticism as mere comment and exposition, but in later years he came to appreciate and practice the larger and more liberal speculation of Arnold. What he did not give up was the conviction that unlike poetry, criticism was not an “autotelic activity,” i.e., an end in itself. For a time he was tempted to believe that only poets had any business setting up for critics and never gave up the idea that “the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest criticism.” As for interpreting texts-the main business of most contemporary critics—he considered it legitimate only “when it is not interpretation at all, but merely putting the reader in possession of facts which he would otherwise have missed.” But facts do not ordinarily come within the provenance of criticism—much less New Criticism, which relegates most facts to one or another of its favorite “fallacies.” It is scholarship which Eliot praises, good old-fashioned philological pedantry. He exclaims with some asperity that “any book, any essay, any note in Notes and Queries which produces a fact of even the lowest order about a work of art is a better piece of work than nine-tenths of the most pretentious critical journalism, in journals or in books.”

When Eliot made these observations in “The Function of Criticism” (1923), the literary world was on the brink of a revolution in critical methods inaugurated largely by I.A. Richards. What Richards and the other New Critics brought was not so much new ideas about the nature of literature or even of the function of criticism (although they were infused with an unholy zeal for their discipline). What made them revolutionaries was the very practice which Eliot had denigrated: interpretation. Richards called it “practical criticism,” and he introduced his method of studying texts—stripped of all context including authorship—into the instruction and examinations at Cambridge, whence it has made its way to nearly every English department in the world. In his book Practical Criticism (1929), Richards announced the birth of a “new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel about poetry . . . and why they should like or dislike it.”

Properly read, Richards’ announcement can be viewed as the program for much of the criticism produced in the following 50 years. It is important to notice both the subjective, emotional element (“what they think and feel”) and the authoritarian (“why they should like it”), because it is this special combination of unverifiable intuition and academic orthodoxy which gives literary interpretation its special character.

For Richards, the interpretive key was psychology, and he insisted that the critics’ first job was to arrive at “the mental condition relevant to the poem.” In practical terms, it has proved impossible to determine exactly what that condition was. Is it the poet’s mental condition? Hardly, for that would involve what the New Critics learned to call the intentional fallacy. If critics disagreed over an interpretation, the question would have to be settled (presumably) by the one more adept at entering the appropriate literary trance. Most critics would respond to the dilemma with something like this: the validity of interpretations depends on the degree to which they are confirmed by the text. (But, as the deconstructionists are apt to point out, what exactly do you mean by text?) Many articles seem to be written from indexes and concordances and attempt to show significant patterns of image, symbol, or theme. Can we judge such performances by the number of words and lines they are able to explicate? The very fact that there is such a wild variety of interpretations of significant works must call into question the idea that literary analysis has an objective basis.

This does not mean, it goes without saying, that interpretation is an open process—far from it, since it is up to the duly licensed critics to decide which sorts of feelings and mental states are actually relevant. Now, if a blockhead in Greek class is corrected by a teacher, he can easily ascertain the rightness or wrongness of the correction. Points of history, grammar, and metrics are open to investigation. Facts have a fine and democratic quality. But interpretation is a hieratic mystery, closed to all but the initiates who have learned to recite and manipulate the sacred language.

Interpretive criticism has come a long way since Prof. Richards first developed his system. New schools have risen and fallen with the grim regularity of pre-Socratic philosophy—error replacing error. Richards’ own theories have now all the vitality of Ozymandias’ statue—look on, ye mortals and despair! The New Critics had set sail for that Golden Age promised by Arnold but found themselves lost in their own subjectivity: “Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,” wrote Ezra Pound. Richards himself thought his methods would be picked up by unscrupulous poets “desiring to increase their sales,” but in looking back, we cannot say that all their efforts have resulted in a widespread appreciation of poetry, much less in the refinement of the art itself. Of the poets in Britain and America who have made a noise in the world—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Frost—or have enjoyed a universal critical reputation—Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden—almost all were practicing their craft before they were exposed to any of the new critical theories. The exceptions go a long way toward proving the rule. Dylan Thomas, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, and Stevie Smith are all postwar poets with large followings, but none of them has cared much for formal criticism.

It is easier to see the impact of criticism on the readership 50 years ago. American high school and college students seem to have enjoyed some kinds of poetry. Ordinary people read Frost, and many of us can remember parents and grandparents who could quote yards of Tennyson and Shakespeare.

Now, nobody reads the poets except persons whose livelihood is at stake, and even they don’t profess to like it much (as C.S. Lewis was early in pointing out). It’s all very strange, since nearly half the population is going to college, most of them taking at least a year of English where they are instructed in Sound and Sense or Understanding Poetry. Perhaps that is the problem. I remember all too well the professorial yammerings on the real meaning of books I had once been simple enough to enjoy and the relief I felt on entering a class in chemistry or German: at least the scientists and pedants were not always poking at some poor fellow’s motives and meaning or fiddling with the buttons on a corpse.

Our meddling intellect
misshapes the beauteous forms of things—
we murder to dissect.

Wordsworth was not the soundest of critics, but he was a good prophet. How many students have spent two years in English classes, only to discover that poetry was too complicated for their poor heads, that poems were riddles constructed to trap the unwary and give opportunities to glib girls who learned to parrot the professor’s line?

Of course, there is a place for critics and men of letters. But their role, to use Allen Tate’s language, has more to do with evaluation than “the Communication of insights.” This evaluation must have an ethical base, at the very least. As Tate put it, “There would be no hell for modem man if our men of letters were not calling attention to it” (“The Marr of Letters in the Modern World”). We may even have an interest in what an Allen Tate or a Cleanth Brooks has to say about the meaning of a poem. (Donald Davidson’s essays on Hardy, I must confess, came as a revelation.) But, in general, what is the point to a hermeneutic criticism when it is not directed to ethical or religious ends? The greatest critics of the past never practiced it. They were either philosophical (or rhetorical) theorists like Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge, or critics in the truest sense like Johnson, who groped for standards of good and bad. Even Arnold, who wrote a great deal about the qualities of various poets, did not generally stoop to explanation. Arnold was a gentleman, and gentlemen—we used to be told-never explained. For what most critics do now, I can only think of two obvious parallels: allegorical interpretation and scriptural hermeneutics.

Literary texts can lose their relevance for some part (or all) of a culture. If the texts have acquired an almost sacred character—like Homer—this presents a problem. The Iliad and Odyssey are filled with scenes which later Greeks, especially philosophers, found distasteful. Perhaps the worst were those in which the gods fought with each other. Plato wanted to expel Homer, along with all poets, from his Republic, but the Stoics preferred to see a hidden allegorical meaning in all the divine struggles. Of course, they distorted the text at the same time as they preserved it. Ovid underwent a similar treatment in the later Middle Ages. In each age, the emergence of interpretive criticism was the sign of a great” cultural discontinuity between the texts and the interpreters.

A more obviously relevant analogy is the long tradition of scriptural exegesis. The writings of the Old and New Testaments were composed over a period of several thou sand years in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. By the time of the Roman Empire, Jewish scriptures required explication and commentary, and by our time there is hardly a line that has not received volumes of attention. Not only is this the result of cultural discontinuity, but the stakes are even considerably higher than they were in the case of Homer. For believers—Jewish and Christian—a proper under standing of scripture is essential if we are to be in a proper relationship to our Creator. For the Protestant Christian, the salvation of his soul can depend on a correct interpretation of certain test passages.

This brings us back once again to Arnold and his sincere wish to see poetry pick up the religion’s fallen torch. In an earlier age of unbelief, Nero, so the rumor went, played the lyre and sang while much of the imperial city burned to the ground. It need not be added that Nero had lost his faith in the gods of Rome-or that he blamed the fire on the Christians. But contrary to Arnold’s expectations, we faith less moderns are not fiddling or versifying. Instead, we devote our efforts to interpreting the sacred texts of Melville, D.H. Lawrence, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But rather than winning converts, the major effect of this monumental scribbling has been to broaden the gap between serious literature and popular audiences. To his credit, Leavis recognized part of the problem. He lamented the rise of the highbrow/lowbrow distinction and pointed out the success of Hamlet, which “appealed at a number of levels of response” in 17th-century England. But Leavis’ only prescription turned out to be a fastidious recoil from all the coarseness and vulgarity of modern life. A few voices were raised in protest—notably Hart Crane, who insisted on the poet’s need to assimilate the machine age. But in the end, Crane, too, is grist for the hermeneutic mill, and he is condemned to reenact his sordid life and tragic suicide a thousand times a year for the entertainment of modern poetry classes.

If poetry is anything worth all this attention and if poets have in fact anything to tell us, then we owe it to them not to interfere in that intensely personal relationship between poets and their audiences. Ancient books need expositors, but if the poets of recent centuries have not succeeded in making their meaning plain enough for a reader, why should we bother? Perhaps a student will not savor all the significance in “Burnt Norton” or Donne’s sonnets, but what he can make out for himself (with the help of a few notes) will be his forever. Reading literature is a kind of marriage of two minds, but when an interpreter slips in to exercise his droit du seigneur, he takes all the honesty and half the pleasure out of the experience.