Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

The romantic attitude to science was ambivalent, however. Shelley, as we now know, made great use of scientific ideas, and it is often pointed out that Wordsworth extended Lockean associationism even as he denied it. For the post-romantic writer, especially if he was acquainted with Darwinism, science was even more seductive and even more insidious, much more like philosophy itself. Nevertheless it had been the strength of the romantic imagination, as its poets continually reminded themselves, to create a unity where there was none before. If the imagination was to continue to reign supreme then art alone must make up the kingdom. Or, in what was to become familiar phrasing: ‘art for art’s sake’, ‘l’art pour ‘l’art’.

In fact the American theory found the initial impetus for its ideas in British sources, principally the work of the Cambridge critic I.A. Richards and the American expatriate poet and critic T.S. Eliot. Moreover, several of the major New Critics were, especially in their early careers, powerfully attracted to English culture. Indeed, many leading New Critics worked at English universities and one, Cleanth Brooks, served from 1964 to 1966 as cultural attaché at the American Embassy in London. This enthusiasm for what was perceived as the English way of life was then applied to the American situation, particularly that of the deep South. In respect of general cultural analysis, as well as critical method, there were real similarities between American and British theoretical developments between the wars, and the New Critics and their British colleagues did much to establish the discipline of English literature as it is today, for it was in these years that its characteristic methods and approaches were laid down.

The new criticism is the name given to the major movement in American criticism this century. Its origins are to be found in the 1920s, and its developed theory was articulated by 1950. Thereafter it exerted a powerful influence on the practice of criticism and student study of literature until the late 1960s, and has remained a benchmark for subsequent developments. Recent Anglo-American post-structuralist theories, for instance, have frequently proceeded through rejection of its proposals, or those of its British equivalent, Practical Criticism.

One effect on romantic criticism of the search for a lost—perhaps never existent—ideal childhood or youth is the difficulty of separating the romantics’ critical works from their imaginative autobiographies. Many major critical statements of the British romantics invoke organic critical principles that parallel the process of maturation marking their personal growth and development. The most influential work of English romantic criticism is Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817). After tracing the growth of a critic’s mind in the early chapters of the work, Coleridge in his more formal critical theory builds on the work of Wordsworth, Schiller and Schlegel, among many others, to point to the close relationship between the universal power of the human mind to organize the data of experience into meaningful relationships—the power that the child uses to come to terms with the ‘other’ outside himself—and the power of the poet to reorganize such fundamental experience into a new and more satisfying order.

As is clear from the belated struggles of Slavophile romantics against such Russian utilitarians as V.G. Belinsky, N.G. Chernyshevsky and N.A. Dobrolyubov, romantic criticism tended not only to be nationalistic but to defend the great poets and dramatists of their own national heritage against the advocates of classical rules, who tended to glorify Roman and, above all, ‘rational’ Italian and French neo-classical art as superior to the native traditions of the Spanish Golden Age, the English Elizabethans and Germanic folk literature.

Reality is no longer a cast list of round characters with intersecting perspectives on the world, for the world is no longer a consensual field of vision. In Joyce and Faulkner, reality is a swiftly moving target bombarded by heteroglot styles from all angles and distances. In Virginia Woolf, there is no threshold over which consciousness must pass in the mellifluous triangle of narrator, character and reader. It suffuses all being, or rather creates a chain of being without visible boundaries. In Marcel Proust, memory bursts in like an unexpected guest on the present instant excited by a sound or a smell, a cake or a flagstone, and the mundane world is made ecstatic through resemblances.

This flexible and composite narrative medium, one always controlled from a vantage point in the future of the events being narrated, literally maintains by this ceaseless relay the medium of time itself, just as the single-point perspective in Renaissance painting co-ordinates all angles of vision into a common horizon. In narrative, this co-ordination is distributed over a sequence and depends on a collected consciousness to maintain it, a more intangible feat perhaps than the visual co-ordinations of realistic space, but equally powerful in extending to infinity the human capabilities it thereby inscribes.