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Righter) elucidate things about poetry that everyone must consider. Our
judgment and Eliot's may be at odds in some degree, but they are not
wholly irreconcilable. By recognizing that Eliot's judgment implies
criteria and"that these, in turn, bespeak a particular encounter with
art,
the way lies open for some form of reconciliation-at best, the transla–
tion of Eliot's terminology ("intellect at the tips of the senses" and all
the rest of it) into the language generated by our own critical neces–
sities; at worst, what Mr. Righter calls "a kind of negative agreement,"
in
which
both we and Eliot go ,our separate ways in peace.
The demon in the machine, for Mr. Righter, is the phantom of
exactness. By accepting the meanings of our critical terminology as they
are
recognized outside the context of literary discussion, and nailing
down their implications, we imagine ourselves on the way to settling
the nature of poetic experience, when actually we have opened an
endless squabbling over words, or sensibilities, or both. Of the New
Critics Mr. Righter observes that their particular language was govern–
ed by the need to distinguish between poetry and a form of speech
peculiar ' to the twentieth century- the depleted, corrupted, mass-pr.o–
duced locutions of the daily newspapers, advertising, the popular arts.
But this difference, like the endlessly variable substance of art itself,
escapes final determination ; our sense of this difference (and the ter.ms
we choose
to
designate it) will inevitably depend upon accidents of
personal history and constitution, upon the particular qualities of mass
speech that happen to impede our own surrender to the poetic ex–
perience. The New Criticism, concludes Mr. Righter, has succumbed
to
the fatal allure of exactness out of some misguided admiration for
the supposed rigor and precision of science.
The imputation of scientism has often been leveled against the
New Criticism, most recently by John Holloway, whose work figures
often in Mr. Righter's pages. But I do not think it is because of their
hankerings after experimental techniques, as Mr. Righter implies.
The "scientism" of the New Critics comes from their ambition to dis–
criminate between the consciousness of literature as such and our means
of relating to it-an ambition that Mr. Righter's own book means to
realize. For it is science that provides the model of a language dis–
tinguishing our apprehension of the object itself from the various rela–
tions to
it
afforded by different perspectives. The New Critics took
poetry-the thing itself, apart from current accommodations to it-as
something that mattered, and extravagantly. Nevertheless it seemed to
them possible to ignore one's conviction for the most part, as Eliot had
done, and treat poetry with an enforced neutrality, as a kind of
ancestral magic that has survived into the modern world, whose powers
