RICHARD POIRIER
the eye. From the first - this care about the ·derivation of words–
comes an emphasis on the culture encapsulated in language, preserved
there and mined by digging for puns and connotations; from the
second - a concern for heard speech - may come the emphasis
on tone and dramatic situation in the reading of literature. Given
other possible sources, from Richards, Graves, Empson, one can only
guess about lines of emergence and development. The important
point
is
simply that these notions were not necessarily political in
origin and that their assumed political effect, once they became class–
room practice, can't easily be translated into the political thinking
of men like Robert Penn Warren.
All such cautions allowed, however, the history of these ideas,
and of related ones of "objective correlative" and organicism, is less
important than are the consequences of their having been packaged,
with something like urgency, for distribution in class. I say "pack–
aged" because there are other critics - Blackmur, Burke, Brower,
Empson and Trilling are among them - whose work doesn't sub–
mit to methodologizing. Neither, for all his enormous influence, does
Leavis, about whom I'll have more to say later. The history of literary
criticism is, fortunately, not the same thing as the history of pedago–
gy,
and it is to this last that I'm addressing myself. Indeed it isn't
the fault of T. S. Eliot, or Coleridge, Emerson or even Longinus,
that
the
idea of organicism, really several contradictory ideas, is
of enormous pedagogical convenience. It's rather that organicism, as
usually interpreted, promises that a student, by commendably ener–
getic local attentions will, if his responses are "responsible to the
text," put together a puzzle at the end. All the better if that puzzle
can be completed in the fifty or sixty minutes of a classroom hour.
The implications of this emphasis have been historically as well as
politically important to literature. One result has been the promo–
tion of those works lending themselves easily for illustration, and a
corresponding evasiveness about the status of those that don't. Why
do students know more about Donne than about Jonson, more of
the relatively trivial than of the mysterious Marvell of "Upon Ap–
pleton House," more of Keats than of Shelley; why do they
all,
to
the last million, seem to have read
Dubliners
instead of some col–
lected stories of Lawrence? What "goes well," what "works" in class
has had an enormous and rigidifying effect on the shape of literary
