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allowed us to see, for instance, that Yvor Winters's "fallacy of imitative
form" was a shorthand signal of his distrust of modernist literature, a
literature in which that "fallacy" has been put to brilliant use.
In turn, the New Critics may have profited from our insistence that
literature was rooted in the soil of history and that critical judgment
could not be closed off, in some vacuum of purity, from the moral and
social dispositions of the critic. Allen Tate had defined the New
Criticism as distinguished by "a hostility to, or neglect of the 'histori–
cal method' "-by which I suppose he meant the peculiarly sterile
version of "historical method" that flourished some decades ago in the
academy. But the joke of it is that the work of the best New Critics is
saturated with historical awareness-you need only look at Tate's essay
on Emily Dickinson, Austin Warren's essays on the New England
writers.
It
barely matters which group learned more from the other. What
made for a lively critical atmosphere in the forties and fifties was that
the two groups clashed in an abrasive friendliness over "positions" that
involved attitudes toward a modernist literature they both admired as
well as questions of how to defend or redefine the terms of civilization.
I think the "positions" of both groups melted away under the pressures
of circumstance, but that hardly matters.
The happiest situation for the critic occurs when he is struggling
in behalf of a great new literary movement or cultural impulse, say,
Hazlitt for the romantics, Eliot for the modernists. Those of us under
seventy are really latecomers to the struggle for modernism, indeed,
witnesses to the excess-and excesses-of its triumph. And we have no
equivalent occasion for taking up our energies and interests. The
critics in my own time that I have most envied were not literary at all;
they were art critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg
who declared themselves intellectual advocates of a major new group
in modern art, the abstract expressionists. That this probably led them
to
occasional foolishness and fanaticism seems hardly to matter as
much as the energy and incentive they were able to gain from a close
supportive relationship to major artists.
If
critics do well in such a relationship, they may also do well at
times when their ideologies, their grand systems, have started to
decompose. The best work of the New York critics was done when the
power of Marxism could still be felt, but not felt so strongly as
to
make
everything fixed and predictable. Marxism in decomposition offered a
spur to improvising, to the release of personality, to moving
a little
