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and pedagogical program. At stake for the early practitioners of this
criticism was nothing less than the salvation of culture from the triv–
ializing and depersonalizing influences of science and commerce.
Whether conservative or liberal in political outlook, first-generation
New Criticism did not break completely with the sociocultural criti–
cism of Van Wyck Brooks and Edmund Wilson. That break was
effected by the next generation, which domesticated New Criticism
to the needs of the academic journal and the undergraduate class ,
divested it of most of its cultural rationale, and turned it into an
instrument for producing "explications." Roger Meiners has made
the interesting and, I think, true point that the original American
New Critics-Ransom, Tate , Warren , Wimsatt , Blackmur-actu–
ally practiced pure explication less extensively than their reputations
would suggest, that the textual analysis one finds in their essays was
usually part of a larger cultural commentary, or at least was subor–
dinated to a general issue. Even when this was not the case, textual
analysis itself was often a sort of closet social criticism, a reading of
the poem at hand as an allegorical critique of the Dissociated Sensi–
bility, technocratic reductionism , or wasteland secularism of modern
culture. Pure explication as an end in itself, explication-for-explica–
tion's-sake, unsituated in any context, was a later development , and
was not necessarily what the first-generation New Critics had in
mind or approved. Thus Eliot in his late writings would deplore
what he called" the lemon-squeezer school of criticism" -the very
school that Eliot had been credited with inventing!
And yet, even though the New Critics themselves practiced a
sociocultural approach to literature, they rarely owned up to that
practice in their theories of literature and criticism. In theory, liter–
ary works were autonomous entities, and though what that meant
was never anything so simple as the art-for-art's-sake formalism it
has sometimes been made out to be, it did encourage the later reduc–
tion of criticism to context-free explication. To be sure, the damag–
ing effects of that reduction on critical publication and pedagogy
were not immediately obvious. Excitement over the interpretive
wonders produced by pure explication had not totally died out by
the end of the fifties. But it took no genius to perceive that pure
explication was subject to a law of diminishing returns. As explica–
tions of the canonical texts accumulated to the point of repetitive–
ness, explication was forced, in order to say anything new , either to
focus on more marginal texts or to become more eccentric, though
interpretive eccentricity would soon be justified as revolutionary
