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PARTISAN REVIEW
ing. Certainly the whole school of the New Criticism did, and one
learned really quite a lot from it. I'm not interested now in either
writing or reading criticism at all. I don't know whether that's just
personal or whether it reflects something of the present state of
affairs.
PM:
Did Auden encourage you to write more criticism?
SS:
No , Auden was not at all interested in criticism. He wrote some
himself, of course, but it was always written from an extremely per–
sonal point of view; it was a kind of commonsense criticism, multi–
plied by a certain zany quality of Auden himself. But I don't think he
read any literary criticism.
I know very few writers who really are interested in criticism,
in spite of everything that's said. Robert Graves didn't read criti–
cism; I'm sure Yeats didn't either. I don't think Eliot read anyone
else's criticism very much .
There was a time when writers had to pretend that they were
interested in criticism, because the critics, especially the New Critics ,
were so formidable.
One does learn to read more critically, but over a long period of
time. I think that I understand what Eliot was trying to do in his
poetry, really through reading his criticism. So to that extent, his
criticism has been helpful. Also the whole idea that poetry is the
manipulation of language and that what you are doing only exists
within the language itself- I think I've learned that through the
analyses of people's poems made by critics .
SR:
In other words, Eliot is rather an exception in writing criticism
and poetry.
SS:
Well , Eliot was always writing his best criticism from the point of
view of a poet who was, as it were, clearing space for himself to write
his poetry. In that way, his early criticism is very like the criticism
you get in Keats's letters, for instance . It's the criticism of a working
poet who's setting goals for himself.
SR:
What is it that turned you toward those critical studies that
you've done?
SS:
Being in part a journalist, I have the awful habit of thinking of
books that I would like to read and then I make the mistake of think–
ing that I can write them. For instance,
Love-Hate Relations
about
American and English relations is really a very good idea for a book
which someone else ought to have written, but which I wrote myself.
I don't have any scholarship at all; I'm really very unscholarly. And I
think that book suffers from my lack of scholarship; I'm not really
