Comrades

Allen Tate

This guy was a true BFF, and the story of how we met is just so darn cute. Of all places, it happened at the famous Parisian haunt of existentialists, the Café des Deux Magots. There was nothing I couldn't talk to Allen about—publications, teaching posts, editorships—we were that close. As VIPs of the academic world, we made careers and brought writers into the limelight. Most importantly, we shared a special affection for Southern Agrarian writers, like William Faulkner.

Robert Penn Warren

When you write a textbook with someone, you really get to know him. Well, Red (a nickname we gave him because of his red hair) and I co-wrote four of them—An Approach to Literature (1936), Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Modern Rhetoric (1949). We were on a mission to get American undergrads to love literature. On top of that, we co-edited The Southern Review (on far-flung newsstands everywhere). Our friendship was forged over a shared love of literature. In our free time, we talked about poets like T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell.

John Crowe Ransom

John was another one of my New Critic bros. Together, we held hope that if people could appreciate a poem as a self-contained object, they would see the beauty of the rhythm, language, and structure and stop thinking about whether the couplet implied some sort of anal retentiveness on the part of the poet.

Rivals

Before I tell you a few of my favorite rivals, I must say that there were a lot of people against New Criticism. They generally fall under the category of New Historicists, but the conspiracy—I mean, um, the criticism—went further and wider than that. It plagued entire English departments, where people would go to war over whether a poem should be read as a self-contained object or whether it should be read as something that could tell us about the psychology of the author or the history and politics of the author's world.

Crazy, right?

Terry Eagleton

This Marxist so-and-so is a real opponent of New Criticism. He felt it was his job to "rescue" poetry from New Critics, as if we were crooks throwing poetry in the trunk of a car and speeding into the desert. He even accused us of turning poets into "fetishes." Such a Marxist. All he cared about was class struggle; why didn't he just go into the History Department instead?

Van Wyck Brooks

Have you ever wanted to just wanted to walk up to someone and say, "Yo, what's your problem with New Criticism?" Well, Van Wyck really got on my wick because he just had nothing positive to say about anything I did. This dude was old school—it's like he was stuck in the 19th century with this idea that the poet was a larger-than-life Great Man who spoke for the people and was the voice of the era.

Van Wyck once accused the New Critics of "doubting the progress of everything save criticism—their own criticism" (source). Ouch.

Alfred Kazin

This high-roller American literary critic wasn't so much against New Criticism as he was against our Southern Agrarian scene. He accused us of being overly idealistic about the South, of creating myths, and of inflating the role of the critic. In short, I think he thought that we were small-minded, that because we thought everything came back to the poem, Southern Agrarianism remained just some fantasy that we didn't really understand and could only locate in a poem. I'll have to give some thought to that one.