Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"Criticism Inc"
Studies in the technique of the art belong to criticism certainly. They cannot belong anywhere else, because the technique is not peculiar to any prose materials discoverable in the work of art, nor to anything else but the unique form of that art. A very large volume of studies is indicated by this classification. They would be technical studies of poetry, for instance, the art I am specifically discussing, if they treated its metric; its inversions, solecisms, lapses from the prose norm of language, and from close prose logic; its tropes; its fictions, or inventions, by which it secures "aesthetic distance" and removes itself from history; or any other devices, on the general understanding that any systematic usage which does not hold good for prose is a poetic device.
A device with a purpose: the superior critic is not content with the compilation of the separate devices; they suggest to him a much more general question. The critic speculates on why poetry, through its devices, is at such pains to dissociate itself from prose at all, and what it is trying to represent that cannot be represented by prose.
This is a dense quote, but it boils down to the same old bit: the "old" critics have been doing it all wrong. Ransom criticizes the existing way of analyzing literature, and those scholar-dinosaurs who continue to insist on studying literary history.
Then he argues for a new direction for literary criticism: the study of technique and form. And he gives us an example of what the New Critic should do. In a nutshell, Ransom wants criticism to be "more scientific, or precise and systematic." Hear, hear.
In that first sentence, Ransom talks about the "technique" of art. (And by "art" Ransom often means "poetry"—the New Critics are a tad bit biased like that.) But what does he mean by technique? Let him count the ways: meter, inversions of syntax, tropes or figures of speech… Basically: anything that separates poetic language from plain prose.
But a good literary scholar must do more than simply list a poem's techniques. If you give a mouse a list of poetic devices, then she'll ask why poetry uses language in these special ways. In kind, the "superior critic" will want to address questions like: Why are poems so dead-set on being different from prose in the first place? Can poetry do something that prose can't? Is poetry uniquely well suited to representing the human experience?
Ransom's essay is important because he wasn't just criticizing the old way of doing literary study. He was proposing a new plan of attack for future literary analysts. He was as interested in doing as he was in undoing. In fact, we think the questions he was asking about poetry back in 1937 are just as important today as they were then.
Quote :The New Criticism
It is my feeling that we have in poetry a revolutionary departure from the convention of logical discourse, and that we should provide it with a bold and proportionate designation. I believe it has proved easy to work out its structural differentiation from prose. But what is the significance of this when we have got it? The structure proper is the prose of the poem, being a logical discourse of almost any kind, and dealing with almost any content suited to a logical discourse. The texture, likewise, seems to be of any real content that may be come upon, provided it is so free, unrestricted, and large that it cannot properly get into the structure. One guesses that it is an order of content, rather than a kind of content, that distinguishes texture from structure, and poetry from prose. At any rate, a moral content is a kind of content which has been suggested as the peculiar content of poetry, and it does not work; it is not really peculiar to poetry but perfectly available for prose; besides, it is not the content of a great deal of poetry. I suggest that the differentia of poetry as discourse is an ontological one. It treats an order of existence, a grade of objectivity, which cannot be treated in scientific discourse.
Ransom simply had to know what makes poetry different from prose. He thought that if we could elaborate on those differences, we could better understand what makes individual poems powerful. So in this passage, he takes a stab at defining the Great Poetry-Prose Divide.
He proposes that poems have two main elements: First, there's the content of a poem. Second, there's the thing that makes a poem a poem—its "texture." This poetic texture, or form, is what's "free, unrestricted, and large."
But then things take a left turn into Head Scratch Territory. Ransom thinks that the texture isn't just a type of content, like morality or emotion or philosophy. Just because you write about morality doesn't mean you're going to write a poem. Nope, texture has to do with how you structure the content.
In this view, there is an "ontological" difference between poetry and prose. In other words, poetry is a particular way of being, and this way of being is just as objective as a plant's way of photosynthesizing light.
Careful though, Shmoopers. Ransom argues that the objectivity of poetry cannot be accessed using the same kinds of scientific tools and talk that exist in other academic disciplines. The job of New Criticism, in Ransom's mind, was to be scientific in a literary way: a way that helps us to understand how poetry is, in its unique fashion, objective.