Comrades

T.S. Eliot

We were huge fans of T.S. Eliot. We mean, what's not to like about "The Waste Land" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"? Love 'em.

But the real heart of the matter was that T.S.'s poems were full of marvelous allusions—have you seen the footnotes to "The Waste Land"?—but you didn't have to understand the allusions to appreciate the aesthetics of his work. In fact, we believed that the footnotes could be read as part of the beauty of the poem itself—not as supplements.

One last thing. We were close personal friends with Eliot, and we never picked up the phone to ask him what his poems meant. Why? Because the answers are in the poems themselves. Snap!

Walter Ong

We always saw Reverend Father Walter Ong's "The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn" as something of an answer to some of the hard-hitting questions we asked in our well-known essay "The Intentional Fallacy." Here's where we bonded with the Ongster: like us, he had a deep faith in language in itself and in what he (and we) called "the autonomy of the work of art." He also rejected the idea of "biographical excursion." Could it get any better?

Stanley Fish

18th-centuryists represent! I (that's Wimsatt here) had to love this cantankerous fellow if for no other reason than that he studied the 18th century, just like me. Hey, we aren't as trendy as 19th centuryists or postmodernists, so we Samuel Johnson-loving few stand together. Young Fish was a pupil of mine, and though he found me to be a tough professor, he admired me enormously and had huge praise for my book Literary Criticism: A Short History, written with Cleanth Brooks.

New Critics

Look, we've been throwing the term "New Criticism" around here like drunken sailors, but did you know how integral we were to this band of brothers? They'd be nothing without us. (Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but whatever.) The New Critics were our comrades because they, too, believed in close reading and in the autonomy of the text. You won't find any of us sniffing around for details about the author or the author's context. Everything you need to know is in the text, folks.

Cleanth Brooks

Wimsatt here. Brooks and I co-authored a book (I love collaborations) called Literary Criticism: A Short History—and by short, we actually meant 800 pages. LOL.

Anyway, our point was that studying literature is all about studying works of art. We don't do cultural studies, we don't do identity politics, we don't do Marxism—you get the point. We also urge all critics to keep their noses out of the author's business and to stop trying to conjure up what the reader might be thinking. No good came come from either of those approaches.

Rivals

Leslie Fiedler

It's easy to sum up why we weren't too keen on this American critic. He didn't think that our idea of the Intentional Fallacy—that is, that it's a mistake to take the design or intention of the author into considering when analyzing a work of art—was such a hot one. He made the annoyingly reasonable argument that we had to consider what a poem was trying to do, or else we couldn't figure out if it was successful at doing whatever it was that it was actually doing. Make sense, right?

Stephen Greenblatt

This smarty-pants Shakespeare critic was really tempted to come to the dark side—to New Criticism, that is. But he remained a faithful New Historicist and went forth spouting all the outrageous idea that literature and history are closely tied together. He actually thought the historical, biographical, and political context of a work of art mattered.

He said that all we cared about was aesthetics, and he also said we were all formalists in love with form. Well, we were. And we're not apologizing for it.

New Historicism

Picture a boxing ring, if you will. In one corner, we have the New Critics, and in the other corner, we have the New Historicists—got the visual? New Historicists weren't too keen on the idea that a work of art should not, under any circumstances, be assessed on the basis of the historical or biographical context from which is arose. They believed that, say, being a woman, or being black, or being a black woman in the 19th century would actually impact the way you wrote.

Whatever. These folks may have won the match, but we're back in training for round two.