Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

We are now seventy-plus years from the publication of a series of landmark volumes of literary criticism that redefined the status and purpose of poetry in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The volumes include T. S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood (1920), F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), and William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). These exemplary works of modernist critical prose at first appear to belong even more distantly in the past, preoccupied with special qualities of poetic language that have since lost their immediate relevance to the contemporary reader. The reader of these masterworks of literary criticism must come to terms with a style and vocabulary that is in a state of transition. Progressive and revisionist in their outlook and purpose, the critical vocabulary of these three critics is forged out of elements like vivid imagery, engagement with the canonical influences of metaphysical and Romantic poets and the robust dialogue of Elizabethan dramatists, or the individualistic vision of poets and critics who are capable of resisting the dull effects of mass culture, in particular the popular press. The concern with the integrity of the poetic tradition, the high seriousness of reading poetry, and the sharp estimation of superior and inferior literary works have all faded away as the primary tasks of the literary critic today. The ... log in or subscribe to read full text