Richards’ poetry courses had such an enormous following that classes had to meet in the streets of Cambridge for the first time in centuries. He published his findings from these classroom experiments in Practical Criticism (1929), one of the few genuinely seminal works of criticism in English since the nineteenth century.8
With these books, and through this group, and not least by the powerful force of his own charismatic example, Richards changed the way literature was studied. He made criticism the primary activity of the field of English, and he installed the notion of “close reading” at the center of that field. The American New Critics of the 1930s—Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and W. K. Wimsatt—all acknowledged the leadership of Richards in showing them the way forward. In America, this enterprise of “practical criticism,” with the study of lyric poems in isolation, indeed became a centerpiece of liberal education for decades. And one of the most important features of this program was that it implicitly identified itself as a kind of activity or doing, for practical also derives from a Greek word (prattein), which means, precisely, to do.
The commission to write a book about how to do criticism thus necessarily returns me to this question of “practical criticism.” It will become clear, however, that I assign practical criticism a somewhat different function from that of Richards. It is one that builds upon Richards’ idea but enlarges the sphere in which criticism is called on to do its work.9 My aim is to illuminate how practical criticism might be effectively sustained in our moment partly by understanding its application to poetics in an expanded field of reference. I will explain what I mean by that in due course. By way of introduction to this book and this mission, however, I turn first to the task of providing a sense of what it means to “do criticism” in the sense that Eagleton intends, just to provide a reminder of what criticism feels like when, to adapt a phrase from Keats, it is proven upon the pulses. I will then broaden the horizon of poetics beyond the study of lyric poetry to include not only literature broadly considered but also film and the motion picture arts. I wish not only to show a viable path forward for criticism “at the present time” but also to suggest that doing without criticism is not only imprudent but also perhaps impossible.
1.2 Two Thought Experiments
In the spirit of Richards’ experiments in criticism, then, let us now attempt a thought experiment of our own. Imagine that you share a refrigerator with someone—a sibling, a roommate, a partner, or a spouse. One groggy morning you go to open it, and you find stuck to its door the following message (Figure 1.1):
FIGURE 1.1 Prose transcription of Williams Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say,” handmade for this book by its author.
It is a fair guess you might be a little annoyed by this note, and perhaps a little puzzled. It might be said to raise questions. Why is the person who stole your plums telling you how good they tasted? Is this a confession or a declaration, an apology or a taunt? The answers to such questions would probably depend upon what terms you were on with your sibling, roommate, partner, spouse, or child. So would your general response: bemusement, irritation, anger. You might do something on account of this message. You might steal your sister’s yogurt, confront your roommate, ask your partner if you have done something to deserve this bizarre treatment, scold your child. You might even laugh it off. But such a message doesn’t call on you do anything with it. It doesn’t call on you, that is, to “do criticism.” Its questions tend to be of a different order from those of criticism.
Now imagine, instead, that you open a standard anthology of poetry, and you find the following:
This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
(William Carlos Williams, 1934)10
This arrangement of words (twenty eight of them, not counting the title) asks for a different kind of response. Such words, so disposed, along with the context in which they appear, do ask you to do something with them. They ask you to perform an act of criticism. They do so, furthermore, by raising a further set of questions. Why should so apparently plain and simple a statement be produced in a formal arrangement of twelve lines in three stanzas? Is the title part of the poem or separate from the poem? Given the fact that the words seem to take the shape of a poem, why does the title emphasize the idea of words reduced to the most basic message they can communicate: “This is just to say”? Why is a simple statement given such an arrangement? Why does it include the detail about how good the plums taste? Is the speaker asking forgiveness for taking the plums in the first place or for not being able to resist an evaluation that adds insult to injury?
Some of these questions might loosely connect with those we might have asked ourselves if the note were in prose form and left by someone with whom we shared a fridge. The differences are nonetheless important. In this case, for example, we don’t know who the speaker of these words is supposed to be. We have to imagine both a speaker and an addressee, because neither is given. We don’t know if the two are on good terms or bad. In the Norton Anthology, the poem is identified with an author, William Carlos Williams. We may or may not know that the author was one of the foremost American poets of the early twentieth century. We may or may not know that he is from Rutherford, New Jersey. There is a date of publication, too, 1934, which might lead us to think about this composition as belonging to a past moment in time. That was the middle of the Great Depression, when money was short and food was scarce, especially luxury foods like plums. Does that matter to the way we respond to these words? “Icebox,” in that light, might thus come to seem less like a peculiar expression that our grandmother would have used than perhaps a marker of the poet’s historical moment. How might that sort of historical indicator figure in what we do with this form of words, this thing that seems to be proposing itself as a poem?
The more we look at the words in this way, critically, taking them as making up a poem, the more we are likely to experience the effect that the Germans call Verfremdung, or defamiliarization, and the Russians ostranenie—and the stranger its apparently simple “message” becomes.11 The request to be forgiven for stealing the plums (which seems to lie in the realm of ethical responsibility) is followed by the description of what it was like to eat them (which seems to belong to the realm of sensual pleasure). Is the description of the pleasure meant to explain the act of theft? To excuse it? To justify it? “I know I stole your plums, but all I can say is they were so good to eat.” Is that implied “all I can say” what the poem has “just to say”? And then there is another range of questions. If this is supposed to be a poem, how are we to judge if it is a good poem? How does its versification matter, the fact that it is arranged in very brief lines and stanzas? Is there a logic to these line breaks and stanza breaks? Is the poem’s versification—its management of rhythm—handled well or badly?
When we pose such questions of words that we encounter in this way, we are beginning to do criticism. We are beginning to engage with the words in an active process of analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. This active process involves formulating questions and working out answers. This activity of posing and addressing questions, moreover, has its own medium and form of expression—in my case here, that of English prose paragraphs. As with other activities, the more we practice it—on such objects, in such a medium—the more adept we become. And with such adeptness comes the capacity to bring a new kind of value into being alongside