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Understanding poetry otherwise: New criticism and historical poetics
Author(s) -
Levine Naomi
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12575
Subject(s) - poetics , poetry , reading (process) , literature , criticism , variety (cybernetics) , value (mathematics) , philosophy , art , aesthetics , linguistics , computer science , artificial intelligence , machine learning
This essay juxtaposes recent work in historical poetics with New Critical reading practices, particularly those theorized by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their influential textbook Understanding Poetry (1938). It focuses on the relationships among method, period, and aesthetic value: the ways that New Critical reading and its variety of critical judgment helped make 19th‐century poetry minor. Examining Understanding Poetry 's association of 19th‐century poetry with aesthetic badness—as well as the generic histories of the textbook's “bad” poems—the essay demonstrates the importance of the problem of evaluation for historical poetics.