Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism

by Garrick Davis (Editor), William Logan (Foreword)

Marked by a rigorously close textual reading, detached from biographical or other extratextual material, New Criticism was the dominant literary theory of the mid-twentieth century. Since that time, schools of literary criticism have arisen in support of or in opposition to the approach advocated by the New Critics. Nonetheless, the theory remains one of the most important sources for groundbreaking criticism and continues to be a controversial approach to reading literature.

Praising It New is the first anthology of New Criticism to be printed in fifty years. It includes important essays by such influential poets and critics as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, and Robert Penn Warren. Together, these authors ushered in the modernist age of poetry and criticism and transformed the teaching of literature in the schools. As the American poet and critic Randall Jarrell once “I do not believe there has been another age in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry has been written.”

This anthology now makes much of the best American poetry criticism available again, and includes short biographies and selected bibliographies of its chief figures. Praising It New is the perfect introduction for students to the best American poetry criticism of the twentieth century.

Genres: Literary Criticism

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 13, 2008

Reviews

[Dwayne Hicks]

An excellent collection of essays from the fathers of New Criticism. These men thought more carefully about poetry and literature than I thought was possible. Obvious synergies between this approach to literature and the approach to theology demonstrated by the Reformers from Calvin up through Vos, Kline, et al. A great way to double your to-read list.

[Gilbert Wesley Purdy]

"R. P. Blackmur's "Lord Tennyson's Scissors: 1912-1950," the final essay in Praising It New: the best of the New Criticism, is a classic. It begins with a commonplace:

Poetry is a game we play with reality...

Of course, in 1951, when the essay was first published, this was not a commonplace at all. It has become one because the thought is so rich with implication that it became a part of our shared way of thinking about poetry.

Like all of our games poetry is fun to talk about. From such talk entire industries of commentary have sprung up around other of our favorite games. The teams and/or individual players shop for and hire the better private analysts, as well. By virtue of this critical machinery, the quality of the games and players rapidly improves. Athletes, for example, come to have less body fat, greater size and astonishing agility. Rules of the game are updated to provide the most entertainment and impact possible to the spectator."

Click here to read my complete review>>> at Eclectica Magazine.

[Justin Evans]

A good collection of the New Critics' more theoretical writing, from the formalist beginnings to Winters' moralizing and the later critique of modernism and modernity. Getting a good look at the way these critics developed is the best aspect of the book- for all the praise their early work received, I was surprised that the later essays were more interesting, perhaps because more unexpected. The section on the dissociation of sensibility, and the way it was used by Ransom and Jarrell to criticize the 20th century (not the 18th etc...) was great.
The downside is that Davis' introductions are horrible. I couldn't quite work out why there was no Empson here represented until I'd finished the book: its because Empson was a leftie, and this book slowly but surely turns into a polemic against 'liberal' academics. Too bad. If you can find all the articles on your own, just photocopy them in the order the book presents them, and you'll get a lot out of them.