The Frontiers of Criticism
Encyclopedia
"The Frontiers of Criticism" is a lecture given by T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

 at the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...

 in 1956. It was reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, a collection of Eliot's critical essays, in 1957. The essay is an attempt by Eliot to define the boundaries of literary criticism
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...

: to say what does, and what does not, constitute truly literary criticism, as opposed to, for example, a study in history based upon a work of literature. The essay is significant because it represents Eliot's response to the New Critical
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...

 perspective which had taken the academic study of literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

 by storm during Eliot's lifetime. It also presents an analysis of some of its author's own poetic works, an unusual characteristic for modern criticism—it has become far more usual today for poets and critics to be in separate camps, rather than united in one individual. Perhaps even more importantly, it demonstrates the progress and change in Eliot's own critical thought over the years between 1919 and 1956.

Prior critical work

Part of the reason for the importance of this particular piece in Eliot's body of work is the position it holds as successor to an earlier (and probably better known) effort at defining the critical endeavor, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Tradition and the individual talent
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" is an essay written by poet and literary theorist T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published, in two parts, in The Egoist and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, "The Sacred Wood"...

. In that earlier piece (first published in 1919), Eliot made famous use of a metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

 drawn from chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

 to describe the process of "depersonalization" that Eliot claimed to be a necessary condition of poetic creation. In this analogy, Eliot compares the poet him- or herself to a catalyst, whose presence causes "feelings" and "emotions" to react with one another and combine in ways not possible without the poet's mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...

.

The essay also makes the point that "No poet, no artist of any art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. . . . The existing [literary] monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." Eliot contended that while art never actually got better, it was in a continual state of flux.

Eliot and New Criticism

Eliot is often claimed by the New Critics as one of their founding fathers, an "honor" he rejected for much the same reasons that he avoided explicit theorizing on the subject of literature: namely, because of his conception of the only true criticism as that of a poet trying to better his art. In some of his work, Eliot had espoused the idea of criticism as necessarily impersonal.

The evaluation of Eliot's criticism occurred relatively early; for example, an appraisal of his work focusing exclusively on Eliot the critic (as opposed to Eliot the poet) appeared in 1941 in a book by I. A. Richards
I. A. Richards
Ivor Armstrong Richards was an influential English literary critic and rhetorician....

. Richards, participating in the New Critical tradition of borrowing from Eliot, writes that


One of the best things in his influence has been his habit of considering aesthetic

Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

 effect as independent of religious effect, or moral, or political and social; as an end that is beyond and not coordinate with these.




This is quite similar to the New Critical attitudes of such authors as W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley
Monroe Beardsley
Monroe Curtis Beardsley was an American philosopher of art. He was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University , where he received the John Addison Porter Prize...

. In their theories of literary criticism, it is of vital importance to separate the work in question from all other factors, both on the side of creation (i.e., the writer's intentions
Intentional fallacy
Intentional fallacy, in literary criticism, addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a "fallacy", a critic suggests that the author's intention is not important. The term is an important...

) and on that of consumption (the reader's reactions
Affective fallacy
Affective fallacy is a term from literary criticism used to refer to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. The term was coined by W.K...

).

Content of the lecture

Eliot's paper is a concise statement of his reactions to the new directions that literary criticism had taken in the years since the publication in 1923 of his article "The Function of Criticism." In this way, the paper is also a more mature reevaluation of his own positions. Much of its length is involved in this kind of self-study, both of his earlier critical work as well as of his poetry.

Influences on later critics

Throughout, the essay demonstrates the influences Eliot had on the New Critics. While Eliot states early on that he failed to see why he was deemed by current literary scholarship to have given birth to New Criticism (106), he also uses the essay as a platform from which to proclaim a number of principles that are quite similar to those of the New Critics:
  • the idea of the circumstances surrounding a work's creation as irrelevant (112)
  • the "danger . . . of assuming that there must be just one interpretation of the poem as a whole, [and] that it must be right" (113)
  • the lack of a need to assess the author's intent (113-14)
  • the unimportance of the "feelings" of the reader (114)
  • the limitation of literary criticism to the study of the literary object, i.e., the work itself (116)


However, at the same time, Eliot takes the opportunity to disavow that school of criticism. He ridicules one of the methods of New Criticism, known today as close reading
Close reading
Close reading describes, in literary criticism, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they...

, describing it thus:


The method is to take a well-known poem . . . without reference to the author or to his other work, analyse it stanza

Stanza
In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...

 by stanza and line by line, and extract, squeeze, tease, press every drop of meaning out of it that one can. It might be called the lemon-squeezer school of criticism. . . . I imagine that some of the poets (they are all dead except myself) would be surprised at learning what their poems mean . . . (113)




Eliot is here giving voice to one of the most common objections to New Criticism, namely that it removes all the enjoyment from a work of literature by dissecting
Dissection
Dissection is usually the process of disassembling and observing something to determine its internal structure and as an aid to discerning the functions and relationships of its components....

 it. This essay strongly asserts that enjoyment is an important component of the reading of literature. Eliot makes no distinction between "enjoyment and understanding," seeing the two not "as distinct activities—one emotional and the other intellectual. . . . To understand a poem comes to the same thing as to enjoy it for the right reasons" (115). On the whole question of enjoyment, Eliot diverges from the general trend of New Criticism, which primarily concerned itself with interpretation. Eliot further distances himself from the New Critics with his implication of the possibility of misunderstanding a poem (115), an idea that the New Critics would consider heretical.

Difference between understanding and explanation

A large part of this lecture is devoted to Eliot's critique of what he calls "the criticism of explanation by origins" (107). One of these is The Road to Xanadu, by John Livingston Lowes
John Livingston Lowes
John Livingston Lowes was an American scholar of English literature, specializing in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Geoffrey Chaucer....

, a work that is now virtually unknown. The other, however, is James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

's Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...

, a work composed mostly what Eliot refers to as "merely beautiful nonsense" (109) that has puzzled critics since its publication.

These works provide Eliot a springboard from which to launch an "analysis" of his own poems. He takes an amused tone when describing his feelings on hearing what some readers have thought about his various works, with primary reference to The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

. Eliot discusses the process by which the notes to that poem came to be, saying that, to his regret, "They have had almost greater popularity than the poem itself" (110). Eliot uses the example of Finnegans Wake in order to illuminate the distinction between explanation and understanding.

Definition of literary criticism

Eliot, like the New Critics, distinguishes among types or classes of criticism, isolating (as the lecture's title suggests) a certain area for literary criticism. Also like the New Critics, he allows that there is merit to such studies. He credits Coleridge with bringing other disciplines (e.g., philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

, psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

) into the field of literary study. Eliot defines specifically literary criticism as criticism written in order

to help his [i.e., the critic's] readers to understand and enjoy [a work of literature]. . . .


We can therefore ask, about any writing which is offered to us as literary criticism, is it aimed towards understanding and enjoyment? If it is not, it may still be a legitimate and useful activity; but it is to be judged as a contribution to psychology, or sociology

Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

, or logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...

, or pedagogy
Pedagogy
Pedagogy is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction....

, or some other pursuit—and it is to be judged by specialists, not by men of letters. (116-17)




The argument of the essay is for a strongly individualist criticism, made clear by the frequent references to the author's own works. "The best of my literary criticism . . . consists of essays on poets and poetic dramatists who had influenced me" (106). In this, Eliot has something in common with the style of literary criticism expounded by Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...

, known for its emphasis on reading in order to make oneself a better writer.
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