New Criticism
& Some More Love Poems
Central Questions
How do we read a poem/text? What do we look for, the
author’s intention, our own psychological projection, “the
meaning” conveyed through both form and content, or the
ways a text respond to its time?
What are the values in reading literature? Is it the finest
example of culture?
What is culture? How is it related to our daily life? Can we
resist commercial culture through cultivating our “artistic”
sensibility? Do you feel nostalgic about “a certain
historical period”?
Are we ultimately free? Is our subjectivity unified or
fragmentary?
Outline
Literature as a
profession; a Religion
and the only solution to
worldly chaos.
Key Words
Matthew Arnold: Culture vs. Anarchy
T. S. Eliot: Literary values defined
New Criticism: organicism & methods
Victorian love poems in the context
from idealism &
of the Victorian vs.
repression to
disunity and franker
Modern Views of Love
views of the body
and desire)
Key Words
Hellenism vs. Philistinism (Arnold) (Bertens 2-5)
Dissociation of Sensibility; Objective Correlative
(Eliot) (Bertens 12-13)
Intentional Fallacy; Affective Fallacy; Heresy of
Paraphrase (New Critics) (Bertens 22-23)
Liberal Humanism (Bertens 6)
M. Arnold: Hellenism vs. Philistinism
Culture: “the best that
has been thought and
said”
Hellenism: Greek culture
as an example
timeless and universal
Intellectual refinement
and sensibility,
disinterestedness,
spiritual activity
Bertens 2-5
Anarchy: caused by
capitalism and middleclass Protestantism.
Philistinism: selfcentered, materialistic
Arnold (2): Art’s Timelessness &
Liberal Humanism
The “ultimate” autonomy and self-sufficiency of
the subject (Bertens 6)  we are essentially
free.
Likewise, literature, or its universal values, is not
constrained by its time and space.
Good questions on p. 8
objective correlative
客觀對應物 (T.S. Eliot)
An external object used to convey the writer’s feeling,
which is elevated to a universal level in writing so that the
same feelings can be evoked in the reader.
“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is
by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set
of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the
formula of that particular emotion; such that when the
external facts, which must terminate in sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately
evoked.” (“Hamlet and His Problems”)
objective correlative: e.g.
客觀對應物 (T.S. Eliot)
e.g. Images of coldness in Hardy’s “Neutral
Tones”
e.g. “. . . the sun was white, as though chidden of God ”
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized(乙醚麻醉) upon a table”
( Are they objective or subjective?)
T. S. Eliot: his Value Judgment
dislikes PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY and Tennyson
e.g. “Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” (ODE TO THE WEST
WIND )
Favors “metaphysical poetry,” which unites emotions
and wits.
What comes after 17th century poetry is a dissociation of
sensibility.  finds ‘organic unity’ in literature
New Criticism:
Major Assumptions (Bertens 21-23 )
A poem is an autonomy (獨立個體), its
meanings decided by itself alone, but not by
the author’s intention or the reader’s
emotional responses to it.
Intentional Fallacy (意圖謬誤),
Affective Fallacy (感情謬誤)
Poetry offers a different kind of truth (poetic
truth) than science, conveyed through its
dense language which cannot be translated.
Heresy of Paraphrase
Major Assumptions —Textual Autonomy
the poet‘s mind as a catalyst (觸媒)
Experience, objective
correlatives
CO2+葉綠素 光合作用
Organic whole
New Criticism: Major Assumption (2)
– organic wholeness
organic unity:
– all of its elements (form and content, poetic
elements, tensions) form a “single unified
effect.”
– all parts of a poem are interrelated and
interconnected, with each part reflecting and
helping to support the poem's central idea. ...allows
for the harmonization of conflicting ideas, feelings,
and attitudes, ...
New Criticism: Methodology
New Criticism’s synonyms = objective criticism,
practical criticism, textual criticism, close reading
the "text and the text alone" approach
New Criticism on Poetry (Bressler 44 - 45)
1. Pay close attention to the text’s diction its meanings
(connotation and denotation) and even its etymological
roots.
2. Study the poetic elements closely.
e.g.詩律（prosody）、比喻語言（明喻、暗喻、擬
人法、頓呼法）
3. Search for structure and patterns; e.g. oppositions in
the text (paradox, ambiguity, irony)
4. From Parts to an Organic Wholeness
New Criticism: Methodology (1)
Poetry
Whole
Parts
Denotations, connotations
and etymological roots
Allusions
Themes
Prosody
pattern, tension,
Relationships
ambiguities,
among
paradox,
the various elements
contradictions
New Criticism: Methodology (1)
NarrativeWhole
Parts
Point of view,
dialogue,
setting,
Plot
Characterization
Relationships
among
the various elements
Themes
pattern, tension,
ambiguities,
paradox,
contradictions
Victorian love poems
in the context of
the Victorian vs. Modern Views of Love
A Woman’s Desire: EBB
Ending of love: Barbara Allen
A Man’s Desire for Possession
Nude With a Dog 1861-61 (later dated 1868)
Gustave Courbet
Female Desire
Innocence,
implied
sexuality
Egon Schiele (Austria : 1890 - 1918)
Female Desire
KNEELING NUDE, 1918
http://www.donagrafik.com/WUK_KATALOG/HTML/31_e.html
Nu a la pantoufle a carreaux (1917)
http://www.pyb.com.au/ptcds/pcres/focus/schiele.htm
E. B. Browning
“While Robert Browning is famous for being a poet,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning is famous for being a
poet with a romantic life story” (Beard 67)
Her life:
– Threatened with lung disease, lived in a darkened
room with few visitors (after her brother’s death by
drowning).
– Married before elopement. (still following the Victorian
moral codes)
– Her elopement with Browning “cured her invalidism.”
E. B. Browning (2) : Critical
Reception of EBB as a poet
“Aurara Leigh”: Aurora, who aspires to be a poet,
is courted with a marriage proposal by her cousin
Romney. Rejecting his offer she proclaims her own
`vocation'.
Victorians –saw her as a major poet, good enough
to be considered for laureatship;
Later critics – see her as an adjunct to her
husband
Contemporary feminists – read her work as
Victorian feminist writings
Her sonnets
Different from the Renaissance sonnets because
she talks mostly about her own love (and
doubts), but not her lover.
Her sonnets: Questions
What are the main ideas of Sonnet 26 and 43?
Are they “good” poems from the standard of
New Criticism?
What do you think about her modes of love?
Note: sonnet forms
– English (Shakespearean) sonnet: Quartrain (abab
cdcd efef) couplet (gg)
– Italian (Petrarchan): Octave (abbaabba ) and Sestet
(cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce.)
Sonnet forms
Italian: two parts -- "The octave bears the burden;
a doubt, a problem, a reflection, a query, an
historical statement, a cry of indignation or
desire, a Vision of the ideal. The sestet eases
the load, resolves the problem or doubt, answers
the query, solaces the yearning, realizes the
vision.“
English: the final couplet -- a commentary on the
foregoing, an epigrammatic close. (source:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sonnet.html )
Sonnet 43
Thesis: The speaker expresses both through form and
content how love is both boundless and limited.
Form:
– Italian, but with only 4 rhymes; intertwining rhymes;
– Repetition of words;
– Emotional, long lines not limited by the form; breaks in the
middle of two lines;
Meaning:
– Paradox between uncountable love and countable ways;
– between boundless love and finality of life. (freely, purely vs.
loss and death)
– between the spiritual and eternal (open or long vowels) and the
everyday life (short and stressed syllables).
Sonnet 26
Thesis:
Form:
– two part (before-after) structure; broken by “your” arrival.
– Nasal sounds associated with visions, and explosives with
the lover.
Content:
– Personification: visions as they
– Ambiguities: “wants,” “God’s gifts”; what “overcame” her
with satisfaction?
E. B. Browning (3) : love & desire
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
The physical sources of desire is presented with
metaphors: (Kern 91-92)
– She hears “footsteps of the soul” and waits with
“trembling knees.”
– The hand of love is “soft and warm” and brings “souls to
touch”
– Her heart opens wide to “fold within the wet wings of thy
dove”
– Her own pulse and her beloved’s “beat double”
E. B. Browning (3) : desire
Exchange of a lock of hair:
– R. Browning “Give me . . . so much of you—all
precious that you are—as may be given in a lock of
your hair—I will live and die with it.”
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
– “. . .from my poet’s forehead to my heart . . .
[I] lay the gift where nothing hindereth;
Here on my heart, as on thy brow, to lack
No natural heat till mine grows cold in death.” (Sonnet
19 qtd Kern 345)
V. Ending
The lovers
composed, with
reasons (the book)
clearly given.
Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) Aurora Leigh's Dismissal of
Romney- (The Tryst) 1860
http://freespace.virgin.net/k.peart/Victorian/hugheslove.htm
M. Ending
Edward Munch
Ashes (1894)
Both lovers
frustrated, in a
mess.
Ending in conflict
While the Victorian were acutely aware of conflict, they
were less willing than the moderns to see it as intrinsic
to love or as having a constitutive function. In art they
displaced conflict onto fictitious characters, often onto
femme fatales in distant, ancient, or imaginary places.
(Kern 373)
The other solution – joining in death. (sometimes quite
liteterally; e.g. Wuthering Heights; Dante Gabriel
Rossetti)
Barbara Allen
Ballad:
– brevity (omission of some plot),
– matter-of-fact tone;
– repetition with variation
Why do you think Barbara Allen rejects the
young man? And why does she die?
How is the young man presented?
How does the form of ballad adds depths to this
ballad?
Barbara Allen
Thesis: Though apparently about unrequited love and
reunion after death, Barbara’s motivation in refusing the
young man or death is not clear.
Form:
– Repetition: “slowly” “Goodbye”
– the turning point: one line said by Barbara to Grove;
– External actions (words) described but not inner feelings;
Content
– Why does she know that he is dying?
– What type of sorrow does she die of?
– “dying” “soft and narrow” bed
Barbara Allen: another version,
misunderstanding
4. "Don't you remember the other day
When you were in the tavern,
I toasted all the ladies there
And slighted Barbara Allen?"
5. "O yes, I remember the other day
When we were in the Tavern,
I toasted all the ladies there,
Gave my love to Barbara Allen."
9. . . .Sweet William died for me today,
I'll die for him tomorrow."
11. . . . And out of hers, a briar.
Different musical versions
http://entertainment.msn.com/Song/?song=
Barbara Allen on
Angel Clare by Art
Garfunkel
The same music
Another version
1256807
Male Desire
Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) (French) "Phryne before the Areopagus“ 1861
http://www.kingsgalleries.com/1024x768/galleries/gerome/expanded/picture-12.htm
Male Desire
S. Dali The Great Masturbator 1929
Male Desire in “Porphyria’s Lover”
Dramatic Monologue: elements –
– situation, “who, where, when, and why”
– the listener,
Can you analyze the working of this speaker’s
mind? Is he sane or insane? Where do you see
the clues?
How is Porphyria presented?
Male Desire in “Porphyria’s Lover”
Thesis: The speaker, with his deranged mind, solves all
the conflicts in Porphyria, but not his desire to control
and be controlled.
Form:
– one continuous speech without stanza divisions;
Content
–
–
–
–
The lover: deranged and disturbed;
Porphyria: active, pleading, in conflict;
Final attempt at getting a pure and eternal love.
Paradoxes: speaker, both passive and active; P: alive after
death
– Final appeal to God
Reference
Literary Theory: The Basics. Hans Bertens.
NY: Routledge, 2001.
Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory
and Practice. 2nd Ed. (Bressler, Charles E.
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall,
1999.)
TEXTS AND CONTEXTS - INTRODUCING
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE STUDY. Adrian Beard.
Routledge, 2001.
The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns. Stephen
Kern. Harvard UP, 1992.
Readings for next week
“Psychoanalytic Criticism” chap 3 (pp 147-153
Reader: 29- 32 )
"Eveline" by James Joyce (Reader: 67-69)