Mr. Wimsatt on the Theory of Literature

Abstract

THE PUBLICATION, in revised form, of a selection of seventeen of W. K. Wimsatt's essays invites a provisional, mid-career assessment of his contribution. This is the task that, in view of the subtitle of the book, I had agreed to undertake when I accepted the editor's invitation to review Verbal Icon' for this journal. True, I had read with pleasure his two brilliant books on Johnson and I knew he worked in areas beyond my professional competence. But I had taken it for granted that the greatest part of his work was on fields in which I had some knowledge. I was acquainted with several of Wimsatt's essays on theory of literature, a subject on which, I hope, I am not altogether ignorant; and I thought I could handle his critical essays, since practical is a subject in which I occasionally dabble. But in this I was not altogether right. In the narrow sense the term criticism has acquired as a result of developments in the last decades in the United States and to some extent in England, Wimsatt has written very little criticism. This is, of course, not said in either praise or blame, but merely to explain why I was not able to carry out my original intention. Very few, two or at most three, of the essays in Verbal Icon are devoted to practical criticism. And, when Wimsatt turns to criticism, he does not undertake what today is considered the job of the critic: analysis of the informing aesthetic structures of poems (using the term in its widest acceptation), or estimates of their place in an order of rank, or elucidation of their meanings. When Wimsatt writes he may write on The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery, but he is more apt to write on the relations of concrete and abstract language to excellence of style, or on the relation of rhyme to meaning, or on the problem of elegant variation, or on what he calls, for reasons that are not satisfactory to the student of philosophy, the logical and the counterlogical aspects of style.2 Since I am not com-