Poetry and the Age

Abstract

There was a time, quite long ago now, when a creature called the New Critic worked the classrooms of American colleges and universities and wrote articles that filled American periodicals with a rarefied strain of mandarin formalism. As we all know, this creature has vanished, and no miniature history of that tale is needed here. So long gone is he—and in point of historical fact, the New Critic was almost always a “he”—that when Frank Lentricchia wrote his pivotal After the New Criticism (1980) he was already addressing the apparent death of formalism, which, after its institutional eclipse, was in a second stage of subterranean resistance. Yes, Lentricchia argued, the reign of close reading to the exclusion of social echolalia or political lacunae had died, but the practice still operated on the lower frequencies. Lentricchia alerted readers to the fact that what they thought was ancient history was actually still at work, and dangerously so. New Criticism was still doing its shadowy job of waylaying the possibility of criticism’s larger stake in the world. Perhaps Lentricchia’s idea that, while officially dead, the New Criticism is not really gone is still relevant today. For one thing, the heralding of a new age for American poetry criticism— one that is historicist, interand contextual, archival—seems to be ongoing, as if formalist ideology were not a historical fact but a contemporary threat. It was also made before Lentricchia wrote his book, by feminist “life writers” like Adrienne Rich, and it was made by Marxists and poststructuralists of all stripes, including the New Historicists and so-called language poet-critics. It is made today by figures as diverse as Jerome McGann, Juliana Spahr, and Maria Damon, three names plucked at random from among so many that it would be impossible to give even a hint of their legions. Despite the hegemony of postformalism—or, more simply, historicism—it has often been a ritualistic feature of