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4 / Recovering the Whole: Culture, Region, and Poetry in the Literary Criticism of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate In his essay “Literature as Knowledge” (1941), Allen Tate tellingly begins his survey of recent semiotic and psychological theories of language not with a discussion of semiotics or psychology, but with a discussion of “culture”—specifically, the “Culture” of Matthew Arnold. Faced with “the accumulating body of the inert, descriptive facts of science,” Arnold, Tate argues, decided “something had to be done about it”; he proposed Culture as that thing.1 Arnold’s “program,” according to Tate, was “culture added to science, and perhaps correcting it” (“Knowledge,” 72). This formula, he concludes, “has not worked,” in part because of the very relationship it imagines between culture and science, and the corresponding ideas of poetry it produces: regarding culture as something that could be “added to” the concrete “facts” of science, Tate suggests, renders the poet as “merely the scientist who achieves completeness”; poetry becomes “descriptive science . . . touched with emotion” (73, 74). As a decorative add-on to the subject matter of science, “the language of poetry is of secondary importance” (76). This “neoclassical” distinction between poetic language and its “prose subject,” Tate goes on to argue, also characterizes recent scientific philosophies of language proposed by the early work of I. A. Richards and others: all of these theories find the “meaning” of poetic language in the pragmatic measure of “how . . . we behave when we read it: what, in a word, does it lead to” (91). Tate’s goal in the essay, of course, is to challenge this pragmatic version of poetic language, in a way that would become central to the New Criticism he would come to represent in the RECOVERING THE WHOLE / 137 next decades. Asking “Is it possible to distinguish the language from the subject? Are not the subject and language one?” (76), Tate answers “no” to the first and “yes” to the second: poetry finally stands as a “unique” experience in offering the reader “complete knowledge,” the completeness of which lies precisely in the fusion of language and subject (104–5). If, in Tate’s argument, Arnold’s conception of Culture gives rise to his (flawed) conception of poetic language, then in this chapter I will suggest that Tate’s critique of Arnold’s theory of poetry is in turn a critique of the version of culture that produces it. In its stead, Tate, along with his colleague and fellow New Critic John Crowe Ransom, proposes a new conception of poetic language that itself rests on a new conception of culture. In the preceding chapters, I argued that in response to a perceived state of fragmentation and “dissociation” brought on by modern industrial society, critics and intellectuals from across a wide variety of disciplines through the 1920s and 1930s attempted to imagine “whole” and “meaningful ” units, be they linguistic structures, works of art, or entire ways of life. This problematic is worked out within anthropology in debates over new ways to conceive of culture as the discipline’s central concern, as anthropologists such as Edward Sapir and Bronislaw Malinowksi attempt to construct culture as a relative, whole system of meaning, the importance of any one element of which can be understood only within the context of that whole. This “anthropological” debate is inseparable from debates over literary form and value—debates that emerge in situations as diverse as Willa Cather’s fascination with literary composition and the composition of Cliff Dweller culture, and in the new ways of reading and valuing literature that lay behind the revival of Herman Melville and the canonization of Moby-Dick at the heart of a restructured version of American literary history. New conceptions of culture as spatial form, in particular, work themselves out in questions of the boundedness of regional or national culture, and the boundedness of the text and the construction of canons of national literature. The intertwining poetic and cultural theories of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate bring together several of the lines of thought traced in the preceding chapters. Tate and Ransom, like the other figures I have been tracking, participate in constructing new models of culture as a “whole way of life” in explicit contrast to the abstractions of science and industrialism and conceive of this cultural “whole” as itself a spatialized, aesthetic object. This spatialized culture is in turn, like for Mumford and Sapir, grounded in the physical region and represents the fusion of art [18...

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