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The Poem as a Closed Field: The Once New Criticism and the Nature of Literature A poem should not mean But be. 8 -Archibald MacLeish, ATS Poetica The new criticism and the poetry which arose with it deserve to be examined in fuller perspectives than those in which they have commonly been viewed. Both are still too often described largely as ad hoc reactions to what went immediately before. The Hulme-Eliot-Pound-Leavis-Richards-Ransom kind of criticism is set against the impressionistic and often autobiographical performances of William Hazlitt, Walter Pater ("the presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters"), or Oscar Wilde. The doctrine of clear, precise images which entered into the fiber of the New Criticism as well as into the more or less contemporaneous imagist poetry is set against the vagaries of Edwardian and Georgian verse. And eventually the story winds down with the anticulture movement which compromised the New Criticism at mid-century. We are, however, becoming increasingly aware that the New Criticism calls for more than such short-range description. It was somehow a major cultural development. Some new insight into why and how it was can be gained if the New Criticism is examined in relation to the antecedent rhetorical tradition, which had dominated the theory and practice of expression from antiquity to the romantic age, when the remote beginnings of the New Criticism can be detected in Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 214 Closure and Print So far as I know, the New Criticism has never been examined in this way, although it has been examined from countless other viewpoints. Even at first blush the rhetorical tradition would appear relevant to the New Criticism not only because the older rhetoric had registered and controlled the dominant attitudes toward poetry for two millennia, but also because the New Criticism from its beginnings has had a lot to say about rhetoric. One of I. A. Richards' earliest books was The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1933); and in the United States, where verbal rhetoric is more studied and less practiced than in Great Britain and its dismantled empire, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren have influenced millions of teachers and students, directly or indirectly, not only through their Understanding Poetry, but also through their companion volume Modern Rhetoric and through other textbooks treating poetry and rhetoric under the same covers. Basically, the relationship between the old rhetoric and the New Criticism is one of opposition. The New Criticism was concerned with rhetoric because by overthrowing the old rhetorical tradition it made imperative an overhauling of the entire noetic economy. The old rhetorical tradition was no small thing. From antiquity the study of rhetoric had encapsulated the most ancient, central, and pervasive tradition of verbalization and of thought known to mankind at least in the West. Elsewhere I have tried to explain how, until the beginning of the modern technological and romantic age in the later eighteenth century, Western culture in its intellectual and academic manifestations-and, mutatis mutandis, very likely all human culture everywhere-can be meaningfully designated rhetorical culture.1 Basically, rhetorical culture means culture in which, even after the development of writing, the pristine oral-aural modes of knowledge storage and retrieval still dominate noetic activity, including both thought itself and verbal formulation and communication . When writing first appeared, it did not immediately 1. Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, R omance, and Technology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 1-22, 255-283. The Poem as a Closed Field 215 wipe out or supplant oral-aural modes of thought and verbalization . Rather, it accentuated and codified them. Writing made scientific analytic thought possible. Directed to the consideration of communication, such analytic thought produced "rhetoric" as a formal, reflective techne or art. It is paradoxical and thought provoking that rhetoric was one of the first fields of knowledge worked up as a formal art with the aid of writing, for rhetoric means primarily oratory or public speaking, for which the Greek word is rhetorike. The written art of rhetoric at first focused primarily not on written but on oral communication, which outproduced and outranked writing not only at the time when writing first timidly began, but also for several millennia afterwards. New inventions normally at first reinforce what they will eventually transform or supplant. The automobile at first encouraged prolification of the kinds of roads devised for horses. Superhighways came late. Writing undermines the oral noetic economy, but only after it first strengthens it...

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