Activity

Whereas New Criticism sunders the text from rational discourse and a social context

New Criticism's view of the poem as a delicate equipoise of contending attitudes

It was the beginning of a 'reification' of the literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself, which was to be triumphantly consummated in the American New Criticism.

Yet, if it excoriated the bland assumptions of a Sir Walter Raleigh on one level, it was also in complicity with them on another

the touchstone of literature, which was less an academic subject than a spiritual exploration coterminous with the fate of civilization itself