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
it was possible to smear classical philology as a form of ponderous Teutonic nonsense
due to Germanic influence; this helped pave the way for the rise of English
