his rhetorical claim to be 'representative' of humankind, to speak with the voice of the people and utter eternal verities

English was a upstart, amateurish affair as academic subjects went, hardly able to compete on equal terms with the rigours of Greats or philology; since every English gentleman read his own literature in his spare time anyway, what was the point of submitting it to systematic study

it was possible to smear classical philology as a form of ponderous Teutonic nonsense

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

[...] it is also possible to point out to students that advertisements and the popular press only exist in their present form because of the profit motive. 'Mass' culture is not the inevitable product of 'industrial' society, but the offspring of a particular form of industrialism which organizes production for profit rather than for use, which concerns itself with what will sell rather than with what is valuable. There is no reason to assume that such a social order is unchangeable; but the changes necessary would go far beyond the sensitive reading of King Lear. [...]

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

[...] like 'practical criticism' it meant detailed analytic interpretation, providing a valuable antidote to aestheticist chit-chat [...] To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than to something else: to the 'words on the page' rather than to the contexts which produced and surround them. It implies a limiting as well as a focussing of concern [...] it encouraged the illusion that any piece of language, 'literary' or not, can be adequately studied or even understood in isolation. It was the beginnings 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.

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.

The New Critics broke boldly with the Great Man theory of literature, insisting that the author's intentions in writing, even if they could be recovered, were of no relevance to the interpretation of his or her text. Neither were the emotional responses of particular readers to be confused with the poem's meaning: the poem meant what it meant, regardless of the poet's intentions or the subjective feelings the reader derived from it. Meaning was public and objective, inscribed in the very language of the literary text, not a question of some putative ghostly impulse in a long-dead author's head, or the arbitrary private significances a reader might attach to his words. [...] Rescuing the text from author and reader went hand in hand with disentangling it from any social or historical context. One needed, to be sure, to know what the poem's words would have meant to their original readers, but this fairly technical sort of historical knowledge was the only kind permitted. Literature was a solution to social problems, not part of them; the poem must be plucked free of the wreckage of history and hoisted into a sublime space above it.

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

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