The Birth of New Criticism : Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I.A. Richards, Robert Graves, and Laura Riding

A groundbreaking account of the origins of the twentieth century's most influential method for studying poetry. Amid competing claims about who first developed the theories and practices that became known as New Criticism - the critical method that rose alongside Modernism - literary historians have generally given the lion's share of credit to William Empson and I.A. Richards. In The Birth of New Criticism Donald Childs challenges this consensus and provides a new and authoritative narrative of the movement's origins. At the centre stand Robert Graves and Laura Riding, two poet-critics who have been written out of the history of New Criticism. Childs brings to light the long-forgotten early criticism of Graves to detail the ways in which his interpretive methods and ideas evolved into the practice of "close reading," demonstrating that Graves played such a fundamental part in forming both Empson's and Richards's critical thinking that the story of twentieth-century literary criticism must be re-evaluated and re-told. Childs also examines the important influence that Riding's work had on Graves, Empson, and Richards, establishing the importance of this long-neglected thinker and critic. A provocative and cogently argued work, The Birth of New Criticism is both an important intellectual history of the movement and a sharply observed account of the cultural politics of its beginnings and legacy. Cover Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 - An Old Anxiety about Influence 2 - A Question of Conflict 3 - Mediating The Poetic Mind: “as many meanings as possible” 4 - The Limits of Poetic Consciousness 5 - Models of Practically Ambiguous Criticism 6 - Defence of Poetic Analysis 7 - The Ambiguous Grammar of Romantic Psychology 8 - Associations 9 - Taxonomies of Types 10 - Remembering Graves in Revision 11 - Richards and the Graves(t) Danger 12 - How Graves Shapes Richards’s Principles 13 - Conflict Theory in Science and Poetry 14 - Riding Corrects Richards (and Graves) 15 - Asserting the Poem’s Autonomy contra Richards 16 - From Slow Reading to Close Reading: Escaping the Stock Response 17 - Taking New Stock of Stock Responses 18 - Poetry, Interpretation, and Education 19 - Anthology Culture, Self-Reliance, and Self-Development 20 - Slow Wit, Slow Close Reading, and Paraphrase Notes Index