Eliot’s shadow

Menand and Rainey ( The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism , 7-8) trace the influence of TS Eliot on the rise of New Criticism, ultimately of structuralism:

“There was the inventive body of criticism that Eliot wrotebetween 1917 and 1924; the ways in which it was worked up into a corpusof acceptable interpretive techniques by I. A. Richards, among others, inthe years immediately following; the brilliant exercise of those techniquesby Richardss student William Empson; the renegade variant of CambridgeEnglish established by F. R. Leavis and the group surrounding Scrutiny in the 1930s and 1940s; the way these various influences fed intothe work of the American New Critics, such as Cleanth Brooks, JohnCrowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, a group with itsown distinctive intellectual roots in the American South; and the gradualestablishment of the New Criticism as a powerful critical orthodoxywithin American universities, a development epitomised by Brookssmove from Louisiana State University to Yale in 1947. The rest, as theysay, is history:

“the dominance and the increasingly ossified formalism ofthe Yale school as represented by W. K. Wimsatt ( The Verbal Icon waspublished in 1954), and the assimilation of New Criticism to Continentalstructuralism, Saussurean linguistics, and phenomenology in the work ofRene Wellek, whose multi-volume History of Modern Criticism beganappearing in 1955. The figure of Eliot as tutelary spirit hovered over thework of nearly all these figures, invoked to support any and (nearly) everyviewpoint.”

More broadly, this is also the genealogy of literary criticism in American universities: “the New Criticism was, in America, the movement that successfullyintroduced literary criticism the interpretation and evaluation of literarytexts into the university; and for all the limitations of its scope andultimate influence as a doctrine of poetry, it established a pattern ofinstitutional adjustment and legitimation which has been imitated byevery critical movement since.”