Interpretation of Poetry by New Criticism in Britain and America

New Criticism New Criticism * * * A school of criticism that had a great influence in the British and American criticism circles in the 1920s and 1950s was named after New Criticism (194 1), a collection of essays by American Joe Lanson. This anthology praises thomas eliot and others' critical viewpoints and methods based on text analysis, which is called "new criticism", which is different from the traditional criticism of academic school since19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, British writer Hume and American writer Pound put forward the idea of emphasizing accurate image and language art, which was the beginning of new critical theory. In the 1920s, Eliot and Richards respectively laid the theoretical foundation of new criticism with the poetic concept of symbolism and the critical method of literary analysis, and became their main representatives. The new critics have many members and diverse views. Their similarities are mainly: 1. From the aesthetic point of symbolism, they regard their works as independent and objective symbols, self-sufficient organisms isolated from the outside world, and are called "organic formalism"; 2. They think that literature is a special language form in essence, and the task of criticism is to analyze the text of the work and explore the interaction and hidden relationship between the parts, which is called "word meaning analysis". Symbolism provides them with aesthetic theory, and word meaning analysis is their specific comment method. Eliot's famous paper Tradition and Personal Talent (19 17) puts forward the theory of "depersonalization" from the perspective of anti-romanticism. In view of the romanticism that poetry is the expression of the poet's emotion, he thinks that subjective emotion is only material. If you want to enter a work, you must first go through an impersonal process, transforming personal emotion into universal and artistic emotion and transforming experience into art. In Hamlet (19 19), Eliot thinks that "the only way to express emotion in artistic form is to find. This is a creative method of symbolism implying feelings with concrete things, which has a great influence on new criticism's attention to finding hidden and ambiguous things in the text. Richards believes that poetic language is a special emotional language, which does not reflect the objective truth (science and poetry, 1925), and poetic vocabulary has complex meanings due to the influence of context (practical criticism, 1929), which urges the new criticism to emphasize literal analysis and the richness and complexity of poetic meaning. In 1930s and 1940s, New Criticism developed the theory of poetic language and the analysis of specific works. Empson's masterpiece Seven Hazes (1930) holds that the vaguer the meaning of a word, the richer it is and the higher the value of the poem. In New Criticism, Lanson holds that poetic language has the characteristics of conflict between "skeleton" (meaning the logic of theme or poetry) and "texture" (meaning the artistic treatment from words to punctuation). In "Mock-a structural principle" (195 1), Brooks called the revision of declarative sentences in poetic context "mock", saying that it is the main principle of any poetic structure. In On the Tension of Poetry (1938), Tate defined the meaning of poetry as the tension formed by the connotation (figurative meaning) and extension (logical meaning) of words. Only when the tension finally reaches balance or harmony can this poem be considered successful. In the comments on specific works, the new criticism advocates symbolism and metaphysics, and belittles Milton, Byron, Shelley and other poets. Their theories and activities paved the way for modernist poetry.