Cleanth Brooks: 'The Formalist Critic'

26 TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERARY THEORY
NOTES
[From 1935 edition. Reorganised and renumbered from the original]

1. A pseudo-statement, as I use the term, is not necessarily false in any
sense. It is merely a form of words whose scientific truth or falsity is irrel-
evant to the purpose in hand.
'Logic' in this paragraph is, of course, being used in a limited
and conventional, or popular, sense.
2. My debt to The Waste Land here will be evident.
3. Verifiable scientific knowledge, of course.
6 CLEANTH BROOKS: 'THE FORMALIST CRITIC'
Here l are some articles of faith I could subscribe to:

That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of its object.
That the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity - the
kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the rela-
tion of the various parts to each other in building up this whole.
That the formal relations in a work of literature may include, but certainly
exceed, those of logic.
That in a successful work, form and content cannot be separated.
That form is meaning.
That literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic.
That the general and the universal are not seized upon fry abstraction, but
got at through the concrete and the particular.
That literature is not a surrogate for religion.
That, as Allen Tate says, 'specific moral problems' are the subject matter of
literature, but that the purpose of literature is not to point a moral.
That the principles of criticism define the area relevant to literary criti-
cism; they do not constitute a method for carrying out the criticism.
Such statements as these would not, however, even though
greatly elaborated, serve any useful purpose here. The interested
reader already knows the general nature of the critical position
adumbrated - or, if he does not, he can find it set forth in
writings of mine or of other critics of like sympathy. Moreover, a
condensed restatement of the position here would probably beget
as many misunderstandings as have past attempts to set it forth. It
Reprinted from the Kenyon Review, 13 (1951), 72-81.
K. M. Newton (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary Theory

© Macmillan Publishers Limited 1997
The New Criticism and Leavisian Criticism 27
seems much more profitable to use the present occasion for
dealing with some persistent misunderstandings and objections.
In the first place, to make the poem or the novel the central
concern of criticism has appeared to mean cutting it loose from
its author and from his life as a man, with his own particular
hopes, fears, interests, conflicts, etc. A criticism so limited may
seem bloodless and hollow ...
In the second place, to emphasize the work seems to involve
severing it from those who actually read it, and this severance may
seem drastic and therefore disastrous. Mter all, literature is
written to be read. Wordsworth's poet was a man speaking to
men .... Moreover, if we neglect the audience which reads the
work, including that for which it was presumably written, the liter-
ary historian is prompt to point out that the kind of audience that
Pope had did condition the kind of poetry that he wrote. The
poem has its roots in history, past or present. Its place in the
historical context simply cannot be ignored.
I have stated these objections as sharply as I can because I am
sympathetic with the state of mind which is prone to voice them.
Man's experience is indeed a seamless garment, no part of which
can be separated from the rest. Yet if we urge this fact of insepara-
bility against the drawing of distinctions, then there is no point in
talking about criticism at all. I am assuming that distinctions are
necessary and useful and indeed inevitable.
The formalist critic knows as well as anyone that poems and
plays and novels are written by men - that they do not somehow
happen - and that they are written as expressions of particular per-
sonalities and are written from all sorts of motives - for money,
from a desire to express oneself, for the sake of a cause, etc.
Moreover, the formalist critic knows as well as anyone that literary
works are merely potential until they are read - that is, that they
are recreated in the minds of actual readers, who vary enormously
in their capabilities, their interests, their prejudices, their ideas.
But the formalist critic is concerned primarily with the work itself.
Speculation on the mental processes of the author takes the critic
away from the work into biography and psychology. There is no
reason, of course, why he should not turn away into biography and
psychology. Such explorations are very much worth making. But
they should not be confused with an account of the work. Such
studies describe the process of composition, not the structure of
the thing composed, and they may be performed quite as validly
for the poor work as for the good one. They may be validly per-
formed for any kind of expression - non-literary as well as literary.

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26 TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERARY THEORY

[From 1935 edition. Reorganised and renumbered from the original]

6 CLEANTH BROOKS: 'THE FORMALIST CRITIC'

Here l are some articles of faith I could subscribe to:

Reprinted from the Kenyon Review, 13 (1951), 72-81.

K. M. Newton (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary Theory

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