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“... power of close reading began when he was a student at Yale in the late 1930s in the era of I.A. Richards and the New Criticism, which held that the meaning of a poem came from the poem itself, and was completely independent of the history of the poet. Indeed, it was hardly necessary to know even the name of the poet. Done right, the New Criticism teased out ...”

“... false and become interesting possibilities.’ He sounds here a little like his contemporary I.A. Richards, who maintained that poetry contained things that might look like statements about the world (‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’) but aren’t really propositional statements at all. Richards called them ...”

“... symbolic form, then (to use his own word) the meaning ‘explodes’. Readers will be struck, as I am, by passages they have semi-forgotten; for me, it was Hopkins’s outraged sputter to Bridges about the impossibility of introducing the Greek gods (as Bridges had) into modern verse: In earnest, not allegorically, you bring in a goddess among the ...”

“... strike many people as at once unrealistically ambitious and largely pointless. When I explain that I am focusing, not on the history of literary criticism, but on the institutional history, looking at the role of universities, departments, appointments, syllabuses and so on, the bafflement turns to boredom and the silent reflection that it takes all sorts.Yet ...”

“... subject, especially in comparison to the 20th-century vigour of English literature under I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis. Who cares about roots and origins when you could be debating the Great Tradition? Tolkien returned the compliment. His Letters, published in 1981, betray no interest at all in the stuff most people think of as modern writing, and a ...”