Saturday 26 September 2020

Did Auden Give Them the Idea?

Reading The Dyer’s Hand by WH Auden yesterday, I came across a passage in which Auden talks about different kinds of literary criticism. The bit that arrested my attention was Auden's description of what he calls  "the critic’s critic". In it, Auden seems to accurately predict the rise of a now dominant approach to literature in academic circles these days, an approach that treats "a work of art by somebody else" as the critic's "own discovered document".  Writing in 1956, did Auden spot an already emerging trend, or did someone later, reading what he said, decide it might be a way to entirely subvert the study of beautiful things?:

"The critic's critic ... on the surface ... appears to idolise the poet about whom he is writing; but his critical analysis of his idol's work is so much more complicated and difficult than the work itself as to deprive someone who has not yet read it of all wish to do so. He, too, one suspects, has a secret grievance. He finds it unfortunate and regrettable that before there can be criticism there has to be a poem to criticise. For him a poem is not a work of art by somebody else; it is his own discovered document."

2 comments:

  1. The idea was in the air, I think. In 1953, Randall Jarrell published Poetry and the Age, in which the essay "The Age of Criticism" makes much the same point. All of Poetry and the Age, and at least some of The Dyer's Hand consist of essays previously published singly, so I don't know which if either could claim priority.

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    1. Thank you, George - Auden mentions it in his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, I think. I like the phrase "The idea was in the air" - in these viral times, it gives one the sense of an infection that has to be survived.

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