Cleanth Brooks was one of the "New Critics" that followed T.S. Eliot in ushering the wild WWI and '20's poetry back into political and aesthetic conservatism. He gives about as good a summation of New Critical dogma as one could ask:
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 in which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation 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 by 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 criticism; they do not constitute a method for carrying out th e criticism" (22).
I find the explanation that follows the list bland, sadly, so I'd rather send people to T.S. Eliot, whose objective correlative more or less underlies all of the above.
It's interesting to compare these men with Russian formalism. Brooks' insistence on "symbolism" seems to favor Jakobson's "metaphoric" as opposed to "metonymic" operation of language. Mind you, Jakobson uses "metonymic" oddly enough that I wonder about translation issues. He seems to mean something like semantic for metaphoric and syntactic for metonymic.
This seems part of the sharp division between Eliot and William Carlos Williams, the more progressive wing of the imagist cum vorticist cum objectivist camp. In "The Language of Paradox," originally in A Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks misses completely the idea behind Williams' "things," and lapses back into what amounts to a rehash of Hulme.
Williams' red wheelbarrow passage from Spring and All, to take a familiar example, touches the sublime because the verb depends throws the objects under description (the nouns) into sudden arrangement so that the issue of arrangement itself becomes highlighted, in part by the very lack of direct description of Williams' beloved things, and we catch the undescribed human in the act of arrangement that constitutes human perception. To see how ideal Williams' things are, crack a volume of Robert Lowell open to any page, and compare.
The Russian formalists, for whatever reason, had no such problems. Jakobson and Schklovsky and Eisenberg's theories included and accounted reasonably well for the most radical work of Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and for Mandelshtam thereafter.
Would that Trotsky and Stalin have been so comprehensive!
One can watch an odd interaction of Eliot's late symbolism crossed with Pound's truly modernist work in The Wasteland, particularly if one examines the facsimile edition. It's Eliot, T.S. The Wasteland: A facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound. Valerie Eliot. Ed. London: Harvest, 1971, though Amazon has no listing. One can observe at length the extensive distinctions between mellifluous early work like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and quieter later work like The Quartets. The Wasteland, of course, was hewn and scraped by Pound, a very different compositor than Eliot, and one who extensively suits Jakobson's metonymic in ways that Eliot would not care to. Pound makes the elements tense against each other through juxtaposition of startling contrasts. Eliot, in all cases, retains a more transparently unified approach, laden with transitions and fundamentally predicative.
But the fact that I find myself talking about Williams, Pound, and Eliot in this entry says most of what I personally have to say about Cleanth Brooks.
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