5.

Critical Approaches to Literature

The really competent critic must be an empiricist. He must conduct his exploration with whatever means lie
within the bounds of his personal limbration. He must produce the effects with whatever tools will work. If
pills fail, he gets out his saw. If the saw won’t cut, he seizes a club.
—H. L. Mencken
Literary criticism is not an abstract, intellectual exercise; it is a natural human response to literature. If a
friend informs you she is reading a book you have just finished, it would be odd indeed if you did not begin
swapping opinions. Literary criticism is nothing more than discourse spoken or written about literature. A
student who sits quietly in a morning English class, intimidated by the notion of literary criticism, will spend
an hour that evening talking animatedly about the meaning of R.E.M. lyrics or comparing the relative merits
of the three Star Trek T.V. series. It is inevitable that people will ponder, discuss, and analyze the works of
art that interest them.
The informal criticism of friends talking about literature tends to be casual, unorganized, and
subjective. Since Aristotle, however, philosophers, scholars, and writers have tried to create more precise
and disciplined ways of discussing literature. Literary critics have borrowed concepts from other disciplines,
like linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, to analyze imaginative literature more perceptively. Some
critics have found it useful to work in the abstract area of literary theory, criticism that tries to formulate
general principles rather than discuss specific texts. Mass media critics, such as newspaper reviewers,
usually spend their time evaluating works—telling us which books are worth reading, which plays not to
bother seeing. But most serious literary criticism is not

1790
primarily evaluative; it assumes we know that Othello or The Death of Ivan Ilych are worth reading. Instead,
it is analytical; it tries to help us better understand a literary work.
In the following pages you will find overviews of nine critical approaches to literature. While these
nine methods do not exhaust the total possibilities of literary criticism, they represent the most widely used
contemporary approaches. Although presented separately, the approaches are not necessarily mutually
exclusive; many critics mix methods to suit their needs and interests. A historical critic may use formalist
techniques to analyze a poem; a biographical critic will frequently use psychological theories to analyze an
author. The summaries do not try to provide a history of each approach; nor do they try to present the latest
trends in each school. Their purpose is to give you a practical introduction to each critical method and then
provide one or more representative examples of criticism. If one of these critical methods interest you, why
not try to write a class paper using the approach?

Formal ist Criticism

Formalist criticism regards literature as a unique form of human knowledge that needs to be examined on its
own terms. “The natural and sensible starting point for work in literary scholarship,” Rene Wellek and
Austin Warren wrote in their influential Theory of Literature, “is the interpretation and analysis of the works
of literaturethemselves.” To a formalist, a poem or story is not primarily a social, historical, or biographical
document; it is a literary work that can be understood only by reference to its intrinsic literary features those
elements, that is, found in the text itself. To analyze a poem or story, the formalist critic, therefore, focuses
on the words of the text rather than facts about the author’s life or the historical milieu in which it was
written. The critic would pay special attention to the formal features of the text the style, structure, imagery,
tone, and genre. These features, however, are usually not examined in isolation, because formalist critics
believe that what gives a literary text its special status as art is how all of its elements work together to
create the reader’s total experience. As Robert Penn Warren commented. “Poetry does not inhere in any
particular element but depends upon the set of relationships, the structure, which we call the poem.”
A key method that formalists use to explore the intense relationships within a poem is close reading, a
careful step-by-step analysis and explication of a text. (For further discussion of explication, see page 1762).
The purpose of close reading is to understand how various elements in a literary text work together to shape
its effects on the reader. Since formalists believe that the various stylistic and the matic elements of literary
work influence each other, these critics insist that form and content cannot be meaningfully separated. The
complete interdependence of form and content is what makes a text literary. When we extract a work’s
theme or paraphrase its meaning, we destroy the aesthetic experience of the work.
When Robert Langbaum examines Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (the full poem is on page
594), he uses several techniques of formalist criticism.
FORMALIST CRITICISM 1791
First, he places the poem in relation to its literary form, the dramatic monologue (see page 593 for a
discussion of this genre). Second, he discusses the dramatic structure of the poem why the duke tells his
story, whom he addresses, and the physical circumstances in which he speaks. Third, Langbaum analyzes
how the duke tells his story his tone, manner, even the order in which he makes his disclosures. Langbaum
does not introduce facts about Browning’s life into his analysis; nor does he try to relate the poem to the
historical period or social conditions that produced it. He focuses on the text itself to explain how it
produces a complex effect on the reader.

Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994)

1951
Here 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 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 bgic.
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 AUen 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 the criticism

********************************************************************************
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 personalities 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

1792 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

 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 performed for any kind of expres
sion—non-literary as well as literary.
“The Formalist Critic”

Robert Langbaum (b. 1924)

On Rober t Browning’s “My Last Duchess” --------------------1957

When we have said all the objective things about Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” we will not have
arrived at the meaning until we point out what can only be substantiated by an appeal to effect—that moral
judgment does not figure importantly in our response to the duke, that we even identify ourselves with him.
But how is such an effect produced in a poem about a cruel Italian duke of the Renaissance who out of
unreasonable jealousy has had his last duchess put to death, and is now about to contract a second marriage
for the sake of dowry? Certainly, no summary or paraphrase would indicate that con demnation is not our
principal response. The difference must be laid to form, to that extra quantity which makes the difference in
artistic discourse between content and meaning.
The objective fact that the poem is made up entirely of the duke’s utterance has of course much to do
with the final meaning, and it is important to say that the poem is in form a monologue. But much more
remains to be said about the way in which the content is laid out, before we can come near accounting for
the whole meaning. It is important that the duke tells the story of his kind and generous last duchess to, of all
people, the envoy from his prospective duchess. It is important that he tells his story while showing off to
the envoy the artistic merits of a portrait of the last duchess. It is above all important that the duke carries off
his outrageous indiscretion, proceeding triumphantly in the end downstairs to conclude arrangements for the
dowry. All this is important not only as content but also as form, because it establishes a relation between the
duke on the one hand, and the portrait and the envoy on the other, which determines the reader’s relation to
the duke and therefore to the poem—which determines, in other words, the poem’s meaning.
The utter outrageousness of the duke’s behavior makes condemnation the least interesting response,
certainly not the response that can account for the poem’s success. What interests us more than the duke’s
wickedness is his immense attractiveness. His conviction of matchless superiority, his intelligence and bland
amorality, his poise, his taste for art, his mannershigh-handed aristocratic manners that break the ordinary
rules and assert the duke’s superiority when he is being most solicitous of the envoy, waiving their
difference of rank
FORMALIST CRITICISM 1793
(‘Nay, we’ll go / Together down, sir’); these qualities overwhelm the envoy, causing him apparently to
suspend judgment of the duke, for he raises no demur. The reader is no less overwhelmed. We suspend
moral judgment because we prefer to participate in the duke’s power and freedom, in his hard core of
character fiercely loyal to itself. Moral judgment is in fact important as the thing to be suspended, as a
measure of the price we pay for the privilege of appreciating to the full this extraordinary man.
It is because the duke determines the arrangement and relative subordination of the parts that the poem
means what it does. The duchess’s goodness shines through the duke’s utterance; he makes no attempt to
conceal it, so preoccupied is he with his own standard of judgment and so oblivious of the world’s. Thus the
duchess’s case is subordinated to the duke’s, the novelty and complexity of which engages our attention. We
are busy trying to understand the man who can combine the connoisseur’s pride in the lady’s beauty with a
pride that caused him to murder the lady rather than tell her in what way she displeased him, for in that
would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop [lines 42-3]
The duke’s paradoxical nature is fully revealed when, having boasted how at his command the duchess’s life
was extinguished, he turns back to the portrait to admire of all things its life-likeness:
There she stands
As if alive [lines 46-7]

This occurs ten lines from the end, and we might suppose we have by now taken the duke’s measure. But
the next ten lines produce a series of shocks that outstrip each time our understanding of the duke, and keep
us panting after revelation with no opportunity to consolidate our impression of him for moral judgment. For
it is at this point that we learn to whom he has been talking; and he goes on to talk about dowry, even
allowing himself to murmur the hypocritical assurance that the new bride’s self and not the dowry is of
course his object. It seems to me that one side of the duke’s nature is here stretched as far as it will go the
dazzling figure threatens to decline into paltriness admitting moral judgment, when Browning retrieves it
with two brilliant strokes. First, there is the lordly waiving of rank’s privilege as the duke and the envoy are
about to proceed downstairs, and then there is the perfect all-revealing gesture of the last two and a lines
when the duke stops to show off yet another object in his collection:
Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! [lines 54—6]

The lines bring all the parts of the poem into final combination, with just the relative values that
constitute the poem’s meaning. The nobleman does not hurry on his way to business, the connoisseur cannot
resist showing off yet ano
1794 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE
(‘Nay, we’ll go / Together down, sir’); these qualities overwhelm the envoy, causing him apparently to
suspend judgment of the duke, for he raises no demur. The reader is no less overwhelmed. We the
possessive egotist counts up his possessions even as he moves toward the acquirement of a new possession,
a well-dowered bride; and most important, the last duchess is seen in final perspective. She takes her place
as one of a line of objects in an art collection; her sad story becomes the cicerone’s anecdote0 lending
piquancy to the portrait. The duke has taken from her what he wants,.her beauty, and thrown the life away;
and we watch with awe as he proceeds to take what he wants from the envoy and by implication from the
new duchess. He carries all before him by sheer force of will so undeflected by ordinary compunctions as
even, I think, to call into question—the question rushes into place behind the startling illumination of the last
lines, and lingers as the poem’s haunting aftemote—the duke’s sanity.
The Poetry of Experience
On ROBERT BROWNING’S “My Last DUCHESS.” Cicerone's anecdote: The Duke’s tale. (In Italian
cicerone is one who conducts guided tours for sightseers.)

Biographical Criticism
Biographical criticism begins with the simple but central insight that literature is written by actual
people and that understanding an author’s life can help readers
more thoroughly comprehend the work. Anyone who reads the biography of a writer quickly sees how much
an author’s experience shapes—both directly and indirectly—what he or she creates. Reading that biography
will also change (and usually deepen) our response to the work. Sometimes even knowing a single important
fact illuminates our reading of a poem or story. Learning, for example,
that Josephine Miles (see “Reason” on page 637) was confined to a wheelchair or that Weldon Kees (see
“For My Daughter” on page 602) committed suicide at forty-one will certainly make us pay attention to
certain aspects of their poems we might otherwise have missed or considered unimportant. A formalist critic
might complain that we would also have noticed those things through careful textual analysis, but
biographical information provided the practical assistance of underscoring subtle but important meanings in
the poems. Though many literary theorists have assailed biographical criticism on philosophical grounds, the
biographical approach to literature has never disappeared because of its obvious
practical advantage in illuminating literary texts.
It may be helpful here to make a distinction between biography and biographical criticism.
Biography is, strictly speaking, a branch of history; it provides a written account of a person’s life. To
establish and interpret the facts of a poet’s life, for instance, a biographer would use all the available
information—not just personal documents like letters and diaries, but also the poems for the possible light
they might shed on the subject’s life. A biographical critic, however, is not concerned with recreating the
record of an author’s life. Biographical criticism focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight
provided by knowledge of the author’s life. Quite often biographical critics, like Brett C. Millier in her
discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” will examine the drafts
BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM 1795
of a poem or story to see both how the work came into being and how it might have been changed from its
autobiographical origins.
A reader, however, must use biographical interpretations cautiously. Writers are notorious for revising the
facts of their own lives; they often delete embarrassments and invent accomplishments while changing the
details of real episodes to improve their literary impact. John Cheever, for example, frequently told reporters
about his sunny, privileged youth; after the author’s death, his biograph
er Scott Donaldson discovered a childhood scarred by a distant mother, a failed, alcoholic father, and
nagging economic uncertainty. Likewise, Cheever’s outwardly successful adulthood was plagued by
alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and family tension. The chilling facts of Cheever’s life significantly changed
the way critics read his stories. The danger in a famous writer’s case—Sylvia Plath and F. Scott Fitzgerald
are two modem examples—is that the life story can overwhelm and eventually distort the work. A savvy
biographical critic always remembers to base an interpretation on what is in the text itself; biographical data
should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it out with irrelevant material
Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
The Relationship of Poet and Poem 1960
A central dogma of much recent criticism asserts that biographical information is irrelevant to the
understanding and evaluation of poems, and that conversely, poems cannot legitimately be used as material
for biography. This double contention is part of a larger position which holds that history is history and art is
art, and that to talk about one in terms of the other is to court disaster. Insofar as
this position rests upon the immortal platitude that it is good to know what one is talking about, it is
unexceptionable; insofar as it is a reaction based upon the procedures of pre-Freudian critics, it is hopelessly
outdated; and insofar as it depends upon the extreme nominalist definition of a work of art, held by many
“formalists” quite unawares, it is metaphysically reprehensible. It has the further inconvenience of being
quite unusable in the practical sphere (all of its proponents, in proportion as they are sensitive critics,
immediately betray it when speaking of specific works, and particularly of large bodies of work); and, as if
that were not enough, it is in blatant contradiction with the assumptions of most serious practicing writers.
That the antibiographical position was once “useful,” whatever its truth, cannot be denied; it was even
once, what is considerably rarer in the field of criticism, amusing; but for a long time now it has been
threatening to turn into one o those annoying cliches of the intellectually middle-aged, profferred with all the
air of a stimulating heresy. The position was bom in dual protest against an
excess of Romantic criticism and one of “scientific scholarship.” Romantic aesthetics appeared bent on
dissolving the formally realized “objective elements in works of art into “expression of personality”; while
the “scholars, in revolt

1796 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

against Romantic subjectivity, seemed set on casting out all the more shifty questions of value and gestalt as
“subjective,” and concentrating on the kind of “facts” amenable to scientific verification. Needless to say, it
was not the newer psychological sciences that the “scholars” had in mind, but such purer disciplines as
physics and biology. It was at this point that it became fashionable to talk about literary study as “research,”
and graphs and tables began to appear in analyses of works of art.

* * *
The poet’s life is the focusing glass through which pass the determinants of the shape of his work: the
tradition available to him, his understanding of “kinds,” the impact of special experiences (travel, love, etc.).
But the poet’s life is more than a burning glass; with his work, it makes up his total meaning. I do not intend
to say, of course, that some meanings of works of art, satisfactory and as far as they go sufficient, are not
available in the single work itself (only a really bad work depends for all substantial meaning on a
knowledge of the life-style of its author); but a whole body of work will contain larger meanings, and, where
it is available, a sense of the life of the writer will raise that meaning to a still higher power. The latter two
kinds of meaning fade into each other; for as soon as two works by a single author are considered side by
side, one has begun to deal with biography—that is, with an interconnectedness fully explicable only in
terms of a personality, inferred or discovered.
One of the essential functions of the poet is the assertion and creation of a personality, in a profounder
sense than any nonartist can attain. We ask of the poet a definition of man, at once particular and abstract,
stated and acted out. It is impossible to draw a line between the work the poet writes and the work he lives,
between the life he lives and the life he writes. And the agile critic, therefore, must be prepared to move
constantly back and forth between life and poem, not in a pointless circle, but in a meaningful spiraling
toward the absolute point.
No! in Thunder

Brett C. Millier (b. 1958)

On El izabeth Bishop’s “One Art 1993
Elizabeth Bishop left seventeen drafts of the poem “One Art” among her papers. In the first draft, she lists
all the things she’s lost in her life—keys, pens, glasses, cities—and then she writes “One might think this
would have prepared me / for losing one average-sized not exceptionally / beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent
person ... / But it doesn’t seem to have at all-----” By the seventeenth draft, nearly every word has been
transformed, but most importantly, Bishop discovered along the way that there might be a way to master this
loss.
One way to read Bishop’s modulation between the first and last drafts from “the loss of you is impossible
to master” to something like “I am still the master of
losing even though losing you looks like a disaster” is that in the writing of such a
BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM 1797
disciplined, demanding poem as this villanelle (“[Write it/]”) lies the potential mastery of the loss. Working
through each of her losses—from the bold, painful
catalog of the first draft to the finely honed and privately meaningful final version—is the way to overcome
them or, if not to overcome them, then to see the way in which she might possibly master herself in the face
of loss. It is all, perhaps “one art”—writing elegy, mastering loss, mastering grief, self-mastery. Bishop had a
precocious familiarity with loss. Her father died before her first birthday, and four years later her mother
disappeared into a sanitarium, never to be seen by her daughter again. The losses in the poem are real: time
in the form of the “hour badly spent” and, more tellingly for the orphaned Bishop “my mothers watch”: the
lost houses, in Key West, Petrdpolis, and Ouro Preto, Brazil. The city of Rio de Janeiro and the whole South
American continent (where she had lived for
nearly two decades) were lost to her with the suicide of her Brazilian companion. And currently, in the fall
of 1975, she seemed to have lost her dearest friend and lover, who was trying to end their relationship. But
each version of the poem distanced the pain a little more, depersonalized it, moved it away from the tawdry
self-pity and “confession” that Bishop disliked in so many of her contemporaries.
Bishop’s friends remained for a long time protective of her personal reputation, and unwilling to have her
grouped among lesbian poets or even among the other great poets of her generation—Robert Lowell, John
Berryman, Theodore Roethke—as they seemed to self-destruct before their readers’ eyes. Bishop herself
taught them this reticence by keeping her private life to herself, and by investing what “confession” there
was in her poems deeply in objects and places, thus deflecting biographical inquiry. In the development of
this poem, discretion is both a poetic method, and a part of a process of self-understanding, the seeing of a
pattern in her own life.Adapted by the author from Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It

Historical Criticism
Historical criticism seeks to understand a literary work by investigating the social, cultural, and intellectual
context that produced it—a context that necessarily includes the artist’s biography and milieu. Historical
critics are less concerned with explaining a work’s literary significance for today’s readers than with helping
us understand the work by recreating, as nearly as possible, the meaning and impact it had on its original
audience. A historical reading of a literary work begins by exploring the possible ways in which the meaning
of the text has changed over time. The analysis of William Blake s poem
“London” (pages 652-654), for instance, carefully examines how certain words had different connotations
for the poem’s original readers than they do today. It also explores the probable associations an eighteenth-
century English reader would have made with certain images and characters, like the poem s persona, the
chimney-sweeper a type of exploited child laborer who, fortunately, no longer exists in our society

1798 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Reading ancient literature, no one doubts the value of historical criticism. There have been so many social,
cultural, and linguistic changes that some older texts are incomprehensible without scholarly assistance. But
historical criticism can even help us better understand modem texts. To return to Weldon Kees’s “For My
Daughter” (page 602), for example, we leam a great deal by considering two rudimentary historical facts—
the year in which the poem was first published (1940) and the nationality of its author (American)—and
then asking ourselves how this information has shaped the meaning of the poem. In 1940, war had already
broken out in Europe and most Americans realized that their country, still recovering from the Depression,
would soon be drawn into it; for a young man, like Kees, the future seemed bleak, uncertain, and personally
dangerous. Even this simple historical analysis helps explain at least part of the bitter pessimism of Kees’s
poem, though a psychological critic would rightly insist that Kees’s dark personality also played a crucial
role. In writing a paper on a poem, you might explore how the time and place of its creation affected its
meaning. For a splendid example of how to recreate the historical context of a poem’s genesis, read the
following account by Hugh Kenner of Ezra Pound’s imagistic “In a Station of the Metro.” (This poem is also
discussed more briefly on pages 660-661.)

Hugh Kenner (b. 1923)

Imagism 1971

For it was English post-Symbolist verse that Pound’s Imagism set out to reform, by deleting its self-
indulgences, intensifying its virtues, and elevating the glimpse into the vision. The most famous of all
Imagist poems commenced, like any poem by Arthur Symons,0 with an accidental glimpse. Ezra Pound, on
a visit to Paris in 1911, got out of the Metro at La Concorde, and “saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then
another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that
day to find words for what they had meant to me, and I couldnot find any words that seemed to me worthy,
or as lovely as that sudden emotion.”
The oft-told story is worth one more retelling. This was just such an experience as Arthur Symons
cultivated, bright unexpected glimpses in a dark setting, instantly to melt into the crowd’s kaleidoscope. And
a poem would not have given Symons any trouble. But Pound by 1911 was already unwilling to write a
Symons poem.
He tells us that he first satisfied his mind when he hit on a wholly abstract vision of colors, splotches on
darkness like some canvas of Kandinsky’s (whose work he had not then seen). This is a most important fact.
Satisfaction lay not in preserving the vision, but in devising with mental effort an abstract equivalent for it,
reduced, intensified. He next wrote a 30-line poem and destroyed it; after six months he wrote a shorter
poem, also destroyed; and after another year, with, as he tells us, the Japanese hokku in mind, he arrived at a
poem which needs every one of its 20 words, including the six words of its title:
HISTORICAL CRITICISM 17
IN A STAT ION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

We need the title so that we can savor that vegetal contrast with the world of machines: this is not any
crowd, moreover, but a crowd seen underground, as Odysseus and Orpheus and Kore saw crowds in Hades.
And carrying forward the suggestion of wraiths, the word “apparition” detaches these faces from all the
crowded faces, and presides over the image that conveys the quali-
ty of their separation:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Flowers, underground; flowers, out of the sun; flowers seen as if against a natural gleam, the bough’s
wetness gleaming on its darkness, in this place where wheels turn and nothing grows. The mind is touched,
it may be, with a memory of Persephone, as we read of her in the 106th Canto,
Dis’ bride, Queen over Phlegethon,
girls faint as mist about her.
—the faces of those girls likewise “apparitions.
What is achieved, though it works by way of the visible, is no picture of the
thing glimpsed, in the manner of
The light of our cigarettes
Went and came in the gloom.
It is a simile with “like” suppressed: Pound called it an equation, meaning not a redundancy, a equals a,
but a generalization of unexpected exactness. The statements of analytic geometry, he said, “are ‘lords’ over
fact. They are the thrones and dominations that rule over form and recurrence. And in like manner are great
works of art lords over fact, over race-long recurrent moods, and over tomorrow.” So this tiny poem,
drawing on Gauguin and on Japan, on ghosts and on Persephone, on the Underworld and on the
Underground, the
Metro of Mallarme’s capital and a phrase that names a station of the Metro as it might a station of the Cross,
concentrates far more than it need ever specify, and indicates the means of delivering post-Symbolist poetry
from its pictorialist impasse. “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time”: that is the elusive Doctrine of the Image. And, just 20 months later, “The image ... is a
radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which,
and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” And: “An image ... is real because we know it directly.
The Pound Era
IMAG1SM. Arthur Symons: Symons (1865-1945) was a British poet who helped introduce French sym
bolist verse into English. His own verse was often florid and impressionistic
1800 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE
Daryl Pinckney (b. 1953
On Langston Hughes 1989
Fierce identification with the sorrows and pleasures of the poor black—“I myself belong to that class”—
propelled Hughes toward the voice of the black Everyman. He made a distinction between his lyric and his
social poetry, the private and the public. In the best of his social poetry he turned himself into a transmitter
of messages and made the “I” a collective “I”
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down
to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in
the sunset
(“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”)
'The medium conveys a singleness of intention: to make the black known. The straightforward, declarative
style doesn’t call attention to itself. Nothing distracts from forceful statement, as if the shadowy characters
Sandburg wrote about in,
say, “When Mammy Hums" had at last their chance to come forward and testify. Poems like “Aunt Sue’s
Stories” reflect the folk ideal of black women as repositories of racial lore. The story told in dramatic
monologues like “The Negro Mother” or “Mother to Son” is one of survival life “ain’t been no crystal stair.”
The emphasis is on the capacity of black people to endure, which is why
Hughes’s social poetry, though not strictly protest writing, indicts white America, even taunts it with the
steady belief that blacks will overcome simply by “keeping on”
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother
They send me to the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well, -
And grow strong.
(“Epilogue”)

Whites were not the only ones who could be made uneasy by Hughes’s attempts to boldly connect past and
future. The use of “black” and the invocation of Africa were defiant gestures back in the days when many
blacks described themselves as brown.When Hughes answered Sandburg’s “Nigger” (“I am the nigger, /
Singer of Songs ... ”) with “I am the Negro, / Black as the night is black
HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1801