Fragments from a Writing Desk: DOING BIOGRAPHY COVERTLY: 15 YEARS AS A TEXTUAL SC...

Fragments from a Writing Desk: DOING BIOGRAPHY COVERTLY: 15 YEARS AS A TEXTUAL SC...:   FOUND 18 February 2022--incomplete, rough, but I will put it on record 22 September-4 October 2009; 24 December 2009 11-19 March 2010; 2...

"Biographers still ought to be afraid of the New Criticism..."

Maybe so, but if my heroes Jay Leyda and Hershel Parker had better attended to New Critical ABC's they would never have misidentified J. E. A. Smith's On Onota's Graceful Shore as the "stout" poem in "heroic measure" that Melville read aloud from in a Berkshire barn--with gusto, according to Evert Duyckinck. The meter of Smith's unpretentious ballad is tetrameter whereas "heroic measure" always designates pentameter. The "stout" patriotic work described by Duyckinck in August 1851 was John C. Hoadley's ambitious national poem "Destiny." 648 lines, pentameter all the way down. In this case, indifference to elemental principles and methods of New Criticism blinded Melville's best biographers to the presence of Melville's future brother-in-law and ever-faithful friend.

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/refresher-on-heroic-measure.html

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/hoadleys-national-poem-cheered-by.html

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/destiny-poem-by-john-c-hoadley.html
  

Wellek was right

... the New Criticism has stated or reaffirmed many basic truths to which future ages will have to return: the specific nature of the aesthetic transaction, the normative presence of a work of art which cannot be simply battered about and is comparatively independent of its origins and effects....The charge of “elitism” cannot get around the New Critics’ assertion of quality and value. A decision between good and bad art remains the unavoidable duty of criticism. The humanities would abdicate their function in society if they surrendered to a neutral scientism and indifferent relativism or if they succumbed to the imposition of alien norms required by political indoctrination. Particularly on these two fronts the New Critics have waged a valiant fight which, I am afraid, must be fought over again in the future. -- René Wellek

Wellek, René. “The New Criticism: Pro and Contra.” Critical Inquiry vol. 4 no. 4, 1978, pages 611–624 at 624. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1342947. Accessed 1 Sept. 2021.

The passage is quoted by Cleanth Brooks at the end of his article on The New Criticism in The Sewanee Review, volume 87 number 4, 1979, pages 592–607; also accessible via JSTOR: www.jstor.org/stable/27543619.