'Doing Valuable Work in Literary Criticism'

“Part of the drama of reading Boswell’s Life for the first time is that one can never (however much classical or Christian erudition one brings to the task) predict confidently how Johnson is going to respond to this or that specific question; yet of course by the end one knows that the answers will very largely be found to cohere if one works patiently enough.” 

It’s merely human to expect consistency in others, even critics, and it’s easy to mistake their likes and dislikes for dogma or at least a systematic set of literary values. That makes it easier to dismiss them as dictators and crackpots. Thoughtful critics and even common readers aren’t obligated to devise a rigorous critical system, weigh every work against it and issue ironclad judgments.

 

I remember the shock I felt when learning what Johnson said of Laurence Sterne: “Nothing odd will do long, Tristram Shandy did not last.” I had just read Sterne’s novel and Johnson's dismissal sounded foolish. For a baffling misstep, consider this passage in Johnson’s “Life of Swift”:

 

“In the poetical works of Dr. Swift there is not much upon which the critic can exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety. They are, for the most part, what their author intended. The diction is correct, the numbers are smooth, and the rhymes exact.”

 

At the top, John Fraser is writing in his essay “Yvor Winters: The Perils of Mind,” published in the Fall 1970 issue of The Centennial Review. Winters had died two years earlier at age sixty-seven. Fraser quotes him: “The number of people capable of doing valuable work in literary criticism is very small. A great critic, indeed, is the rarest of all literary geniuses . . . perhaps the only critic in English who deserves the epithet is Samuel Johnson,” followed by Fraser’s conclusion: "So too with Winters’ literary judgments.” I know a blogger who called Winters “a fanatic” and “a fascist.” He means Winters had rigorous standards and little use for shoddy work.

 

For Winters, a prerequisite for critical judgment is life experience. Literature is not an abstraction in an Erlenmeyer flask. I like Winters’ remark about a poem by J.V. Cunningham: “I confess that I retain a kind of bucolic distrust of all theories which seem to be in conflict with the facts of life.” He writes of  the overrated William Carlos Williams: “[He] was a thorough bore in print except on a few occasions.” That makes up for Winters' silly critical elevation of Charles Churchill, F. G. Tuckerman and Jones Very.