Eliot and New Criticism
Unwittingly, Eliot inspired and informed the movement of New Criticism. This is somewhat ironic, since he later criticized their intensely detailed analysis of texts as unnecessarily tedious. Yet, he does share with them the same focus on the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of poetry, rather than on its ideological content. The New Critics resemble Eliot in their close analysis of particular passages and poems.
Read more about this topic: Tradition And The Individual Talent
Famous quotes containing the words eliot and/or criticism:
“Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life ... can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)