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Newman, Aristotle, and the New Criticism: On the Modern Element in Newman's Poetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Norman Friedman
Norman Friedman*
Affiliation:
Queens College, Flushing, N. Y.
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Extract

Certain Aspects of modern critical theory can be defined in terms of its use—or rather, misuse—of Aristotle's Poetics, especially of Aristotle's conception of plot and his statement that poetry deals with universals rather than particulars. The same, of course, can be said of other periods as well. Sidney's view of Aristotle, for example, was confined to the notion that a poem was an imitation of an action, but he platonized even this conception by claiming that the action imitated was an ideal one—what ought to be rather than what is—and this, as we shall see, became quite a common distortion of the famous passage at the beginning of the ninth chapter of the Poetics. The other side of the coin is found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' concern with the genres and the unities and their supposed rules. It cannot be said that Aristotle has been a vital influence on literary criticism since the nineteenth century, except for the current minority report being filed by the Chicago Critics, but these two aspects of the Poetics nevertheless offered a support and a challenge to certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics for clarifying their own ideas about poetry.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , June 1966 , pp. 261 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 Cf. Geoffrey Tillotson, “Newman's Essay on Poetry: An Exposition and Comment,” which first appeared in Newman Centenary Essays, ed. Henry Tristram (London, 1945), and then, much changed, in Perspectives of Criticism, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), and in Tillotson's Criticism and the Nineteenth Century (London, 1951); and Alba H. Warren, Jr, English Poetic Theory 1825–1865 (Princeton, 1950), Ch. ii. Although my essay touches theirs at several points, there is no real duplication.

2 I hope I may be permitted to call an essay written in 1829 “Victorian,” although the period is not officially regarded as having begun until three or four years later. This essay represents an early portion of a projected chronological study of Victorian poetry and poetics as they relate to Modernism, and Newman—even as a young man—certainly belongs within the compass of such a study.

3 I am using the text of Newman's essay found in English Critical Essays (Nineteenth Century), ed. Edmund D. Jones (New York, 1916), pp. 190–215. Since I have not troubled to document my references to this work further, I can do no better than to quote Tillotson's remarks on the subject: “Unless otherwise stated [or implied by the context], words and passages in quotation marks come from the essay under discussion. If any reader wishes to trace these quotations to their immediate context, he has only twenty-six pages to search: meanwhile other readers are spared the tedium of finding a flock of numerals related only to further numerals” (Criticism and the Nineteenth Century, p. 149, n. 3).

4 The italics are Newman's.

5 I am thinking primarily, of course, of Johnson's “Preface to Shakespeare” (1765). Cf. W. R. Keast's “The Theoretical Foundations of Johnson's Criticism,” Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane, abridged ed. (Chicago, 1957), pp. 169–187. I have referred to the more easily available paperback (Phoenix) edition of this book wherever possible.

6 See Olson, “An Outline of Poetic Theory,” Critics and Criticism, pp. 3–23; and Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto, 1953).

7 “The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks,” Critics and Criticism, unabridged ed. (1952), pp. 83–107. This is the hardcover edition, and it also contains, of course, all the essays in the paperback edition.

8 “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones.” Critics and Criticism, abridged ed., pp. 62–93.

9 Bywater translation.

10 “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), Selected Essays 1917–1932 (New York, 1932), pp. 121–126.

11 “The New Romantic Criticism,” Sewanee Review, lxix (1961), 490–500.

12 This essay, written in 1913, is in Hulme's posthumous Speculations, ed. Herbert Read (New York, 1924).

13 First published in 1833 as two related essays, and then in 1859 as one combined essay with minor alterations.