12.22.2004

Finished Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry on a break this afternoon. Crane closes where he began, with a generous & sensible recognition of the basic value of variety in critical methods.

"Of the truth about literature, no critical language can ever have a monopoly or even a distant approach to one; and there are obviously many things which the language I have been speaking of cannot do. It is a method not at all suited, as is criticism in the grand line of Longinus, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, to the definition and appreciation of those general qualities of writing - mirroring the souls of writers - for the sake of which most of us read or at any rate return to what we have read." (p. 192)

& etc.

No comments: