Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : polemics (label : subject/polemics).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are many others) : carpitude, cheese poetics, community, ideology, satire, social role...

Maybe the language poets' (or I should say Ron Silliman's historical version of same) reaction against "speech", and American anecdotal poetry, signalled a dissatisfaction with narrative and representation; but it seems predicated on an equally simplistic (ie. as simplistic as the prose realists') concept of representation. One sees a New-Critical emphasis on the technical analysis of the "verbal object", its autotelism - Clark Coolidge's "word-drumming".

The issue of representation-as-communication - as parable, if you will - is downplayed.

The Romantics understood inspiration as a progressive, purposeful movement of ecstatic vision : the sun is not a 1-inch bright disk in the sky, but a burning eye at the "top" of the visible world, an emblem of the fusing power of spiritual insight - the synthetic, imaginative intelligence. For Hopkins, each thing speaks itself, and in speaking, "selves" itself - communication is its essence; it mirrors the dark "speech" of its origins in the Logos.

These stances imply a cosmology, obviously! A particular interpretation of nature & experience.

I'm certainly no authority, but in my recent skimming of Chicago critics, this notion that "a principle must be a principle of something else" stems from Aristotle's method. The active principle of a thing lies in its motive, its end or purpose for action or change. (With Aristotle one can always look at a thing from different perspectives, based on whether you're doing "science" - nature of a thing in itself - or "art" - its telos in relation to other things. I'm sure I'm garbling this, O philosophers, but anyway...).

The statement quoted below seems to align critical practice with my own sense (drawing on Mandelstam), anyway, of the poem as a combination of impulse and material, motive (gesture, genre) and language. & this is a different focus from that of the New Critics, & the mantras of langpo & related "theoretical" styles (text is prior to speech, text undermines authorial presence, etc).

Let's move on, class.