Volume 11, Number 8 · November 7, 1968
Character
By Noel Annan
The White-Garnett Letters
edited by David Garnett
Viking, 312 pp., $6.95
T.H. White
by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Viking, 352 pp., $6.50
Whenever university administrators or professors are trying to extract money to finance some new development, they declare how essential it is for the university to keep pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge. It might be all for the good if they were asked: 'And how do you propose to get your students to help push?' It can sometimes happen. Back in the 1920s in Cambridge, England, when the New Criticism was being born, I. A. Richards, struggling with the fundamental problems of meaning and value in poetry, handed his audience of undergraduates a sheet of a dozen poems, date and author unrevealed, and asked them to say what each poem was about and whether it was a good or bad poem. The results of this inquiry were startling. A poem by Longfellow was thought superior to one by Hardy, and the verses of Ella Wheeler Wilcox and of a First World War army chaplain, known as Woodbine Willie, were preferred to Hopkins and Lawrence. There was not the faintest agreement about the meaning of any one poem: a greeting to Meredith on his birthday was confidently asserted to be a cavalier drinking song. Richards drew some conclusions on the causes of this singular lack of success. Not only had his audience read too little poetry, not only were they unable to construe their own language, not only were they immature, but they brought to the text a mass of preconceptions and—most fatal of all—stock responses. They lacked sincerity of feeling. They responded to poems as if they were advertisements. They had never let the poem penetrate to the heart, nor let the heart be guided by the informed use of their intelligence.
Review, 1915 words
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