The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry

It is very nearly ironic that by the time that William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published Verbal Icon in 1954 as a methodology for setting out the basic principles of the New Criticism, there was already a counter movement by a new generation of critics who were chafing against what they deemed to be the overly rigid and codified tenets of the New Criticism that would not permit the reader to view a text using any outside or external referentialities. Verbal Icon is a collection of some dozen essays penned during the decade of the 1940s. Most of these essays are rarely read today except by specialists in poetic theory, but two essays have lingered in numerous anthologies as being the very heart and soul of the New Criticism: "The Intentional Fallacy" and its sister essay "The Affective Fallacy." The overarching purpose of both was to codify what to them were self-evident axioms, the majority of which dealt with their refusal to admit the validity of a "designing intellect" that requires the reader/critic to ascertain the author's stated or implied intention as part of the interpretive process. Wimsatt and Beardsley had a rather simple touchstone for determining the meaning (or what they termed the "organic unity") of a text. If an author, usually a poet, succeeded in making it clear to the reader that the poem had one and only one clear meaning, then this "clear" meaning inhered only within the poem itself as if it were a buried jewel waiting to be dug up by the reader/excavator. All other secondary meanings were not judged worthy of being hailed as primary and were to be discarded. It followed then that if the reader failed to identify this organic unity, it was not his fault; rather the fault lay in the poet who quite frankly was overly inept in constructing this unity by failing to integrate a host of factors ranging from figurative language to denotation/connotation to the physical structure of the work itself. Related to their axioms of a poem's autotelic qualities was their distinction between the ideological struggle that poet Archibald MacLeish saw as the difference between a poem's meaning and "be-ing." As far as Wimsatt and Beardsley were concerned the "truth" of an axiom of science was not the same "truth" of a poem. The former was incontestable and provable while the latter had relevance only in the fuzzily designed universe of human aesthetic experience. They asserted that since a poem was no more than artfully assembled words on paper it followed that any attempt to judge those words must be limited to those same words. The autonomous structure of a poem had no room to include either authorial intention (the Intentional Fallacy) or the emotive response of the reader (the Affective Fallacy). They averred that if either fallacy were to intrude in any judgment of the meaning of the poem, then the result must inevitably degrade into a morass of relativity from which no universally accepted unity could emerge.The counter movement against the formalistic theories of New Critics like Wimsatt and Beardsley did not begin with the deconstructive tenets of Jacques Derrida in 1967. Structuralism as an alternate theory began to emerge at about the same time as Verbal Icon was hitting the book stores. Critics of formalism were aghast at the penchant of New Critics to isolate a text from any connection to the outside world. Their telling rejoinder was that if a text were truly to be examined only using the words on the page, then how would its adherents like Wimsatt and Beardsley justify their willingness to include symbolism as a needed adjunct if the act of symbol-hunting required the reader to search for external markers of that symbol? Further, they argued that if the organic unity also required the erudite reader to similarly peek within the Oxford English Dictionary to locate synonyms, antonyms, and temporally limited archaisms, then the very concept of an autotelic self-sustaining text was a fiction. Within just a few years, the widespread existence of New Criticism as a tool for poetic explication began to fade, to be replaced by the post-structuralist credo that the concept of Eternal Truths was the same fiction that caused formalism to be discarded. A final irony in the passing of formalism is that the close reading required by New Critics is still being used by all post-structuralists even as they denigrate thinkers like Wimsatt and Beardsley.

One of the greatest and most important works of literary theory ever written. Very hard tasks tackled with enormous energy and precision.

received this week in very good condition

It gives me the opportunity to go back to my studies and at the same time it makes it available to my daughter who teaches literature.

This is one of those classics of literary criticism which every student of poetry and English Literature in general should have in their collection. The book arrived in excellent condition and on time. A great buy!

Timely delivery and a reasonable price.