Muir States Critics Alienate Poet From His General Public Readers

Modern critics have increased the gap between the poet and his public audience by forgetting that criticism should begin and end in enjoyment, Edwin Muir, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, charged last night.

Their emphasis on analysis has created the impression that to know poetry, one must explain it. This has given people the impression that a poem is something to be studied and not something to be enjoyed, he said.

Muir spoke in New Lecture Hall on "The Poet and the Critic" in the fifth of his six Norton lectures.

"The main function of criticism is to open the joys of literature to the reader," Muir said. "But this task has been left to lesser men while the best critics have turned all their attention to what is only their secondary function, to influence the poet."

Ordinary readers can get help and enjoyment from the traditional critic who tells what impression a poem makes on him, Muir said. They glean nothing from the critic who says the poem cannot possibly mean what it seems to, and then proceeds to explain it.

The analytical method is valuable in making us aware of the meanings concealed by our stock reactions, Muir said. It was especially valuable in getting rid of superfluous romantic notions earlier in the century, he said.

"New Criticism was salutary while it remained only an influence; but it has now become a sanctioned method, and has used this sanction to usurp power," Muir continued. He charged that the method was often used to find so many possible meanings in words or phrases of a poem, it concealed the principal meaning.

"Such an approach cuts the poem off from the air, and the reader feels trapped between it and the critic," he said. "Among young and inexperienced readers it may make the poem a problem before it is an experience, and keep it from ever becoming more than a problem."