Plato's attitude to poetry is primarily expressed in The Republic and Ion. In The Republic, he famously banishes poets from his ideal state for two reasons: poetry is thrice removed from truth (it imitates appearances, which are themselves copies of the Forms), and poetry appeals to the irrational, emotional part of the soul, weakening the rational. In Ion, he argues that poets compose not by skill but by divine inspiration — they are "out of their senses," channelling the Muse like a magnetic ring passing force through a chain of iron rings.
Aristotle (384–322 BC) — Poetics
Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BC) is the foundational text of Western literary theory. Written partly as a reply to Plato, it rehabilitates poetry by arguing that imitation (mimesis) is natural to humans and pleasurable, and that tragedy purges the emotions through catharsis.
Key Aristotelian Concepts:Mimesis — imitation of human action · Catharsis — the purgation of pity and fear through tragedy · Hamartia — the tragic flaw or error of judgement · Hubris — excessive pride leading to downfall · Anagnorisis — recognition or discovery · Peripeteia — reversal of fortune · Mythos — plot (the most important element) · Ethos — character · Dianoia — thought · Lexis — diction · Melos — melody · Opsis — spectacle. The six elements of tragedy in order of importance: plot, character, thought, diction, melody, spectacle.
Aristotle defines tragedy as "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude... through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions." The ideal tragic hero is a man of intermediate goodness who falls from prosperity to adversity through a flaw or error, not through vice or depravity.
Longinus — On the Sublime (1st Century AD)
On the Sublime (Peri Hupsous), attributed to Longinus, identifies five sources of the sublime in literature: great thoughts, strong emotion, figures of speech, noble diction, and dignified word arrangement. The sublime produces not persuasion or pleasure but transport — it strikes "like a thunderbolt."
Horace — Ars Poetica (c. 18 BC)
Horace's verse epistle establishes the neoclassical principles of decorum, unity, the three unities (action, time, place), and the dual purpose of poetry: aut prodesse aut delectare — "either to benefit or to delight" (or both: omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci — "he wins every vote who mixes the useful with the sweet").
10.2 Renaissance and Neoclassical Criticism
Sir Philip Sidney — An Apology for Poetry (c. 1579–80)
Sidney defends poetry against Puritan attack by arguing that the poet creates a "golden world" superior to nature's "brazen world." Poetry surpasses history (which is bound by fact) and philosophy (which is abstract) because it combines truth with delight — it can move readers to virtuous action. The poet is a "maker" (poietes) who creates a second nature.
John Dryden — An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668)
Dryden's dialogue debates the relative merits of Ancients vs Moderns and English vs French drama. He defends Shakespeare against neoclassical critics as a "comprehensive soul" who transcended the rules. He coined important critical terms: "wit," the "heroic play," and the concept of "imitation of nature."
Alexander Pope — An Essay on Criticism (1711)
Pope's verse essay codifies neoclassical critical principles: follow Nature and the Ancients, avoid extremes, maintain decorum, and recognise that "to err is human, to forgive divine" and "a little learning is a dangerous thing." The rules of the Ancients are themselves derived from Nature.
10.3 Romantic Critical Theory
William Wordsworth — Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
Wordsworth's Preface is the manifesto of English Romanticism. Poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" recollected in tranquillity. The poet should use "the real language of men" speaking about "incidents from common life." Metre provides pleasure by creating a controlled expectation that manages emotion.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Biographia Literaria (1817)
Coleridge's critical masterpiece distinguishes: Primary Imagination (the living power of perception), Secondary Imagination (the creative, dissolving, recreating faculty), and Fancy (mechanical association). He argues against Wordsworth's theory that poetic diction should be identical to the language of rustics. He defines a poem as "that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth." He also develops the concept of "the willing suspension of disbelief."
Percy Bysshe Shelley — A Defence of Poetry (1821)
Shelley argues that poetry is the highest form of expression — poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Poetry "strips the veil of familiarity from the world" and restores the capacity for wonder. He distinguishes between reason (analytical, divisive) and imagination (synthetic, creative). Written in response to Thomas Love Peacock's "The Four Ages of Poetry."
10.4 Victorian and Late 19th-Century Criticism
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
Arnold defined criticism as "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." He argued that poetry would replace religion as a moral and spiritual guide: "More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us." He proposed the "touchstone" method — testing poetry against passages from the acknowledged masters. His concept of the "grand style" identified the best poetry as possessing "the power of forming, sustaining, and delighting the imagination."
Walter Pater (1839–1894)
Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) proposes aesthetic criticism — responding to the impression a work makes on the sensitive reader. His famous "Conclusion" argues that art exists to give us "the highest quality to your moments as they pass." All art aspires toward "the condition of music" (pure form without content). His influence shaped the Aesthetic movement and Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Wilde inverted the realist aesthetic: "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life." In "The Decay of Lying" (1889) and "The Critic as Artist" (1890), he argued that criticism is itself a creative art, and that the critic's first duty is to see the object as in itself it really is not — to bring their own personality to bear upon it. Wilde's aesthetic philosophy — art for art's sake, the supremacy of beauty over morality, the creative power of the lie — is dramatised in his fiction and embodied in his own life and writing.
📖 Read Wilde in Your Member Library
Wilde's critical essays are inseparable from his creative practice. Read two essential Wilde texts in your member library and see his aesthetic theory in action:
The Picture of Dorian Gray — Wilde's only novel, and the supreme fictional expression of his aesthetic philosophy. Lord Henry Wotton is the Wildean critic as artist; Dorian is the life that imitates art; Basil Hallward is the artist destroyed by sincerity. The Preface ("All art is quite useless") is Wilde's critical manifesto in miniature.
De Profundis — Written in Reading Gaol (1897), this long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas is Wilde's most personal prose work. Where his earlier criticism celebrated surface and artifice, De Profundis confronts depth, suffering, and spiritual transformation — a fascinating counterpoint to his aesthetic theory.
10.5 20th-Century Formalism: New Criticism and Russian Formalism
Russian Formalism (c. 1915–1930)
Russian Formalism — associated with Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Boris Tomashevsky, and Roman Jakobson — analysed literature as a system of formal devices, divorced from biography, history, and psychology.
Defamiliarisation (ostranenie) — Shklovsky's concept: art makes the familiar strange, forcing us to see it freshly
Fabula vs Sjuzhet — the raw story material vs. the way it is arranged and told
Literariness (literaturnost) — what makes literary language different from ordinary language
Jakobson's six functions of language: referential, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual, poetic
New Criticism (c. 1930–1960)
New Criticism — associated with I. A. Richards, William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom — advocated "close reading" of the text itself, independent of authorial intention, historical context, or reader response.
I. A. Richards — Practical Criticism (1929); Principles of Literary Criticism (1924); emotional vs referential language
William Empson — Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930); ambiguity as richness
Cleanth Brooks — The Well Wrought Urn (1947); the poem as a dramatic structure of tensions resolved
The Intentional Fallacy (Wimsatt and Beardsley) — the author's intention is irrelevant to textual meaning
The Affective Fallacy (Wimsatt and Beardsley) — the reader's emotional response is irrelevant to textual meaning
Paradox, irony, tension, and ambiguity as the hallmarks of good poetry
T. S. Eliot's Critical Theory
Eliot's critical essays — particularly "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) and "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921) — were enormously influential. Key concepts: the impersonal theory of poetry (the poet as catalyst, escaping personality), the objective correlative, the dissociation of sensibility, and the importance of tradition as a living, modifiable whole.
10.6 Structuralism and Post-Structuralism
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (posthumous, 1916) is the founding text of modern linguistics and, through its influence, of structuralism. Key concepts: the sign is composed of signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept); the relationship between them is arbitrary; language is a system of differences with no positive terms; langue (the language system) vs parole (individual speech acts); synchronic vs diachronic analysis.
Structuralism
Structuralism applied Saussurean linguistics to literature and culture — seeking the underlying structures (grammars) that govern all narratives, myths, and cultural practices.
Claude Lévi-Strauss — structural anthropology; binary oppositions in myth
Roland Barthes (early) — Mythologies (1957); S/Z (1970); codes in narrative
Vladimir Propp — Morphology of the Folktale (1928); 31 narrative functions
A. J. Greimas — actantial model; six actants in narrative
Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction
Post-structuralism challenged structuralism's claim that stable meanings and structures can be identified.
Jacques Derrida — Of Grammatology (1967); Writing and Difference (1967); deconstruction; différance; the trace; logocentrism; the metaphysics of presence
Roland Barthes (late) — "The Death of the Author" (1967); "From Work to Text" (1971); the writerly vs readerly text
Michel Foucault — discourse; power/knowledge; The Order of Things (1966); Discipline and Punish (1975); the episteme; the author-function
Paul de Man — rhetorical reading; Allegories of Reading (1979)
J. Hillis Miller — Yale School of deconstruction
Barthes's "Death of the Author" (1967): Barthes argues that the author's intentions are irrelevant to the meaning of a text — meaning is produced in the act of reading, not writing. "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." This essay, along with Foucault's "What is an Author?" (1969), fundamentally changed how literary theory conceived of authorship and meaning.
10.7 Psychoanalytic, Marxist, and Feminist Criticism
Psychoanalytic Criticism
Sigmund Freud — the unconscious; the Oedipus complex; dream-work (condensation, displacement); the uncanny (Unheimliche); "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" (1908)
Jacques Lacan — the mirror stage; the Imaginary, Symbolic, Real; language and the unconscious; jouissance; the gaze
Harold Bloom — The Anxiety of Influence (1973); poets struggle with their precursors through "misreading" (clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, apophrades)
Marxist Criticism
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — base and superstructure; ideology; literature as reflecting class interests
Georg Lukács — realism vs modernism; the historical novel; typicality
Louis Althusser — Ideological State Apparatuses; interpellation; literature as relatively autonomous
Antonio Gramsci — hegemony; the role of intellectuals; literature and cultural leadership
Terry Eagleton — Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976); Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
Fredric Jameson — The Political Unconscious (1981); "Always historicize!"
Feminist Criticism
Virginia Woolf — A Room of One's Own (1929); material conditions for women's writing
Simone de Beauvoir — The Second Sex (1949); "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"
Kate Millett — Sexual Politics (1970); literature as an arena of patriarchal power
Elaine Showalter — gynocriticism; A Literature of Their Own (1977); the female literary tradition
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar — The Madwoman in the Attic (1979); anxiety of authorship; the madwoman as alter ego
Hélène Cixous — écriture féminine; "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975)
Luce Irigaray — This Sex Which Is Not One (1977); the phallogocentric order
Julia Kristeva — the semiotic and the symbolic; abjection; intertextuality
10.8 Postcolonial, New Historicist, and Reader-Response Theory
Postcolonial Theory
Frantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth (1961); Black Skin, White Masks (1952); colonial psychology; national consciousness
Edward Said — Orientalism (1978); the Western construction of the "Orient" as Other; culture and imperialism
Homi K. Bhabha — The Location of Culture (1994); hybridity; mimicry; ambivalence; the Third Space
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988); the subaltern; strategic essentialism; translating Derrida
