In Honor of Richard Ellmann
David M. Katz
New Criticism
I want to memorize “The Man Who Dreamed
Of Faeryland” by Yeats, the first of three
Poems my teacher Richard Ellmann taught
To show us that a poem stood alone
Without biography or history,
A would-be life, a model of the human.
The second, Auden’s “Autumn Song,” reflected
Nothing but itself, a skeleton
Of desiccated leaves, stroller wheels,
And nannies in their graves. The third was lost
Inside the glamour of a tiny-footed
Muse, pedaling out her legacy in music:
“Piano,” buried heart of Lawrence, fact
Past Freud and melancholy, playing itself.
My poem “New Criticism” honors Richard Ellmann, who was born on this date in 1918. Although I attended his packed lectures at Northwestern University, I regret that I never met the man personally. But he played a significant role in galvanizing my lifelong passion for modern poetry.
As an undergraduate at Northwestern University in the late 1960s, I had the good luck to take a lecture course in Modern American and British poetry taught by Ellmann, who was by then a celebrated Joyce and Yeats biographer. The experience of writing its three required papers is what I remember most about the course.
From today’s perspective, the assignments can seem odd, especially coming from a scholar lauded for his work on the lives of poets. For each paper, we were told to analyze a single poem: Yeats’s “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” Auden’s “Autumn Song” (“Now the leaves are falling fast”), and D. H. Lawrence’s “Piano.” The kicker — at first it felt like a strait jacket — was that we were barred from citing any evidence from outside the bounds of the poem itself: no references to literary, historical, political, or social science research. Absolutely no use of author biographies was allowed.
In retrospect, it’s clear that Ellmann’s idea for the assignments was based on New Criticism, the literary theory rooted in the discipline of close textual reading, which was still popular after its heyday in the 1950s.
Often linked with what we may with hindsight call the Old Formalism, New Criticism forced its acolytes to analyze only the intrinsic elements of each poem by digging into such things as its rhetorical devices, prosody, and vocabulary. Restrictive as the method first seemed, writing those 5-page papers helped me learn how to read into the deep structure of a poem to gain access to its unique nature.
With some modifications, what I learned in Ellmann’s class still informs how I read poems. "How shall we get said what must be said?” wrote William Carlos Williams. “Only the poem.” My accompanying poem, “New Criticism” first appeared in PN Review and later in my book Stanzas on Oz.