Understanding Critical Ideology: Objective Literary Analysis

Critical Ideology

He believed in a descriptive and interpretative criticism that was objective. You tell what the poem says, you explain what the poem looks like, and you give meaning to it. There is a kind of criticism omitted that is called Judicial criticism. The judgement should be as little contaminated by personality and subjectivity of the critic. It should be as distant as possible from the personality of the critic because the most important critical judgement forms itself without a relation with the critic.

The critic should have fresh knowledge and let out his own judgement. Here we have the clash between objectivity and subjectivity because the critic has to be objective and let the judgement pass along as a secondary factor of knowledge. The central part of what a critic should do is communicate objective knowledge.

All of this brings us back to the three estimates: personal, historical, and real. The real estimate is implemented by means of the theory of the touchstones, but in the end, we see that it is also subjective. He rejected the personal and historical estimate and he thought they should not be the support of criticism.

Personal Estimate and Criterion for Judgement

Personal estimate is useless because it is based on our personal affinities and circumstances; it is useless to determine the quality of poetry. If you do criticism based on personal estimate, you are making an autobiography, talking about yourself but with the excuse of criticising a poem. You have to banish all forms of personal criterion in your criticism.

Historical Estimate

If you give a poem importance because of the period in which it was written, you are not focusing on the importance of the poem itself. The 19th century is the great century of historicism. There was a tendency to dive into the past and bring to the present very old English poems from the medieval epoch to give them importance just because they were medieval. But history does not make a poem better or worse because it is the poem itself that has value.

He rejected the historical criterion so he was not a historic critic, and his idea on historicism was different because he rejects the historical estimate and he uses the term modern. He does not think about modernity in terms of time but with the idea of adequacy. For most people, modernity is related to things closer in time. Arnold said that a poem is modern when it is adequate to the period of time in which it was written, so for example, a very old poem can be modern because it reflects perfectly the circumstances in which it was written.

Racial Divisions

He established a bizarre relation between racial fact and literary facts. He distinguishes 3 racial divisions: Anglo-Saxons, Norman, and Celts. And with this, he established a relation between literary attributes and racial facts.

Catchphrase

Matthew Arnold said that poetry is the criticism of life. Poetry criticises life showing us the bad aspects of life that can be improved so literature can do us most good.