Ch.1 and An Essay on Criticism

In class we discussed how criticism and literature have a symbiotic relationship. I never approached Criticism in this way before. I have always ignorantly assumed that critics really served no purpose. The writers were geniuses and the critics were not creative enough to come up with there own work so they wrote about other people’s work. After reading Ch.1 of Eagleton’s How to read Poetry, it really lays out “The Functions of Criticism.” He early on addresses the idea that literary criticism is a dying art. I think that I am a classic example of why that would even cross his mind. I do not feel I was trained in this art, and as he suggests perhaps because my teacher was not trained in this art. I have been trained to close read. I think this may be why I struggle with reading poetry. As Eagleton demonstrates so often that people treat “the poem as language but not as discourse.” As I am beginning to see more clearly through this class, Poetry inherently must be approached as discourse because it draws meaning from everything and has a density unlike other literature. In fact, “poetry was pitted against rhetoric” for being not a battle of logic, but a battle “of the heart.” Additionally Eagleton makes comments on a belief that the value of Experience is dying. We like to rush for an immediate experience and focus only on the end result not the process leading up to it. Following such a claim was his commentary on Imagination. I found this to be inspiring. He points out that the reading of works can help make your own creativity and make your imagination more dynamic. After thinking about Ch.1 I tried to join that and Pope’s Essay on Criticism. At first I disliked the poem, I thought it was long, way to long. The more I read over it the more I tried to understand what Pope was saying and why he was saying it, the more I saw how it so beautifully related to Ch. 1. Rules of literature were derived from the ancient classics, and therefore it is necessary to study them. I felt like I picked up on an idea that most people are born with a certain taste, but it is the education we go through that kills that inside of us. Just as I feel Eagleton might agree Education kills students sense of Experience and Imagination. Overall, after reading Essay on Criticism I found the format more interesting. It is long, similar to the epic poems written by those he sites within the poem. He reference La Mancha from Don Quixote and that book is extremely long.

- Kelly Johnson