Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T19:24:36.562Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - R. P. Blackmur

from THE NEW CRITICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Michael Wood
Edited by
A. Walton Litz ,
Louis Menand  and
Lawrence Rainey
A. Walton Litz
Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
Louis Menand
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Lawrence Rainey
Affiliation:
University of York
Get access

Summary

And as you cry, Impossible,

A step is on the stairs.

Randall Jarrell, ‘Hope’

‘Form is a way of thinking’, R. P. Blackmur wrote, and form was one of his cherished, recurring words. Yet he cannot plausibly be called a formalist, and it is entirely characteristic of his criticism that he should use an apparently smaller concept – technique – to get him into even larger territories. His approach, he said in 1935, in an essay called ‘A Critic's Job of Work’, was

primarily through the technique, in the widest sense of that word, of the examples handled; technique on the plane of words and even … linguistics … but also technique on the plane of intellectual and emotional patterns … and technique, too, in that there is a technique of securing and arranging and representing a fundamental view of life.

It may help to suggest that Blackmur's early work concentrated on technique in the first sense, with plenty of glances at the others, while his later work examined technique chiefly in the last sense; and that the middle sense never left him, early or late. This grouping corresponds very roughly to a focus on poetry and poets in the first books – e.g., The Double Agent (1935), The Expense of Greatness (1940) (much of this work reappearing in Language as Gesture (1952) and again in Form and Value in Modern Poetry (1957)) – and on prose and society in the later ones – e.g., The Lion and the Honeycomb(1955), Eleven Essays in the European Novel (1964), A Primer of Ignorance (1967).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 235 - 247
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Blackmur, R. P.A Primer of Ignorance (New York, 1967).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.Eleven Essays in the European Novel (New York, 1964).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.From Jordan's Delight (New York, 1937).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.Henry Adams (New York, 1980).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.Language as Gesture (1952; rpt. New York, 1981).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.New Criticism in the United States (1959; rpt. Folcroft, 1971).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.Outsider at the Heart of Things, ed. Jones, James T. (Urbana, Ill., 1989).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.Poems of R. P. Blackmur (Princeton, 1977).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.Studies in Henry James (New York, 1983).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.The Double Agent (1935; rpt. Gloucester, 1962).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.The Expense of Greatness (1940; rpt. Gloucester, 1958).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.The Good European (Cummington, 1947).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique (New York, 1955).Google Scholar
Blackmur, R. P.The Second World (Cummington, 1942).Google Scholar
Boyers, Robert, R. P. Blackmur: Poet-Critic: Towards a View of Poetic Objects (Columbia, Mo., 1980).Google Scholar
Cone, Edward T., Frank, Joseph, and Keeley, Edmund (eds.), The Legacyof R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1987).Google Scholar
Davie, Donald, ‘Poetry or Poems?’, in The Poet in the Imaginary Museum (Princeton, 1977).Google Scholar
Donoghue, Denis, ‘Introduction: The Sublime Blackmur’, in Selected Essays of R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1985).Google Scholar
Donoghue, Denis, ‘R. P. Blackmur and The Double Agent’, Sewanee Review, 91 (1983).Google Scholar
Donoghue, Denis, ‘R. P. Blackmur's Poetry: An Introduction’, in Poems of R. P. Blackmur (1977).Google Scholar
Edel, Leon, ‘Criticism's Double Agent’, Grand Street, 1 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Form and Value in Modern Poetry (Garden City, 1957).
Frank, Joseph, ‘R. P. Blackmur: The Later Phase’, in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick, 1963).Google Scholar
Fraser, Russell, ‘My Two Masters’, Sewanee Review, 91 (1983).Google Scholar
Fraser, Russell, ‘R. P. Blackmur and Henry Adams’, Southern Review, 17 (1981).Google Scholar
Fraser, Russell, ‘R. P. Blackmur: America's Best Critic’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 57 (1981).Google Scholar
Fraser, Russell, A Mingled Yarn: The Life of R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1981).Google Scholar
Hyman, Stanley Edgar, ‘R. P. Blackmur and the Expense of Criticism’, in The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (1948; rev. edn. New York, 1955).Google Scholar
Jones, James T., Wayward Skeptic: The Theories of R. P. Blackmur (Urbana, Ill., 1986).Google Scholar
Kenner, Hugh, ‘Inside the Featherbed’, in Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature (New York, 1958).Google Scholar
Lewis, R. W. B., ‘Casella as Critic: Notes on R. P. Blackmur’, Kenyon Review, 13 (1955).Google Scholar
Merwin, W. S. ‘Affable Irregular: Recollections of R. P. Blackmur’, Grand Street, 1 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pannick, G. J., Richard Palmer Blackmur (Boston, 1981).Google Scholar
Parker, Hershel, ‘Deconstructing The Art of the Novel and Liberating James's “Prefaces”’, Henry James Review, 14 (1994).Google Scholar
Ransom, John Crowe, The New Criticism (New York, 1941).Google Scholar
Schwartz, Delmore, ‘The Critical Method of R. P. Blackmur’, in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, ed. Dike, Donald A. and Zucker, David H. (Chicago, 1970).Google Scholar
Selected Essays (New York, 1986).
Wellek, René, ‘R. P. Blackmur’, in A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, Volume 5: English Criticism, 1900–1950 (New Haven, 1986).Google Scholar
Wood, Michael, ‘No Success Like Failure’, New York Review of Books (7 May 1987).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×