“The critic is surely himself a literary creator, and his work starts with a spontaneous surge of piety, and is inducted by the contagion of art into a composition of his own.”

He gives literary criticism a creative dignity, describing the critic as an artist responding to art. · Essay, Criticism, Inc.

• Art
• Creation
• Criticism

“The critic should find in the poem a total poetic or individual object which tends to be universalized.”

His emphasis on treating the poem as an integrated artistic whole rather than reducing it to historical or biographical information. · Essay, Criticism, Inc.

• Criticism
• Poetry
• Structure

“The poem is a loose logical structure with an irrelevant local texture.”

A concise expression of his influential distinction between a poem’s logical structure and its rich verbal texture. · Book, The New Criticism

• Language
• Poetry
• Structure