Old-School Literary Criticism Restores the Wonder of Literature

American poet, author, and professor Mark van Doren (1894–1972) delivers the keynote address at the fourth annual Forum on Democracy, at Columbia University, New York City. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The name “Mark van Doren” isn’t likely to top most people’s lists of famous literary critics. Yet this somewhat forgotten scholar—and more importantly, lover—of literature has much to teach us about the right way to think, study, and comment on literature. Van Doren (1896–1972) fought against the overly technical, scientific method of reading poetry that developed in that latter half of the 20th century. The new method tended to isolate literature from life and the wider world. Perhaps unwittingly, the New Criticism and their successors often stifled the joy of reading and commenting on literature.

Authenticity Is Key

Van Doren, an angular man with a grave expression, was a professor of English at Columbia University for almost 40 years and literary editor of The Nation. He wrote a number of books and essays on great works of Western literature, including volumes on William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Dryden.

A talented poet in his own right, Van Doren won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his “Collected Poems 1922–1938.” As a teacher, he influenced a generation of notable writers and thinkers, including John Berryman, Richard Howard, Allen Ginsberg, John Senior, and Thomas Merton.

Van Doren advocated for a simpler, old-fashioned, authentic encounter with a work that avoided an overly critical and dissecting mindset, technical “academese,” piles of footnotes, or abstruse theories. All of these could obscure the real delight and meaning of a work of art, which ultimately serves as a gateway to contemplating reality. In his book “A Liberal Education,” Van Doren put it succinctly: “Literature is a means to something bigger than itself; it makes the world available to us as chance and appetite do not.”

In contrast, many modern literary critics consider literature as an end in itself, a stunted and sealed-off academic discipline, and they get lost among terms, theories, and deconstructions of the text. They have made literature the domain of “experts” with little grounding in the real world and the mystery of human life.

"Shakespeare" by Mark Van Doren.

The New Criticism of the mid-20th century wanted to bring new rigor to their academic discipline; they wanted English to have as much sophistication and structure as biology or physics. In short, they wanted to treat literature like a science.

But Van Doren knew that the scientific and poetic mindsets are fundamentally different ways of thinking, though both valuable in their proper contexts. A poem can no more be reduced to a purely scientific analysis than the mystery of the human heart to a merely scientific analysis. The scientific and poetic mindsets are fundamentally different ways of thinking

In the preface to a book called “The Private Reader,” Van Doren laid out key principles of sound literary criticism. Van Doren argued that there are two types of good critics: those who say nothing and just enjoy the experience of reading and the wisdom gleaned from it, and those who do write about what they’ve read, but briefly and without putting too much weight on their analyses.

Such a critic “does not assume that criticism, cooled into words, can define poetry any more than poetry, having found even its best form, can be adequate to life.” This spirit instills in good critics a sense of humility: They recognizes that their words aren’t the final word on the matter, and that they could have misinterpreted the work. Good critics recognize that “criticism is an art at which luck and love assist.”

Such critics don’t belabor their points, but rather expresses a simple, though thoughtful, assessment of what was read. Van Doren wrote, “The critic can afford more often that he does to leave some space between him and his subject; to move in easy, rapid circles around it; and to dart in with judgments only when they offer themselves to him naturally, as it were on the fly.”

From there, Van Doren rejects the overly academic approach to literature then gaining prominence in institutions. This approach tended to forget a fundamental truth: A literary critic was simply a human being responding to another human being’s art, which reflected something of the mystery of the world. It was bogged down with “deserts of ingenuity and plateaus of learning, but almost never the clear figure of a man who approaches and sees, and with a decent suddenness says what he sees ... The effort, it would seem, is not to liberate poetry into a current of true and fresh ideas ... but to crowd in upon it, capture it with definitions, and immobilize it.”

Read With Purpose

None of this is to say, of course, that close reading of texts bears no fruits, or that analysis can’t deepen appreciation. But Van Doren suggested that whatever detailed probing we do into a text should be at the service of a greater delight and love of the work, not a process of increasing paralysis through dry explication. Analysis should help us to get more out of the work of literature, not less.

The Van Doren’s cardinal rule was to use academic processes and terms as a means to an end. He remembered that literature doesn’t exist solely for itself or in isolation from the real world, but as a window—or better, a magnifying class—through which we can sense the wonder of reality.

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