When applying New Criticism to a text, the analyzer is only supposed to take into consideration what is in the text. New Critics value content over context, ignoring anything that isn’t explicitly stated by the writer in that particular work. While I appreciate the heavy reliance on analyzing the text, I find it counterproductive to the project of the piece not to contextualize it—not to think about what was happening at the time the text was written, who the writer was, and what they were interested in forces the reader to ignore certain aspects of the text (or completely miss references) does the work a disservice.

Because of the intense focus on the text, New Critics are able to deeply analyze a text, which I think is fundamental when it comes to analysis of any kind—you have to be able to articulate what the text is doing before you can begin to unpack how it’s doing that. However, I think New Criticism falls short in ignoring outside aspects and influences of the work. As we began to talk about in class today, when artists or critics or curators or whomever are analyzing work they look at the piece itself, but then they look at the piece in relation to the other pieces made by that artist or made in the same time period or during the same movement in order to create the most compelling, thorough analysis of the work.

One poet whose work I am really interested in right now is Jericho Brown, whose latest book, The Tradition, deals with a lot of heavy topics including race, queerness, and trauma. If we were to look at Brown’s poems as New Critics and analyze only the content of the poems, we would still be reading amazing poems, but we would lose so much of their nuances. Brown’s personal history plays a huge role in the emotion of these poems—he is an African American, queer man who has undergone some intense traumas in his life, and to separate that context from the content of his poems would mean losing the value of them.

In the titular poem for Brown’s book (which can be found here: https://poets.org/poem/tradition), New Critics would lose so much of the historical implications of the poem, which deals with slavery and police brutality without ever naming those things. To separate Brown from the poem would mean that lines like, “our dead fathers/Wiped sweat from their necks” wouldn’t have the implications of slavery because a New Critic would not consider Brown’s race when analyzing the poem. And a New Critic would completely lose the meaning behind the end of the poem because they wouldn’t be able to understand who John Crawford, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown are or why the ending of the poem is not only intelligent, but also extremely emotional. When Brown says, “Men like me and my brothers filmed what we/ Planted for proof we existed before/ Too late, sped the video to see blossoms/Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems/Where the world ends, everything cut down./John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.” he is equating black men who have been murdered by police officers to flowers that have been plucked and cut down. Without the context of Brown’s background or the current political climate surrounding police brutality, New Critics wouldn’t be able to fully grasp what Brown was doing in the poem.

“The Tradition.” The Tradition, by Jericho Brown, Copper Canyon Press, 2019.