My dear Mr. Ransom, et. al.: You are the founders of New Criticism, a literary movement that focuses on a text as a single, wholesome entity unto itself. Your method for analyzing literature leaves me with some questions: How do the past and the present have nothing to do with the future? If you like to see poems as objects, as fixed anecdotes in time, will you not see humans this way also? But do I not have a mother? Does her past not affect me? Her childhood? Am I living in white space, as in cartoons, while you peer down at me through a microscope?
The answer is no. My family’s experiences and histories are completely relevant to consider in a critical analysis of the woman I am. I know that subjectivity may seem a hindrance to you, as you seem to dislike thinking about the histories behind writing and the gilded futures they create, winding thread in the minds of readers who will use it to connect the facts. Utilizing measured objectivity is necessary for all fields of study, of course. In this you are correct. However, it is a tradition misguided in its use, as the academic world has learned from the ancients to prize what can be tested and observed above the careful language chosen from a churning heart.
You see, Mr. Ransom, this tradition has played a role in the lives of the suppressed and the voiceless. In his Interdisciplinarity, Joe Moran writes that “there has been a centuries-old debate about the relative merits of ‘useful’ areas of knowledge that set themselves limited aims but clearly achieve them; and more nebulously defined areas of knowledge that are more ambitious and wide-ranging but not so obviously ‘useful’”. The former areas have historically been objective disciplines that I have heretofore mentioned, whereas the latter have consisted of the arts and the humanities, considered subjective and therefore less ‘useful’ in content.
Mr. Ransom, I know by your bibliography that you love literature. This means that you may have had to defend yourself against others in your lifetime about your chosen field. How did it feel to be judged by your choices about what you preferred in life? I would hope that you can see how the pursuit of writing as well as its proponents have been vilified throughout history as crude or simple. I hope that you can see similarly how writers have paradoxically felt voiceless at times, when confronted with criticism against their field.
It is very useful to learn from other disciplines to dissect and observe an organism separate from its environment. In this way, your idea of seeing the text as a separate entity is necessary. Without viewing the text as words and syntax, we could not identify clever literary devices that we appreciate. What I must remind you, however, is that literature is often subjective—fantastical and unexplainable because it comes from many parts of the human body. It makes strange and terrifying noises because it exposes the roots of us rather than what is calmly and logically planned out.
To separate the author from his or her work for a period of time is a reasonable, profitable exercise. To divorce them means disparaging and unforeseeable loss.