The Birth of New Criticism: Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I.A. Richards, Laura Riding, and Robert Graves by Donald J. Childs (review)

Reviewed by: The Birth of New Criticism: Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I.A. Richards, Laura Riding, and Robert Graves by Donald J. Childs Stephen J. Adams Donald J. Childs. The Birth of New Criticism: Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I.A. Richards, Laura Riding, and Robert Graves. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s up, 2013. 406pp. $100.00. When I was asked to review a book entitled The Birth of New Criticism, I accepted with little hesitation. As an erstwhile undergraduate in Allen Tate’s class at the University of Minnesota, I have lived my academic life evolving from what I understand to be the New Criticism ever since, never wholly losing contact with that wholesome root. But when I received this volume and read the subtitle, I knew adjustments were required. This is not a book about the American New Criticism but about its English fore-bears—William Empson, I.A. Richards, and (surprisingly) Robert Graves. Suspecting a bias on my part, I asked several colleagues and was greeted with the same reply: the New Criticism was an American phenomenon. So the title of Professor Childs’s study is misleading. It might more fairly have been called The British Backgrounds of New Criticism or, even more accurately, Robert Graves and English Poetics of the 1920s. For this is essentially a study of Robert Graves’s poetic theory and its immediate influence, and read as such it is a thorough, detailed, and original piece of literary history. [End Page 127] Childs begins his study with a candid self correction: he quotes his own entry written for the The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Toronto 1993), a skilfully condensed summary of the generally accepted sequence of events. But when he wrote that summary twenty years ago, he was unaware of the place of Robert Graves in the earliest phases, and this book corrects that history. The greater half of Childs’s study is devoted to Graves’s presence in Empson’s breakthrough book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). Empson’s book, written at the astonishing age of twenty-two, is one of those rare works of criticism that never loses its value: its reader even today is not merely informed but put through the paces of exercising the Empsonian method, as she sorts through tangled lines of syntax and semantics. It can still be a mind-altering experience. Childs notes the familiar genesis of Empson’s book, as described by his Cambridge tutor Richards: At about his third visit he brought up the games of interpretation which Laura Riding and Robert Graves had been playing [in A Survey of Modernist Poetry 1927] with the unpunctuated form of “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” Taking the sonnet as a conjuror takes his hat, he produced an endless swarm of lively rabbits from it and ended by “You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?” This was a Godsend to a Director of Studies, so I said, “You’d better go off and do it, hadn’t you?” A week later he said he was still slapping away at it on his typewriter. In a note to his book, Empson duly acknowledged his debt to Graves, but he neglected to include Laura Riding as co-author—in fact “lead author”— of A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Graves, after all, was an established presence, having published four previous books of prose, while the youthful Laura Riding had published nothing. Riding, reasonably enough, protested to Empson in a letter, and Empson apologized, saying that he was thinking primarily of Graves’s earlier books. Not satisfied, she followed with further correspondence that became increasingly nasty. Graves too went on to bad mouth Empson (he is “as clever as a monkey & I do not like monkeys” [56]) and the two persisted in their pestering correspondence, so that Empson, in his second edition of the Seven Types, dropped any mention of the Riding-Graves Survey, referring only in passing to Graves’s notion of “conflict.” Donald Childs properly labels the episode a “silly quarrel,” but it underlines the distance from American-style...

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