Toward a Familiar Literary Criticism

Abstract

The writer’s responsibility lies in observing, in seeing clearly “the nature of things.” Eliot shows the way, illustrating it in his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations and commenting on it in such essays as “The Metaphysical Poets” and “Lancelot Andrewes.” The position he both describes and embodies, and that I embrace too, is anti- Romantic: the writer’s job, poet, fiction writer, or essayist, is not to reflect (as Wordsworth does) but to reveal what he or she sees. Opinion does not matter; indeed, it should be kept out of the picture. As Eliot, his friend Pound, and other Modernist writers—not “Moderns”—insist, the writer snaps a picture for us.