Abstract

Like the determinist, the New Critic must proceed by assuming what he hopes to prove; he assumes the existence of "objective" relations between the words of the poem he is studying and then attempts to perceive such relations.1 The distinction between "objective"—that is, in some sense verifiable—and purely subjective or personal meaning must necessarily be a central one for this type of poetics. New Critics are constantly protesting that they are not "reading into" works, that the meanings they ascribe to the words or images of a literary text are objectively there rather than subjectively imposed. Empson declares, speaking of a recurrent image in Donne's poetry, "the point is not so much what 'connotations' this 'image-term' might have to a self-indulgent reader as to what connotation it actually does have in its repeated uses by Donne"—there is clearly a semantic distinction to be made here, for Empson is using the same term, "connotation," to describe both what he does and what he does not mean.2 · 1. On this procedure in general, see Nelson Goodman's remark on "virtuous circles" in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast , pp. 67 ff.· 2. "Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition," Kenyon Review 11 : 580; reprinted in Paul Alpers, ed., Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism , pp. 63-77. Empson's quotation marks indicate that for the purposes of discussion he is adopting the terminology of Rosemond Tuve. Richard Strier, assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, has written articles on religious poetry and is currently completing a book on Herbert and Vaughan