Lecture 5: New Criticism

Objectives

By the end of this lecture, students will be able to:

Ø  Understand what is New Criticism

Ø  Understand how to perform close readings of texts

Ø  Provide a thoughtful, thorough and convincing interpretation of a text using New Criticism perspectives

Introduction

New Criticism is a reading approach that grew out of the formalist movement of the 20th century.

It should be noted right from the beginning that New Criticism is not a literary theory, but a reading approach. New Criticism is a style of criticism that emphasizes the close reading of texts as a self-contained piece of work capable of producing independent meaning, without the accompaniment of any philosophical, historical or biographical context surrounding the text. It is a way of reading literature and not a consolidated, unidirectional literary theory. However, New Criticism was the reason of the growth of many theories that came after it. New Criticism is an accidental mother because later theoretical approaches developed as a reaction to new criticism and its conservative ideologies. New Criticism is responsible for the divorce of literature from society, politics, and history. So approaches like Reader-Response theory, New Historicism, and Deconstruction grew as a challenge to New Criticism.

Here you have 10 major points with ample examples and ideas that New Criticism gives:

I.A. Richards, an English educator, literary critic, poet and a professor at the University of Cambridge, gave his students some small lyric poems to critically analyze and comment upon composed of 18 to 32 lines. While giving this task, Richards removed all external details of the poems and any historical or biographical detail that are usually given on the page. Then he asked the students to critically analyze the poems. At his disappointment, Richards found out that the students’ responses to the poem were vague, personal, and impressionistic. Most of the students were unable to identify the nuances of literary language. Almost none of them paid attention to the figurative language, the devices used by the poet, and how the devices actually played a role in enhancing the meaning of the poem. 

       In other words, none of the students had performed a “close-Reading” of the text. Richards felt that these students had done is not a literary criticism, but what he called “social gesture”-an attempt to praise the poem on personal views. This reflected that the discipline of English literary criticism at that time was not disciplined at all; it was chaotic and haphazard. Richards felt there was a desperate need to lay some ground rules in order to keep literature literary and to keep literary criticism separate from history and biography.

    Meanwhile, a similar event was happening in other parts of the world as well. In Canyon College in America, for example, a teacher known as John Crowe Ransom, and some of his students who are today the most pronounced scholars of New Criticism under the names of Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. These scholars found similar gaps in the field of literary criticism and decided to do something about it. These “New Critics” decided to define the role of a literary critic. They wanted to develop modes of reading that pay attention to the linguistic and formal elements of a literary text. In this way, New Criticism was an attempt to validate literary criticism as a field governed by rules and systems. This is how New Criticism originated.

What did New Criticism try to change? And how it tried to change it?

1. A literary text is not just a reflection of the spirit of the age or the author’s life.

Before New Criticism was developed as a methodology, the dominant approach to literary criticism was historicist and biographical.

According to this approach, reading a literary text or critiquing or analyzing it involves investigating two things:

1. The historical background
2. Author’s biographical/psychological details: investigating the author’s intentions from his personal documents, letters, essays, dairies, or his biographies? This was used to make sense of what the world was trying to do and what was happening in society at the time when it was produced. 

    So, as you can understand in this approach the text appeared to be a reflection of the historical events around it and that the context was given more importance than the text. The text ends up being used as a tool to understand the “Spirit of the Age” and the author’s life and the expression of his psyche. 

     Let’s figure out what was wrong with studying literature as the byproduct of the age or as a byproduct of the author’s secret mind. For example, taken from Lois Tyson’s: Critical Theory Today: An Introduction”, that before New Criticism, a teacher would come to class to teach Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas”, French Revolution, Romantic Movement, romantic poets, etc. Wordsworth’s personal details: his family, friends, enemies, lovers, habits, education, beliefs, experiences, and so on. After discussing all of this, the teacher would rub off the lecture saying that they have done in the class Wordsworth’s Elegiac Stanzas. The analysis is considered complete even without opening the text. Reading the poem becomes the study of the context rather than the study of the text. Scholars viewed the literary text merely as an adjunct to history, as an illustration of the “spirit of the age” in which it was written, not as an art object worthy of study for its own sake. It ended up being the study of factual details rather than appreciating or critiquing a piece of art. 

   New Criticism, however, was an attempt to reform and systematize the field of literary criticism and make it more focused on the literary and not the historical or biographical. But if literature was not the spirit of the age or the author’s intentions, then what was it?

This would lead us to the second point, according to New Criticism; a text is an individual entity with a stable unified central theme. The New Critics argued that a literary work is a timeless, autonomous (self-sufficient) verbal object (artifact); or what W. K. Wimsatt called:  The Verbal Icon (1954). (The intention of the author is neither available nor desirable. Not available because the author does not leave back explanations of his work). Readers and readings may change, but the literary text stays the same. So, the New Critics introduced the principle of autonomy which declared that a literary text is a self-sufficient entity and its internal properties are enough for its sustenance and interpretation. A literary text has an internal system of language. In this internal system of language, there is a relationship between the various linguistic units, various features, techniques and various figurative tools, and various devices used by the author. There is a relationship between all of these. And this makes a literary text a system of language, a self-sufficient system with inherent value. It is unaffected by outside factors/material factors. 

Actually, later theories proved that literary criticism is impacted by material history and external factors.

     New Criticism, therefore, maintained that there is no need to investigate external features to analyze and judge a literary text. Relying on the historical, and political, beliefs of the author and what was happening when the text was written was a mistake. Let’s take an example, New Critics argue that when we read a text like Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, we should keep in mind that no matter Milton’s political views, his opposition to idolatry, his radical religious standpoint of the time, when we read Paradise Lost Satan’s rebellion against God should not be confused with Milton’s intention as his opposition to certain structures. It should not be considered or confused with the poet’s intentions. New Critics believe that “Paradise Lost” is an “autotelic text”, independent of internal systems of language. When undertaking the analysis of such a poem, we should pay attention to the language and the relationships between the various systems of language within the text. The central theme that is the nature of human beings’ relationship to God will be revealed (autotelic). Thus, there is a stable central theme which is in the text whose internal system of language will help you find it if you read closely.

Another point the New Critics argued is that the nature of literary language is special and different from everyday language. It has the potential to reveal much more than what is visible on the page. Language, according to New Criticism, can be used in two main ways:

I.A. Richards highlighted two uses of language in an essay in which he distinguishes between referential and emotive language. The referential language (denotative language) or what is customarily called nonliterary language is the practical, matter-of-fact, factual language that is usually used to give instructions and register facts. Whereas, emotive language has a purpose to evoke the emotional and intellectual faculties of the listener. The purpose of the non-literary language is very simple. It wants to get the message across. It is referential in that manner that it always refers to something outside of itself to get the message done. But the purpose of the literary language is to draw attention to itself, its beauty (the artistic beauty of its existence), its layers, and depth. Everyday language wants to get things done. It does not use figurative language, full of ambiguity and symbolism which delays meanings. 

   Literary language depends on connotation: on the implication, association, suggestion, and evocation of meanings and shades of meaning. (For example, while the word father denotes male parent, it connotes authority, protection, and responsibility.) In addition, literary language is expressive: it communicates tone, attitude, and feeling. Literary language organizes linguistic resources into a special arrangement, a complex unity, to create an aesthetic experience, a world of its own.

For example, when John Keats wrote in his poem Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and time, 

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweety than our rhythm;

The poet wants you to stop, and think and enjoy the ambiguity of the still by which

he means that 

The image of the bride 

1. on a Grecian Urn is still (motionless) because she is an emotionless image
2. Still unravashed which means despite the ages of the time back she was depicted on that Urn she still hasn’t consummated her love with her partner.
3. The word still also points to the fact that the beauty of the bride is still untouched by time/age and she looks as beautiful as she did a long time ago. 

So the multiplicity of meanings (ambiguity) in a single word still is a matter of enjoyment. The reader is supposed to use his intellectual faculties to discern the suggested views of language to experience the poem’s process of meaning-making. To get the pleasure that only art can afford. How can a literary critic afford to base his interpretation on historical or biographical facts while ignoring the internal linguistic features of a literary work? 

New Critics emphasized the need to formulate some rules and empirical methods to analyze literature based on literary and linguistic factors. 

   This is why New Criticism asserted that the meaning of a poem could not be explained simply by paraphrasing it or translating it into everyday language, a practice New Critics referred to as the heresy of paraphrasing. Change one line, one image, and one word of the poem, they argued, and you will have a different poem.

What should New Critics focus on?

1. The focus should be only on the words on the page or what New Critics called the “Ethos of the New Critical practice”. Focus is on the form of the text and only the text. Focus on the form includes the linguistic details an author leaves consciously or unconsciously within his work. This includes not only what the work says but “how” it says it. So judging a literary work, a literary critic cannot ignore the “hows” of the linguistic process. Before the development of New Criticism, literary critics focused only on the cover of the book by its cover. The cover is the biographical and historical details. The form is the linguistic elements used in the structure of the work.

 For example, we all appreciate Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: Shall I compare this to a summer’s day? It is the most oft-quoted and often most loved. What is it that makes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 so amazing? Is it the social background? Is it Shakespeare’s personal life? No. it is the literary language that makes the sonnet so important. Just ask yourself, if you hadn’t read the actual voice of the sonnet, would not you have missed a very important experience as a literary scholar? The words of the sonnet create the experience and not the historical/biographical details. The speaker’s message is simple: you are better than everything and everyone. If someone wants to judge Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 according to the King of the time, or the political climate of the time, or Shakespeare’s personal life, and miseries and dilemmas, would you ever be close to knowing the immense beauty and joy of the literary/linguistic features you feel after reading the sonnet? It is the form of the work; it is the beauty he creates by comparing the beloved with a summer’s days, the juxtaposition of the beloved with the imagery from nature, the hyperbole when he declares his beloved immortal and resistant to times’ ravages and the metaphor of the summer’s day, and the personification of death. All of this along with the work’s concept makes it a great work. Literary critics should focus on the words on the page. There is no need for external detail if it is a great work. However, only good form does not make good art. This would lead us to the next point

1. Form and content are inseparable. What makes great literature great? What makes literature literary? It is the fusion of beautiful form and a thoughtful, serious, universally relevant subject (content). Both content + form work together in harmony which creates a sublime experience that reading great literature offers. So to judge the quality of a work, a literary critic must consider the relevance, seriousness, and universal appeal of the subject (the content) while closely observing the formal elements of the work. The New Critics consider such a critic an informed critic and not impressionistic and vague about his judgment. He conducts his analysis by closely observing both the form and content of the work. Take, for example, an Elegy of Written on a Country Churchyards by Thomas Gray, despite being a poem with a personal message (an elegy to his friend Richard West), why is it still considered the best poem in the English language? It is because it has a beautiful language. It is simple. Its rhyme skim rhythm is simple and expressed in lines like: “The plowman homeward plots his weary way”. The words initiate the actual walking of a farmer. The repetition of the hard “d” sound reflects the hard nature of the farmer’s work. The transferred epithet in “weary way” which literally means a tired path but actually it is the farmer’s tiredness that it refers to. All of this reflects the beauty in the language used and at the same time the thoughtful subject matter i.e. “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” This reflects the central theme of the poem which is the transitory nature of human life, the inevitability of death and that death is the great equalizer. The reader can identify the central theme of the poem, the pleasure of its beauty of language, the sublime message, the beauty of the linguistic elements, and the beauty of its content even if no external details are provided. The New Critics should, therefore, focus on both the university-relevant subject and the aesthetically appealing form. One without the other is meaningless. 

    The form of literary language—the word choice and arrangement that create the aesthetic experience—is inseparable from its content, and its meaning. Put more simply, how a literary text means is inseparable from what it means. The form and meaning of a literary work, at least of a great literary work, develop together, like a complex living organism whose parts cannot be separated from the whole.

Avoid paraphrasing: Change one word and you have an entirely new text. For the New Critics, a text is like a living organism. Just as you cannot casually take an eye or an ear or a hand from a living human being, you can’t take even a comma from a literary work or you cannot get the same work. According to New Critics in literary work, specific words are placed in a specific order—and this one-of-a-kind relationship creates a complex of meaning that cannot be reproduced by any other combination of words. A New Critical reading of Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” (1966) can help us appreciate the poem by explaining how the poem’s complex meaning works, but it cannot replace that complex of meaning: only “Middle Passage” is “Middle Passage,” and it will always be “Middle Passage.” This is why New Criticism asserted that the meaning of a poem could not be explained simply by paraphrasing it or translating it into everyday language, a practice New Critics referred to as the heresy of paraphrasing. Change one line, one image, and one word of the poem, they argued, and you will have a different poem. A literary critic is not concerned with what a poem “says” but what the poem “is”.

Questions a New Critical Analysis may ask.

• What do the words on the page of a text express?
• What internal evidence that a text provide to guide its readers?

Mind you we are using the text and not the author: the author provides nothing to the New Critics, the text provides everything.

• What are the formal elements that the work uses in order to forward the narrative and reveal its central themes? 
• How do the linguistic structures and formal elements reveal multiple meanings, and thus create complexity which is the hallmark of good art? 
• Do all these meanings direct us toward an order/a balance/a central theme?
• How do the formal elements enrich the process of meaning-making? 
• What is the inter-relationship between the devices that function within a text?
• How is the process of meaning-making deferred, delayed, and complicated by ambiguity, irony, and paradox?
• How do these separate parts function together in an organic unity that creates literary art?

Fallacy: concluding invalid modes of reasoning. Confusing the work with its origins(being concerned with how the work originated rather than the work itself).

Shortcomings and gaps in the New Critical Approach 

ü  New Criticism is a very conservative ideology by focusing on the words on the page only, and by considering everything that is outside the text as an unwanted nuance. 

ü  New Criticism underestimated the potential of literature to challenge and disturb the status quo to change and impact society.

ü  In the new critical methodology, the literary text was divorced from all contexts in which it might have otherwise functioned meaningfully. 

ü  What if the text was written with a purpose to bring about change? (New Criticism pays no heed to the author’s intention). For example, Maya Angelou’s poem

“Caged Bird” (1983) the poem is a moving expression of the helplessness and the loss of the agency that segregation and racism had cost. And within the text Angelou makes no mention of slavery or discrimination, or African-American history. But if we read the poem only as a bird yearning for freedom, don’t we miss out on an important political implication? Don’t we miss out on experiencing the depth of an unfortunate problem? And even though we can come to several valid meanings possible, the central theme from only the words on the page possible, missing out on even one of such important interpretations is a huge loss. So, we can see how New Criticism resulted in the depoliticization of literature and dehistoricization of the literary text.

New Criticism methodology is limited in its scope, only suitable for small-length poetry. New Criticism resulted in selective criticism and restricted the scope of analysis.

New Criticism also ignored the reader. The reader is an important agent in the process of meaning-making. New Criticism is considered as an attempt to create a psychological escape in literature. 

Exercise  

     This prominent approach is free and independent of the intention of the author which closely and attentively examines the text independently or goes for its literariness of this rare piece of literature. Besides, it provides a detailed explanation of representational, dramatic, imitative, and cognitive aspects of literature to reach its meaning. Therefore, the text ought to be independently examined to arrive at its interpretation. „The text itself‟ is what it matters here. The New Criticism perspective is based on the consideration of the text. 

Reaching the New Criticism

“Literary theory has permeated our thinking to the point that it has defined for our times how discourse about literature, as well as about culture in general, shall proceed. Literary theory has arrived and no student of literature can afford not to come to terms with it.” (McLaughlin, 1990, p.1). The history of literary criticism or theory is very deep and ancient; it is not dated just one or two centuries earlier.

Some  scholars  dedicatedly  date  it to  the  time  of  Greek philosophers  Plato and  Aristotle  which  has continued to the present  day, who  have been  debating or disputing over the meaning of a  drama-text;  therefore, everyone was judging the meaning of the text in some way. Literary critics involve themselves in either theoretical or practical criticism; theoretical criticism formulates the theories, principles, and tenets of the nature and value of art. The way we arrive at the meaning of the text of drama, poem, fiction, or any other style of literature is rooted in the time of Plato. So when anyone responds to any text is already a practicing literary critic, so that literary criticism is situated in his/ her precondition expectation.

       Therefore, the way a person analyzes or depicts any reaction to any given text is not something new. Literary theory and criticism had their ups and downs, but it developed much, even today lots of critics work hard to give it a different look. Aside from other schools of criticism, new criticism is a way of analyzing any literary text “to discover its true or correct meaning independent of its author’s intention or of the emotional state, values, or beliefs of either its author or reader” (Bressler, 2007, p. 55).

      New criticism is a school of thought that analyzes any piece of literary work by close examination  of work’s words; including both connotative and denotative meaning, after that, it moves to the allusion inside the text, it goes further to look for phrases, words, grammar, clauses, sentences, figures of speech and allusions. In addition the critics of this school of thought also examine points of view, tone, symbols, and after that whole critics can declare what the poem means.   New criticism concentrates on the sole meaning that is hidden within the text, whatever information they need they search inside the text by untying the secretive ties. Generally, New Criticism is “an emphasis on form parenthesizes concern for the representational, imitative and cognitive aspects of literature” (Habib, 2005, p.602).  It has been widely dominant during two-third of the twentieth-century in the West. So that literature is aiming to represent reality or to impart moral or intellectual lessons, and it is considered to be an object on its own. Therefore; the text must be treated as an autonomous think possessing its laws and regulations. New criticism draws an easy formula for arrival to an interpretation of the text; this approach or formula provides the readers with a true interpretation of a text using only the text itself. 

     In  New  Criticism,  the  critics  assert  that  only  the  poem  (any  piece  of  literary  work)  can  be objectively evaluated, not the feeling, the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the author or anyone else. The main and pivotal focus of this school is on the examination of the text itself rather than the background of the author or the historical background of the work. Thus, the new critics espouse what many call the, text and text alone.‟ this is their only approach to come to the meaning of the text. Although New Criticism has emerged as a very powerful approach in the 1940s, its roots were planted in the 1900s. The name “New Criticism” seems to have been derived from John Crowe Ransom in a 1941 book of that title, which examines the work of I.A. Richard and William Empson, T.S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, and the philosopher Charles W. Morris” (Richter, 2007, p. 754). New Criticism borrows lots of its foundation and elements from T.S. Eliot’s. Eliot maintains that a good reader perceives the poem structurally. New Critics look to a work of art as an existed object, so that the meaning of a poem must not be equated to the feelings and intentions of the author inside it. As well as the text must be treated as an object of the public.

    To apply this approach to any literary text, we have to take in mind the diction of the text, consider the etymological roots of every word along with its denotation and connotation.  We have to examine the grammar, clauses, phrases, constructions, tones, sentences. Above all, we have to go for every  literary  element  like  the  point  of  view,  theme,  tone,  dialogue,  narration,  parody,  setting, foreshadowing, and allusion as well as a critic shall relate them to the dramatic situation of the text. As well as we have to evaluate in interrelationships of each element with the text and take in mind where tensions, ambiguities, and paradoxes arise. After all, we have to justify the result of our work with the above-mentioned points to reach the true meaning of the given text.

Critical Appreciation of the Death be not Proud

 To apply the New Criticism to the selected poem of John Donne, it's better to cite the whole poem in this section of the present research.  Notably, the theoretical assumption and practical methodology of New Criticism would be applied to John Donne's Death be not proud.

 

Sonnet X

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. (Nutt, 1999, P.161

 

    In the early beginning of the poem, when the speaker says death be not proud, this stanza focuses on the subject and audience of the poem. It seems that the text is narrated through an anonymous first-person point of view, this is clearer in the fourth line of the poem, when the speaker says, "die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me" (Nutt, 1999, p. 161). The speaker directly addresses death and gives death commands to stop pride. He behaves death as a character through personification. This harnesses the attention of the audience and gives them the courage to stand for that. It is like that the speaker controls and manages the passion and feelings of his. It seems that the speaker is a bold and courageous person who tries to challenge death and prove that your pride is meaningless. In the first section of the octave the speaker acclaims that death must not be proud. It must be proud and rude because it kills all human beings. This part can figure out the paradox of the poem, and it has been resolved in the sestet section when the speaker compares death to short sleep. This is to say that the narrator of the poem is romanticizing the notion of death.  The poet regularly occupies connotation to show his contempt for death's pride. He furthermore frequently insists to emphasize the helplessness or powerlessness of death.

The narrator usually refers to death as a rest or sleep, implying the impotence or helplessness of death as well as the transience of death's effects. When the writer says that death as rest gives a person pleasure, he associates the metaphysical conceit that is an unusual comparison.  In addition, he truly depicts what death is like and to avoid being afraid by implication of death as sleep or rest.  Therefore, for some people who believe in the other world, according to them there is no death in the other world. In this sense, it is clear that the speaker is a religious person who believes in the afterlife (eternity) and he envisions no death in the other world. The writer uses the personification to personify death as a rest or sleep that gives human beings pleasure and comfort. This is in the case to capture his emotion and direct them toward tranquility. The writer effectively communicates with the speaker's emotions and passion for death. After the octave he uses the turn, this is the time that the emotions of the speaker are tranquilized and captured, and he initiates the sestet with a discussion where the issue is changed.

    Since it is a holy sonnet or religious sonnet, the writer desires to convey a very moral and virtuous lesson to his readers, when he says, “And soonest our best men with thee doe goe” (Nutt, 1999, p. 161).

He  insists and  asks his  reader  to  be  good  people; good  people can  be those  who practice  religion. Whoever believes in life after death, this is like a reward proposed to them. Furthermore, it seems that Donne attempts to remove the tension and worries about death that some of his audience had. Even the language and tone are very serious which successfully conveys the moral lesson to the audience.

The speaker of the poem dramatically establishes the poem by capturing the first line and drawing the reader into the controversial paradox that encompasses the poem. The speaker introduces the motif of death and afterlife in the poem as well as he, the speaker, characterizes him as a commander who commands for another commander or killer. The speaker confronts death and considers it as a nonsense shadow as per his duty is to convey us to the other world. He claims that some call you “Mighty and Dreadful”, so that some refer to a small number of people. In line 4, he refers to death as “poore” and it is significant because the term poor imply the reduction of its power and ability. Furthermore, addressing the death as poor can decrease the drastic and fearful emotions of people about death.

The second quatrain that is linked to the first turns death into very less harmful and fearful that gives human beings pleasure. The writer criticizes death for considering too highly placed. In addition, he treats

death as no sovereign but a „slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men‟. The slave is death here. To define the slave, it is someone who must be devoted to another‟s will or wishes. By doing such the writer

demonstrates the absence and powerlessness of death authority. The writer’s metaphorical implication of connotations of charms and poppy implies that the feeling of death is pleasant. Poppy and charms both give a tranquil and comfortable transient passing into sleep.  Thus, he approximately decreases the dreadful feelings of death. Since the rest or sleep is a much comfortable experience; he claims that death must be of the same experience and a deeper way of sleep. The narrator attempted to associate an unknown phenomenon to a much-known phenomenon through a metaphorical comparison between death and sleep. It seems that he wanted to convey the feeling of familiarity to unfamiliarity one and therefore to extract the fear of the unfamiliarity. He encounters death as a gateway from suffering toward pleasure.

As though, death has no superiority out there. 

After the second quatrain or the shift, the speaker becomes more hostile with death and calling him a slave. With this metaphor, the speaker proposes that death is not free but rather a slave. He cannot act out of his free-will. Moreover, he is manipulated by another superior owner like, fate; chance, kings, and desperate men.‟ Fate and chance also have been treated as a person in the literature that control whatever happens to people. Thus death doesn’t decide for men rather than fate. However, king and desperate men can be different because they carry out their orders about death.  He again accuses death in line 10 claiming that death is a friend of war, poison, sickness, and compared them to poppy and charm which give a person amusement or delight. 

Both the octave and sestet of the sonnet are interrelated or correlative sections. The octave expands the issued situation within itself up to the sestet. Generally, the octave explains one single situation while the sestet provides more hints related to the situation. After all, it concludes the situation and resolves the paradox expressed in the opening line. The writer adheres to some rules taking from both major types of sonnets and yet fully expressing the emotion of the narrator through that combination.  He uses the tradition of both sonnets to communicate the speaker's emotions to the audience. The speaker is seriously explaining his comfortable feeling of the unknown phenomenon that is very familiar to him. The sonnet is very rich with personifications and metaphors exemplifying the writer’s mastery and his superiority in his poetic profession. The figurative elements make the tone and mood of the poem very serious moving to a very luxurious one. The way he manipulates the words and emotions of the speaker, the tone varies and gives a relaxing feeling to both the speaker and audience.  Eventually, he launches or offers another figurative element in this closing line; “And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die” (Nutt, 1999,

p.161). This personification that death is destined to die, he uses to inject his pleasant feelings and vision of death to the audience. So this final couplet caps the arguments against death the servant of other powers. It is mentionable that the speaker kills death at the couplet. As in Christianity and Islam religions, the dead people will be resurrected for their eternal reward. The poem is a transition of the writer’s death feelings to the audience.

Conclusion

 New  criticism  is  a  school  of  thought  that  examines  the  diction  of  a  text  associating  the connotations,  denotations,  and  the  etymological  root  of  each  word  in  a  given  text.  This literary perspective further takes into account the allusion, analyzes the imagery, symbols, and figures of speech throughout a specific given text. It also analyzes the different structures, grammar, tone, theme, point of view, and any other literary element within a text. After all, new critics look for the tension that is arisen in the text and they try to resolve that tension. In a poem, the most important things are the paradox and irony to be resolved. In the Death be not Proud, the author raises a paradox at the opening line of the poem and he, therefore, resolve the paradox at the couplet of the text. It has been worked to provide the readers with the correct interpretation of the text-only by using the text alone. The analyzed sonnet is considered to reach for its exact meaning by going deep into the text without its author's intention, beliefs, values, and emotion. First, it has been focused on the structure of the sonnet. In the poem, the speaker attempted to convey his feeling of death to the readers. So what he feels about death are tranquility and easement. In a broad sense, he just wants to give convenience to the people who are about to die. The speaker tries to tell the readers that death is just a transition and its effects are transient. Finally, the speaker anticipates the end of the death itself.  As well as, the speaker wants to indicate death’s  powerlessness and it is a pathway to the eternal world.

References

Brooks, Cleanth. (1947). The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Peotry, New York: Harcourt, Brace

Eagleton, Terry. (2008). Literary Theory: An Introduction, 3^rd edn, Oxford Blackwell

Graff, Gerald. (1987).Professing Literature, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press

Pope, Rob. (2012).Studying English Literature and Language: An Introduction and Companion. London, Routledge

Rapaport, Herman. (2011).The Literary Theory Toolkit: A Compendium of Concepts and Methods, London, Blackwell Publishing

Wellek, R. and Warren, A. (11963). Theory of Literature, 3^rd edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin