Types of literary criticism

[نازخاتون]

Overview
For all its shortcomings, literary criticism still provides the poet with the tools for self-evaluation and self-improvement. It introduces work of periods and cultures different in theme and treatment.
Literary criticism comes in various shapes and aims. At best it poses searching questions of the writer, and insists that he understands how the arts, the sciences and philosophy have different but coexisting concepts of truth and meaning. Art in the end cannot be divorced from contemporary life, and that consideration leads on to literary theory.
Introduction

Literary critics have many skills, {1} but those which the practising poet needs to acquire are close reading, explication and evaluation. And the first two because most poems fail through lack of care. The originating emotion still clots the lines or, in striving for originality, the work becomes muddled, pretentious or incoherent. The incomprehensible can always be taken for the profound of course, and no doubt much get published for that reason, but only the beginner will see publication as the sole purpose of writing. Poems take too much of the writer's time and emotional lifeblood not to be made as good as possible, and dishonesty will spoil even the best talents. Poems grow through evaluation, that dialogue between what has been written and what was originally hoped for, between what the poems say now and what they might with further work. Self appraisal is inescapable.
But the critic's eye is a rare gift, rarer than sainthood, Housman thought, and matters have lately become more controversial. Criticism is not fashionable, and has been replaced by literary theory in many university departments. {2} The criticism that continues to be written naturally concentrates on established figures. The remainder, the reviewing/criticism appraising the great torrent that pours off the small presses, is often partisan, shallow and/or doggedly optimistic. {3} Even the aims of criticism seem somewhat doubtful. {4} No single critical approach seems invariably successful, {5} and insights from differing approaches do not necessarily cohere. Nothing brings finality of judgement, moreover, and one critic's findings can be undone by another's ingenuity. Much more damaging, the premises even of literary theory have been uprooted by radical theory. {6}