essay on modern criticism

An Essay on Criticism Summary & Analysis by Alexander Pope

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" seeks to lay down rules of good taste in poetry criticism, and in poetry itself. Structured as an essay in rhyming verse, it offers advice to the aspiring critic while satirizing amateurish criticism and poetry. The famous passage beginning "A little learning is a dangerous thing" advises would-be critics to learn their field in depth, warning that the arts demand much longer and more arduous study than beginners expect. The passage can also be read as a warning against shallow learning in general. Published in 1711, when Alexander Pope was just 23, the "Essay" brought its author fame and notoriety while he was still a young poet himself.

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The Full Text of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

1 A little learning is a dangerous thing;

2 Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

3 There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

4 And drinking largely sobers us again.

5 Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,

6 In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts,

7 While from the bounded level of our mind,

8 Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

9 But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise

10 New, distant scenes of endless science rise!

11 So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try,

12 Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;

13 The eternal snows appear already past,

14 And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;

15 But those attained, we tremble to survey

16 The growing labours of the lengthened way,

17 The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,

18 Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Summary

“from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” themes.

Shallow Learning vs. Deep Understanding

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts, While from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise New, distant scenes of endless science rise!

Lines 11-14

So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try, Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky; The eternal snows appear already past, And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;

Lines 15-18

But those attained, we tremble to survey The growing labours of the lengthened way, The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes, Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Symbols

The Mountains/Alps

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“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

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Extended Metaphor

“from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• A little learning
• Pierian spring
• Bounded level
• Short views
• The lengthened way
• See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

Rhyme scheme, “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” speaker, “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” setting, literary and historical context of “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing”, more “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” resources, external resources.

The Poem Aloud — Listen to an audiobook of Pope's "Essay on Criticism" (the "A little learning" passage starts at 12:57).

The Poet's Life — Read a biography of Alexander Pope at the Poetry Foundation.

"Alexander Pope: Rediscovering a Genius" — Watch a BBC documentary on Alexander Pope.

More on Pope's Life — A summary of Pope's life and work at Poets.org.

Pope at the British Library — More resources and articles on the poet.

LitCharts on Other Poems by Alexander Pope

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TRENDS IN MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM/FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

2022, International Education and Research Journal

Every literature has two aspects. These two aspects of literature may be called creation and criticism. Creative writing may be defined as a kind of writing which is new, fresh and original. Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s poems, Hardy’s novels and Eliot’s poetic plays are the instances of creative writing. This kind of writing has its own process, its own movement and its own appeal. Every creative writer looks at the different sections and cross-sections of his society; he draws material for his writings from these places; he thinks and imagines a good deal and it is only then that he creates something. Every kind of creative writing, therefore, is both personal and impersonal at one and the same time. Criticism is different from creation. It is not new or fresh or original in the sense creation is. It is derivative in character because it is a kind of work which is based on creation. Critical writing is not possible without creative writing. If nothing is created, there would be nothing to criticize and comment on. Some people are of the view that creation is health while criticism is disease. This is not a correct and sound attitude. Some critics may be bad and some kind of criticism may be unhealthy, but there is an inner-relationship between creation and criticism. That is why; Eliot says that criticism is as unavoidable and as necessary as breathing. There have been critics for a very long time now. Aristotle was the first major critic of the ancient times. Since then criticism has kept on being written without any break. Dryden, Dr. Johnson, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold have been the major critics in the history of English literature.

Related Papers

Petru Golban

Literary criticism implies the intellectual capacity to evaluate and understand the literary text, the analysis of particular works being the main aim of literary criticism, but, though achieved by most of the critics prior to the twentieth century, in English background criticism has started with some purposes which are alien to the nature of critical act. For instance, Sydney defends, Dryden prescribes, Pope reflects and prescribes, Fielding introduces a new genre and Wordsworth a new type of poetry, etc. English criticism during the neoclassical period was a complex and multi-voiced phenomenon, represented by a large number of critics and writer-critics who developed a reflexive but above all normative and prescriptive critical discourse. John Dryden and his Of Dramatic Poesie, An Essay would better show the condition of English criticism in Restoration. The first half of the eighteenth century was dominated by the neoclassical ideas expressed by Alexander Pope in An Essay on Cri...

Joshua Pimentel

a description and evaluation of its object: literature (literary writings, writers, literary classes, etc.) Literary criticism is not an abstract, intellectual exercise; it is a natural human response to literature. If a friend informs you she is reading a book you have just finished, it would be odd indeed if you did not begin swapping opinions. Literary criticism is nothing more than discourse—spoken or written—about literature. A student who sits quietly in a morning English class, intimidated by the notion of literary criticism, will spend an hour that evening talking animatedly about the meaning of R.E.M. lyrics or comparing the relative merits of the three Star Trek T.V. series. It is inevitable that people will ponder, discuss, and analyze the works of art that interest them. The informal criticism of friends talking about literature tends to be casual, unorganized, and subjective. Since Aristotle, however, philosophers, scholars, and writers have tried to create more precise and disciplined ways of discussing literature. Literary critics have borrowed concepts from other disciplines, like linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, to analyze imaginative literature more perceptively. Some critics have found it useful to work in the abstract area of literary theory, criticism that tries to formulate general principles rather than discuss specific texts. Mass media critics, such as newspaper reviewers, usually spend their time evaluating works—telling us which books are worth reading, which plays not to bother seeing. But most serious literary criticism is not primarily evaluative; it assumes we know that Othello or " The Death of Ivan Ilych " are worth reading. Instead, it is analytical; it tries to help us better understand a literary work. Critical Approaches to Literature In the following pages you will find overviews of nine critical approaches to literature. While these nine methods do not exhaust the total possibilities of literary criticism, they represent the most widely used contemporary approaches. Although presented separately, the approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive; many critics mix methods to suit their needs and interests. A historical critic may use formalist techniques to analyze a poem; a biographical critic will frequently use psychological theories to analyze an author. The summaries do not try to provide a history of each approach; nor do they try to present the latest trends in each school. Their purpose is to give you a practical introduction to each critical method and then provide one or more representative examples of criticism. If one of these critical methods interests you, why not try to write a class paper using the approach? The formalist critic knows as well as anyone that poems and plays and novels are written by men—that they do not somehow happen—and that they are written as expressions of particular personalities and are written from all sorts of motives—for money, from a desire to express oneself, for the sake of a cause, etc. Moreover, the formalist critic knows as well as anyone that literary works are merely potential until they are read—that is, that they are recreated in the minds of actual readers, who vary enormously in their capabilities, their interests, their prejudices, their ideas. Speculation on the mental processes of the author takes the critic away from the work into biography and psychology. There is no reason, of course, why he should not turn away into biography and psychology. Such explorations are very much worth making. But they should not be confused with an account of the work. Such studies

Hisham M Nazer

But the course ‘literary criticism’, the reason why I am writing this piece, was unsatisfactory and the contents only kept us ‘outmoded’. We had Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Arnold’s ‘The Study of Poetry’, Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, Johnson’s ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ and Aristotle’s Poetics. I have heard that Shelley’s ‘A Defense of Poetry’, excerpts from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Dryden’s ‘An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’ and Sidney’s ‘An Apology for Poetry’ too were there in the syllabus, in the past years. But still, what is it really with our obsession for things no longer deemed ‘valid’? Training in classical thoughts is undoubtedly praiseworthy (and necessary too!), but if that happens without some knowledge of the contemporary, it will be difficult to stand on the same footing with the constantly improving world literatures and their critical literary manifestos.

Dr. NASREEN BANU JAMADAR

One of the most influential movements in modern critical scholarship, the New Criticism is a philosophy of literary interpretation that stresses the importance of studying literary texts as complete works of art in themselves. Although the term New Criticism was first coined in the nineteenth century, it was not until American critic and poet John Crow Ransom, founder of the Kenyon Review wrote a book titled The New Criticism (1941) that it became established in common academic and literary usage. In essence, the New Critics were reacting against established trends in American criticism, arguing for the primacy of the literary text instead of focusing on interpretations based on context. However, as René Wellek has noted in various essays detailing the principles of New Criticism, proponents of this theory had many differences among them, and beyond the importance the New Critics afforded the literary text itself, there were many differences in the way they approached critical study of literary texts. Wellek writes that among the growing number of New Critics in the 1930s, there were few that could be easily grouped together. For example, he puts Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren among the leaders of what he calls the " Southern Critics. " Mostly, they are grouped together due to their reaction against previously established schools of criticism, such as impressionist criticism, the humanist movement, the naturalist movement, and the Marxists, and the fact that many of them taught at Southern universities at the time they created the theory of New Criticism. In addition to rallying against traditional modes of literary interpretations, the most significant contribution made by the New Critics, according to Wellek, was the success with which they established criticism itself as a major academic discipline. New criticism first started as movement replacing the bio-critical and historical methods that dominated literary studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In these methods instead of the text itself, the biographical-historical contexts of the text were examined whereas the text is the sole evidence for interpreting it. The life and times of the author, may be of interest to the historian, but not necessarily to the critic. The text ought not to be confused with its origins:

Literary criticism implies the intellectual capacity to evaluate and understand the literary text, the analysis of particular works being the main aim of literary criticism, but, though achieved by most of the critics prior to the twentieth century, in English background criticism has started with some purposes which are alien to the nature of critical act. For instance, Sydney defends, Dryden prescribes, Pope reflects and prescribes, Fielding introduces a new genre and Wordsworth a new type of poetry, etc. English criticism during the neoclassical period was a complex and multi-voiced phenomenon, represented by a large number of critics and writer-critics who developed a reflexive but above all normative and prescriptive critical discourse. John Dryden and his Of Dramatic Poesie, An Essay would better show the condition of English criticism in Restoration. The first half of the eighteenth century was dominated by the neoclassical ideas expressed by Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man; the second half of the century was governed by the personality of Dr Samuel Johnson and his influential Lives of the Poets and Dictionary of the English Language. The most prescriptive critical voice in English literature belonging to the neoclassical period is that of John Dryden, as to be equalled perhaps only by Alexander Pope. To reveal the essence of prescriptive criticism as explaining and giving rules as well as showing the direction for literary production with regards to the critical discourse of Dryden and that of Pope represents the purpose of this study.

Journal of Economic and Administrative Sciences

Adriana Scuotto

Dr. GEORGE KOLANCHERY

Abstract Mathew Arnold is an important critic of English Literature. Before him, English criticism was in fog, and whatever criticism we find, is more based on personal notions than on any consistent methods. Dryden is regarded as the first critic of English, but his criticism is based on personal notion- sympathy and knowledge rather than on any formula. It is the reason that even in his age, the authority of Aristotle remained unquestioned. The romantic critics besides their rich criticism were more lost in their theory of imagination and lo e for metaphysis. It is in Arnold that English literature could have a critic of real nature, who laid down certain principles following which poetry could be criticized. Herbert Paul very pertinently remarks, “Mr. Arnold did not merely criticize books himself. He taught others how to criticize. He laid down principles; if he did not always keep the principles he laid down. Nobody, after reading “Essays in Criticism” has any excuse for not being a critic.” Key Words: Mathew Arnold, Critic, Functions of Poetry

Paul Trolander

Khanh Huynh

In the following pages my aim has been to sketch the development of criticism, and particularly of critical method, in England; and to illustrate each phase of its growth by one or two samples taken from the most typical writers. I have in no way attempted to make a full collection of what might be thought the most striking pieces of criticism to be found in our literature.

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Founded in 1951, by F. W. Bateson, Essays in Criticism soon achieved world-wide circulation, and is today regarded as one of Britain's most distinguished journals of literary criticism …

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Philosophy › Modernist Literary Theory and Criticism

Modernist Literary Theory and Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 13, 2020 • ( 0 )

“Modernist” is a term most often used in literary studies to refer to an experimental, avant-garde style of writing prevalent between World War I and World War II, although it is sometimes applied more generally to the entire range of divergent tendencies within a longer period, from the 1890s to the present. Modernism is an international movement, erupting in different countries at different times; in fact, one characteristic of modernism is its transgression of national and generic boundaries. My main focus here, however, is on English-language modernism. As a historically descriptive term, then, “modernism” is misleading not only because of its varying applications (to the historical period or to a highly organized style characteristic of some but not all writers of the period) but also because it is typically more evaluative than descriptive. In its positive sense, “modernism” signals a revolutionary break from established orthodoxies, a celebration of the present, and an experimental investigation into the future. As a negative value, “modernism” has connoted an incoherent, even opportunistic heterodoxy, an avoidance of the discipline of tradition. This critical overtone has sounded periodically since the eighteenth century, from the time that Jonathan Swift, in A Tale of a Tub (1704), lampooned the “modernists” as those who would eschew the study of the ancients through the late-nineteenth-century reform movement in the Catholic church, which was labeled “modernist” and condemned as the “synthesis of all the heresies” in the papal encyclical Pascendi of Pope Pius X (1907). It is interesting to note that in the recent debates over modernism versus postmodernism, the characteristic unorthodoxy of modernism has been displaced onto the postmodern; in a motivated reversal, modernism is characterized as the corrupt, canonized orthodoxy (identified, misleadingly, with the new critcism attributed to T. S. Eliot, among others), with postmodernism as its experimental offshoot.

The project of identifying a modernist criticism and theory is vexed not only by the imprecision and contradictory overtones of the word “modernist” but also by the category “theory.” Certainly many modernist writers wrote criticism: Virginia Woolf published hundreds of essays and reviews; W. B. Yeats’s most important literary criticism has been collected in Essays and Introductions ; Ezra Pound’s voluminous criticism is well known for its informality and directness; Eliot was as important a critic, especially in his later years, as he was a poet. But the most interesting theoretical dimension of modernist writing is not always explicitly presented as either criticism or theory but is instantiated in the writing itself; the theory can be deduced, however controversially, from the practice.

One axiom of modernist theory that was importantly articulated by T. E. Hulme in “Romanticism and Classicism” (1913-14, posthumously published in Speculations , 1924) is an acceptance of limits that are identified with classicism. Hulme argues: “The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas” (120). The classical style, Hulme states, is carefully crafted, characterized by accurate description and a cheerful “dry hardness” (126). He asserts that “it is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things” (131); Hulme’s preference is for the visual and the concrete over the general and abstract, for freshness of idiom, for the vital complexities that are “intensive” rather than extensive (139).

Hulme’s sounding of the note of classical style as one that is local, limited, intensive, and fresh resonates widely through the work of other modernist writers. Pound’s dictum “Make it New,” Eliot’s objective correlative (“Hamlet,” 1919, Selected Prose 48), James Joyce’s epiphanies, Woolf’s moments of being, and the explosive power of the concrete image celebrated in Imagism are all instances of a “classical” technique, a preference for the local and well-defined over the infinite. In Dubliners, Joyce defined the sickness of modern life as paralysis, a loss of local control, and he set about designing his fiction in a way that requires the reader to understand its individual, local parts before the whole can assume a meaningful shape.

The classical style is characteristic of much, but not all, modernist writing (D. H. Lawrence’s work being one well-known exception). However, the classical theory begins to bifurcate, producing political implications that are diametrically opposed, when the insistence on finitude is applied to the individual. Both groups of classical writers accepted the view that the individual is limited, but one group, which included Woolf, Joyce, and Yeats, began to develop a theory of supplemental “selves” that points toward a celebration of diversity as antidote to individual limitation. In Mrs. Dalloway , Woolf has Clarissa propose a theory that she is many things and many people, “so that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them” (1925, reprint, 1981, 52-53). Yeats worked out an analogous idea in his theory of the anti-self in “Per Arnica Silentia Lunae” (1917), a notion that each individual is implicit in his or her opposite, which eventuated in the complex theory of interlocking personality types outlined in A Vision (1925, rev. ed., 1937). In Ulysses (1922), Joyce also pursues the idea that the self is luxuriously heterogeneous, a heterogeneity brought to the surface by multiple encounters with difference. He makes his hero an apostate Jew who is defined on either extreme by a “spoiled priest” and an adulterous woman, and in these slippages between limited individuals he celebrates such limits, such insufficiencies, as conditions of communal possibility. As Stephen Dedalus explains in the library, the varied world represents the potential scope of a disunited selfdom: “Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves” ( Ulysses , 1922, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, 1984, chap. 9,11.1044-46).

The same recognition of the limitation of the individual produced in other modernist writers an insistence on strict, authoritarian regulation of the individual, the germ of fascist tendencies for which the movement became notorious. Hulme again articulates the premises of this position: “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him” (116). He speaks of liberty and revolution as essentially negative things, citing the French Revolution as evidence that when you remove the restraints on individuals, what emerges is their destructiveness and greed. Like Eliot, Hulme appreciated religion for its power to control human depravity through traditional order.

The problem with controlling “human depravity” through institutional restrictions is that the controlling “order” tends to legislate sameness, so that some orders of existence are seen as preferable to—less depraved than—others. And this is where the seams of “classical” modernist theory split: not over the limited nature of humanity, but over the question of the value of difference. The split was a jagged one; some writers, such as Pound, could cultivate difference in their writing and denounce it in society (as he did in his infamous radio broadcasts of the 1930s). The different premium accorded to ethnic, social, religious, and sexual differences by writers who agreed on the limited nature of the individual, however, explains how the offensive tirades of Wyndham Lewis and the brilliant feminism of Woolf, the anti-Semitic propaganda of Pound and the Jewish hero of Joyce’s Ulysses could stem from the same “classical” root.

Virginia Woolf

In a period that was to culminate in World War II, racism was an inevitably controversial issue. The related cause of feminism was also hotly debated during the period, since women had only been granted suffrage after World War I (1920 in the United States, 1928 in Great Britain). Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own , details clearly and unpolemically the historical and material restrictions on women that prevented them from full participation in artistic and professional life. Her best illustration of the greater circumstantial constraints on women is her invention of a wonderfully gifted sister for Shakespeare named Judith, his counterpart in everything but freedom and opportunity. Woolf outlines what would have happened to this young girl if she had wanted to act in London, as her brother did; she sketches in the ridicule to which she would have been subjected, the ease with which more experienced men could have taken advantage of her, and the passion with which, upon finding herself with child, she would have killed herself: “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” (1929, reprint, 1981, 48). Woolf’s main argument is that women need space—a room of their own—and economic freedom (a fixed income) for their hitherto pinched genius to flourish.

Finally, no discussion of modernist criticism and theory is complete without an account of the collapse of plot and its replacement by intertextual allusion and the “stream of consciousness.” In a much-cited review of Joyce’s Ulysses called “ Ulysses , Order and Myth” (1923) Eliot argued that developments in ethnology and psychology, and Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough , had made it possible to replace the narrative method with what he called the “mythical method,” which was first adumbrated by Yeats. The mythical method works not through narrative but through allusion to different mythical narratives that, when fleshed out and juxtaposed, illuminate both the text in which they appear and each other in surprising and often revisionary ways. For example, Yeats’s early poetry worked to contextualize his hopeless love for Maud Gonne within the competing and mutually reinforcing contexts of Greek myth (Helen of Troy) and Celtic myth (Deirdre of the Sorrows; the magic of the Sidhe). In Ulysses , the main mythic parallels are the Odyssey and Hamlet , although individual episodes are further complicated by allusions to other intersecting narratives, historical, fictional, or mythic. Eliot’s The Waste Land provides the densest illustration of the mythical method, where the range of allusion includes a variety of Christian, Greek, occult, Scandinavian, Judaic, and Buddhist references, as well as allusions to music, drama, literature, and history.

Eliot chose to highlight myth as the key to modernist stylistics, but actually myth was just one category of narrative accessed through allusion; one might say that all kinds of narratives were situated behind the page, identifiable only through “tags” in the text, and that the interplay between these narratives produces a submerged commentary on it that imitates the pressure of the cultural unconscious (in narrativized form) on any individual performance. The stream-of-consciousness technique is yet another way of drawing the reader’s attention from conscious, deliberate, intentionalized discourse to the pressure of the unsaid on the said, of the repressed on the expressed. The apparent randomness of associative thought prompts the reader to question the submerged “logic” of connection, to listen for the unconscious poetry of repressed desire. This attention to the unknown as the shadow of the known is reversed in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake , in which it is the known that is obscured by the highly organized distortions of language and history as processed by the unconscious mind and the “mudmound” of the past. It is no surprise, in light of this sensitivity to the muted voice of the unconscious in the literature of the period, that another great modernist theorist was Sigmund Freud .

In fact, the opposing political tendencies of modernist writers bear a significant relationship to their different attitudes toward the unconscious. Bounded by the eruption of two world wars, the modernist period can be read as a historical enactment of the tension between Friedrich Nietzsche ‘s Apollonian and Dionysian forces. The Dionysian power of the unconscious was making itself felt, and the writers who sought to contain or deny it through the Apollonian power of civic or religious authority were, like Pentheus in the Bacchae , torn apart. Others sought to express the creative potential of the unconscious, its capacity to unify without homogenization, to proliferate via division, and it is the writing of this group that is most animated by the zest of manifold contradictions. As Yeats wrote near the end of his career in the voice of a crazed old woman,

‘Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,’ I cried. ‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth Nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff When on Love intent; But love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.’

(“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition , ed. Richard J. Finneran, 1983, rev. ed., 1989, 259-60)

Bibliography T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923, reprinted in Selected Prose of T S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, 1975);T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (ed. Herbert Read, 1924, 2d ed., 1936); Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927); Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz, eds., Modern Literary Criticism, 1900-1970 (1972); Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929, reprint, 1981); W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (1961), Mythologies (1959). Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: 1890-1930 (1976); Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971); Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957); Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (1984); Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought (1985); Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Essay on Criticism for Students and Children

500+ Words Essay on Criticism 

It is tough for anyone to criticism well. For some, criticism is a good thing while others disagree. Criticism in itself is one of those words that looks like negative. Thus, it gives a feeling of unwilling to accept or making a massive disagreement or being pessimistic. But to everyone’s surprise, it is not the case. Criticism is often different than what people perceive. The essay on criticism gives you an insight into the pros and cons of the criticism. 

Criticism is expressing the disagreement for something or someone that is generally based on perceived faults, beliefs, and mistakes. So, the main point here is whether to consider criticism as good or bad. Also, if we go by the meaning of the word criticism then criticizing someone is bad. Also, simultaneously this might lead to improving the person who is being criticized. So, he/she is becoming a better person and does not repeat the mistakes is considered as providing criticism to be good. Thus, this depends entirely on the perceived value that is hidden behind the criticism. 

A Good Part of the Criticism

Scope for improvements .

Constructive criticism will lead to locating the fault or mistakes that are made by the people. So, the people can work upon it and thereby improve their activities so a heedful and better life can be lived. Criticism calls for improvement on one plane and thereby avoiding the issues unwanted on the other side. 

Expert and Credible Status

When the criticism is constructive it always makes the criticizer a central figure among the people. Thus, more honors and credibility is given and so criticism would rather be considered as expert advice. Thus, it will add to the status quo of the person that is criticizing. 

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The Bad Side of Criticism

Leads to a feeling of demotivation.

A person that is being constantly criticized may feel at tines demotivated. So, this is because of the fact that his/her efforts have not been justifiably and rightfully appreciated. Thus, it may further lead to increase in hesitation in moving forward.

The Danger of Creating a Destructive and False Image

There are many times that it can occur that the people that criticize are seen as the villain of the society. Thus his/her image gets automatically shattered as well as abruptly changed. So, doing criticism may lead adversely to the criticizer as well. 

So, we can understand that if the criticism is done in a constructive and positive way that this may lead to a good and fair outcome. Also, if it is done destructively than it may lead to adverse effects on both society as well as personal level. 

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Modern criticism Synonyms

Modern replaced.

• contemporary criticism
• new criticism
• recent criticism
• popular criticism

Definitions for Modern

• (adjective) being or involving the latest methods, concepts, information, or styles
• (noun) a person with very modern ideas
• (adjective) ahead of the times

Synonyms for phrase

• recent review
• contemporary review
• recent study
• current review
• contemporary commentary
• current commentary
• new assessment
• current comment
• new commentary
• current opinion
• new analysis
• recent commentary
• recent condemnation
• new comment
• recent analysis
• latest review
• present-day commentary
• recent comment

MC abbreviation

Criticism replaced.

• modern analysis
• modern opinion
• modern critique
• modern study
• modern blame
• modern explanation

Definitions for Criticism

• (noun) an essay evaluating or analyzing something
• (noun) a serious examination and judgment of something
• (noun) a written evaluation of a work of literature

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Letters to the Editor | Criticism, praise of ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’…

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Letters to the Editor

Letters to the editor | criticism, praise of ‘jewish voice for peace’ essay | letters to the editor.

As a Jew, I would like to know how Jewish Voice for Peace would characterize the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 against innocent men, women, children, seniors and infants. I and others would define this brutal attack, including mass rapes of women and kidnappings of more than 240 people of all ages, as heinous, genocidal and ethnic cleansing. Israel — and any country — has a duty to defend its people from such horrific attacks of terrorism.

Israeli defense forces take great pains to reduce killing innocents. They dropped leaflets and made calls to inform Gazans to get out of harm’s way. Hamas, on the other hand, embeds its terror network among civilians and forcibly prevents them from reaching safe ground. They misappropriate funds to build missiles and terror tunnels rather than provide for their people.

Gaza was turned over to the Palestinians for self-rule in 2005. The West Bank is largely ruled by the Palestinian Authority. I agree that Israel needs to do more to prevent and punish settlers who commit violence against their Palestinian neighbors.

Hamas staged a bloody coup and has ruled Gaza by terror since 2007. Its charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

I stand with Israel because, as Golda Meir said, “We have nowhere else to go.”

Shari Somerstein, Plantation

Support for cease-fire

Thank you for publishing the piece from Alan Levine and Donna Nevel about the slaughter in Gaza. I condemn war crimes no matter which side commits them, and right now, that is the Israelis.

I am deeply troubled by the U.S. government’s refusal to support a cease-fire. How many more babies must die before Congress and Biden decide that our weapons have killed enough people? How can we still claim to be human?

Ed Wujciak, Lake Worth Beach

In appreciation

Thanks for publishing the piece from Alan Levine and Donna Nevel. It is so refreshing to see a newspaper in Florida publish something that is not Zionist. Thank you so much.

Ella Fies, Miami Beach

What’s missing from essay

I read and reread the Sun Sentinel’s “Another Viewpoint” by Alan Levine and Donna Nevel (“Violence will beget violence until Palestinians have freedom and self-determination”) with dismay.

I sought to find the words “Hamas” or “abduction” or the numbers 1,400 or 220; they were not there. The authors obviously do not believe in Ahavat Israel, a love of fellow Jews. They cry for the Gazans who elected and support Hamas, but don’t shed a tear for those who were brutally murdered in their homes or babies abducted and held hostage.

Not once did they condemn or mention the vicious massacre of Jews by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. They proceed in their condemnation of Israel’s reaction, as if there was no precipitating reason for Israel’s response. Since there is not even a minor condemnation of Hamas’ atrocities, perhaps the authors do not believe that Israelis are humans, let alone Jews. They talk about “whole families have been wiped out,” referring to Gazans, but not one word of entire Jewish families wiped out. Their hatred is evident.

Richard I. Glick, Delray Beach

‘They are an embarrassment’

The “Another Viewpoint” by Levine and Nevel might as well have been written by a Hamas terrorist. As these two rail against Israel, it is obvious they don’t like being Jewish or to be associated with Jews in the U.S., especially with Jews in Israel. They are an embarrassment to our community. Their Berkeley-based group (where else?) of far-left progressives gives mainstream Democrats a bad name. This group is reportedly backed by George Soros and supports the BDS movement.

This group spearheaded recent protests in New York and Washington. They blame Israel for defending their nation without any mention of Oct. 7. How do they not realize that Israel left Gaza in 2005 in fantastic shape to build a country, and a few years later Gaza voted in a terrorist organization, Hamas, that has held them hostage since?

Mark Goldstein, Boca Raton

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