The English Critic: from Chaucer to Auden

About the Book

The book studies the great critics of the past to make the readers understand or benefit from the great critics of today. For when they discuss seemingly modern problems (which have in fact so often been topics for critics of previous centuries) they are building on the foundations made by their predecessors. The study includes bold critics who dare to praise experiments that do not square with the accepted rules. It tries to create an audience for criticism and establish that reading of criticism can be enjoyable, even exciting. It makes the readers aware with the many ways of choosing books to their satisfaction. It also discusses various methods used by critics to criticize a work and comprehensively studies critic's tools, comparison, and analysis along with taste which needs honesty and courage to support it as the critic should record his findings without considering current fashion, and, no matter how eminent the author he is studying, should perceive and point out where a work changes from "great" to "good".

The book studies how to derive pleasure from the way in which the critic expresses himself. The more the critic is an artist in prose, the more we shall turn to his pages with delight. The book discusses three touchstones of a good prose, simplicity, lucidity, and euphony, which can be applied to criticism above all other literary forms. It also takes into consideration the social implications of literature according to which literary criticism traces the origins of the work of art in the psychology of the individual and in the economic structure of society. It has a wide coverage and studies all well-known critics from Chaucer to Auden viz., Sidney, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Eighteenth-Century Essayists, Addison and Steele, Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Arnold, Hardy, Galsworthy, Eliot, and Herbert Read.