Trauma theory has been and continues to be important to critical work in every period of literary study. This essay argues that the subtle literary strategies of one fourteenth-century poem can help to address a blockage about representation current in that theory. Geoffrey Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" meditates upon trauma by rendering…

Considers W. K. Wimsatt's and M. C. Beardsley's denial that an author's intention has direct relevance to the criticism of his literary work. (SW)

Structuralist literary criticism, in its methods and claims to being scientific, strongly resembles the "New Criticism."

Examines Roethke's commentary on his poem and looks for answers to such questions as: Is Roethke a reliable interpreter of his own poem? Where is the reader's understanding of the poem likely to differ from his and why? How do we reconcile these two viewpoints when they differ? (Author)

Extremists, whether formalists of the New Criticism or of the humanist-moralist tradition, are taken to task in this attempt to combine elements of both in a more pluralistic approach to literary criticism. An analysis of a Frost poem, "Stopping by Woods", is attempted as an illustration of a kind of criticism that seeks to clarify the parts of…

Presents the reactions of ten advanced students in a Colloquium for Psychoanalytic Criticism to Denise Levertov's "To the Snake." (DD)

A satire on overzealous annotators and over overclever poets. (JH)

Holland's "Poems in Persons" is evaluated. (JH)

The teacher's authority in matters of interpretation comes from his greater experience as a reader--and he does students a disservice if he does not exercise that authority. (JH)

A satire on literary analysis and criticism. (RD)

The palindromic pattern--in which formal features in the first half of a work are repeated in reverse order in the second--is frequently used by modern poets for a variety of effects. (JH)

In criticism, as in real life, we should take into account what the dramatic speaker is doing in the act of uttering a piece of discourse. (JH)

Examines three representative short poems to illustrate some of the difficulties that traditional textual criticism would encounter with them. Outlines some ways in which different approaches could deal with these difficulties. (RL)

Poets usually employ enjambement to communicate experiences in which, after repeated frustration, a human subject suddenly overcomes limitations and goes beyond previous limits. (DD)