Colin Burrow on Literary Criticism's Decline

Literary criticism is in a state of decline, according to an essay by Colin Burrow in the London Review of Books. The University of Exeter announced plans that might make roughly a third of its English department redundant, and other institutions have stopped offering English degrees altogether. The number of people taking A-level English literature in England has dropped by around a third since 2000, to approximately 36,000, with a shift towards subjects like business studies.

Many recent justifications for studying English literature focus on its utility. Proponents argue it provides transferable skills, encourages empathy, and lights up unique parts of the brain. These defenses, Burrow notes, often boil down to promising a job, conceding too much to marketplace logic without capturing the subject's intrinsic point or the pleasures of doing it well.

The Core Pleasure of Criticism

So what is the point? The core act is simple: sitting with a piece of writing and thinking about it. This leads to a moment of making connections between its parts, one's own experience, or the world around its author. The writing might seem alien at first. A good critic acts as a lightning conductor, picking out the energy in what they read and passing it on. Burrow recalls coaching a teenager who called every poem weird. The critical task became asking what made it weird, and whether it was a good or bad kind of weird.

Helen Vendler's Guiding Example

Burrow writes that he would have liked a copy of Helen Vendler's Inhabit the Poem for such a student. Vendler, who died in April 2024, spent a lifetime writing about lyric poetry. This posthumous collection discusses poems from John Donne to Ocean Vuong. Most essays begin by quoting an entire poem, which is then set against a big concept. This shows that reading poems is not just about technical analysis but a form of thinking, a way of bringing abstractions to life.

Vendler believed criticism was about the pleasure of describing complex things and conveying the joy of understanding them to others. Her essays often open with autobiographical notes about her initial mystification upon encountering a poem. These passages reveal a human critic who made mistakes and changed her mind. She explains she had no idea what to make of Wallace Stevens's The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws in her twenties. She answered her own question by deciding the work demanded she inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world.

Beginning with Perplexity

The essays recognize that literary criticism usually begins with perplexity, frustration, or misunderstanding. Poems are often weird. Reading them is not easy and requires a willingness to change one's mind. Sometimes Vendler's readings seem challenging or perverse. She claims William Blake's The Lamb is often misread and is not as innocent as it sounds. She argues the child-speaker is echoing a priest's catechism, overlaying innocence with echoes of experience. We become spectators of the child's innocent sadism as he humiliates the lamb, Vendler writes.

Burrow suggests sadism may go a bit far, seeing little sign the child wants to torture the lamb. Yet, by the essay's end, the poem looked quite different to him. That, he concludes, is literary criticism.