SOURCE: "Poetry in the 1930's, I: Cecil Day Lewis," in Poetry and the Modern World, The University of Chicago Press, 1940, pp. 190-213.

Daiches is a prominent English scholar and critic who has written extensively on English and American literature. He is especially renowned for his in-depth studies of such writers as Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Virginia Woolf. His criticism in general is best characterized as appreciative in content and attached to no single methodology. In the essay "The 'New Criticism': Some Qualifications" (1950), Daiches summarized his conception of the critic's role: "In the last analysis, the test of [a work's value can be judged only by the receiver, and judged by him on some kind of 'affective' theory…. Literature exists to be read and enjoyed, and criticism, at least in its pedagogical aspect, exists in order to increase awareness and so to increase enjoyment. The purely philosophical...