SOURCE: Perosa, Sergio. “R.P. Blackmur: The Break-down of New Criticism.” In Cross-Cultural Studies: American, Canadian, and European Literatures, 1945-1985, edited by Mirko Jurak, pp. 15-18. Ljubljana, Slovenija: Filozofska Fakulteta, 1988.

In the following essay, Perosa describes Blackmur's theories of poetry criticism, tracing its evolution from the early tenets of New Criticism to what Perosa terms as a later “break-down” of that mode of interpretation.

If R. P. Blackmur's criticism of poetry can be considered “new-critical”, his criticism of fiction shows the break-down of that attitude.¹ This shift in attitude is in many ways typical of the late 1950s-early 1960s.

The underlying principle in Blackmur's criticism is the concept of homeostasis—the precarious balance of an unstable state, as he put it This concept invokes a compulsion, as it were, to keep opposing ideas, principles, and perceptions balanced in one's mind, in order to be able to perceive meaning...