Literature, you might think, is to be enjoyed, and criticism concerned with the quality and criteria of that enjoyment. Wellek's critics will have none of that. Their perspective is totally different. For them books, pictures, compositions, like the phenomena of biological speciation or the refraction of light, are objects to subsume under theory. It is not surprising that a critic with such a motive will sooner or later attack literature. After all, the exciting business is theorizing, mere imaginative writing is only the matter on which critics build. Does one remember a particular light beam, or does one celebrate Planck, Einstein, Rutherford? So, who should remember poets and novelists? But alas, critics discover that people do remember writers without having heard of the critics at all. So there is a motive of revenge in the attack on literature, pique that the hoi polloi recognize the names of Dante...