How to read like a Christian – and avoid lazy thinking
Nick Ripatrazone• February 1, 2025
Nearly a hundred years ago, the English writer IA Richards coined a phrase that has become a mainstay of literary studies. “All respectable poetry,” he wrote in Practical Criticism, “invites close reading.” Richards would never again use the phrase, but it has become synonymous with a type of reading that his critical method influenced.
In On Close Reading, John Guillory mines the origin and evolution of this rather imprecise phrase – and why its ambiguity might be a problem.
A formidable historian of academic criticism, Guillory published Cultural Capital in 1993, an examination of the so-called canon wars that inflamed literature departments in the final decades of the 20th century. Thirty years later, he released Professing Criticism, an inquiry into the purpose of literary criticism in the academic realm. On Close Reading, published this January by University of Chicago Press, is a concise inquiry into a strand of the broader concerns of that book.
Guillory, who recently retired from his longtime position at New York University, grew up Catholic in New Orleans, where he attended its Jesuit High School (founded in 1847 as the College of the Immaculate Conception). He strikes a moderate tone in the book, one that is both sceptical of assumptions made about close reading – and yet one that affirms the value of the literary word.
Close reading, Guillory notes, “reached the zenith of its dominance in the period from the 1940s to the later 1960s”, which placed it solidly within the practice of New Criticism. Descended from the spirit of Richards in Practical Criticism, these writers included FR Leavis, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Catholic convert Allen Tate.
Guillory claims that “for some reason, the New Critics consistently failed (or declined) to specify programmatically the technique of reading they believed they had extrapolated from hints in Richards’s practice or even to name it ”. The key word within this claim – and what makes it a safe and valid one – is programmatically. If we read selected explications from these individual critics, we will find certain techniques employed – but we are unable to find a unilateral, shared checklist.
Yet Robert Penn Warren cautioned in 1943 that “the critic who vaingloriously trusts his method to account for the poem, to exhaust the poem” is acting through ego. Although we might critique the tendency of New Critics to ignore a literary work’s context and a writer’s biography, Warren and his ilk were realistic readers. Warren thought poems, like life, were messy: “They mar themselves with cacophonies, jagged rhythms, ugly words and ugly thoughts, colloquialisms, clichés, sterile technical terms, head work and argument, self-contradictions, cleverness, irony, realism – all things which call us back to the world of prose and imperfection.”
Warren inherited that vision from Richards, who wrote that a poem “asks the reader to remember that its aims are varied and not always what he unreflectingly expects. He has to refrain from applying his own external standards…The whole trouble of literalism is that the reader forgets that the aim of the poem comes first, and is the sole justification of its means. We may quarrel, frequently we must, with the aim of the poem, but we have first to ascertain what it is.”
It is possible that this is a Christian view of reading. While a poetic word may not be The Word, there is a sacramental-like elevation of art that occurs when one pays close attention towards a text.
Guillory thinks reading is a valuable act. His goal, though, is to reframe our historical view of close reading. “In the long tradition of critical writing extending from Dryden to Eliot,” he notes, “there is very little close textual analysis to which one might point.” As an example, he cites “The Decadent Movement in Literature” by Arthur Symons, describing the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé.
John Guillory appearing on ‘By the Book’, discussing ‘Professing Criticism’ (screenshot)
Symons read Mallarmé’s poetry “closely and carefully”, but his essay is wholly absent of “any quotation from the poems, any reference to particular words, phrases, or lines that would support Symons’s assertions about Mallarmé’s style, or the larger significance of his language”. For Guillory, this absence of quotation and explanation means that Symons’s “reading occurs in the background of his writing and remains there”.
In his book, Guillory offers a useful analogy. “Close reading,” he posits, is an instrument of sorts, “analogous to techniques for playing a musical instrument such as a violin or piano. Close reading ‘plays’ the literary work. An instrument does not determine what is played on it; nor does a basic technique for playing an instrument determine how well a piece of music will be performed. The instrument itself will always be just that; but the artistry with which the instrument is played has no determined outcome or limit of sophistication.”
Guillory’s book is a necessary reminder that accepted critical terms and tendencies should be questioned and reconsidered, lest they lead to lazy reading and thought.
Photo: (circa 1860) A man has found a quiet spot to read his book beneath a tree at Sandringham, Norfolk, England. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.)