“Whimsies and Crochets”: Pragmatism, Poetry, and Literary Criticism’s Founding Gesture

Abstract

Using as its key texts George Oppen's 21 Poems and I.A. Richards' introduction to The Principles of Literary Criticism, this essay argues, first, that in the early decades of the twentieth century pragmatist epistemology and ethos of participation had a transformative effect on U.S. poetry, and second, that in these same decades, the then-emergent profession of literary criticism refused to absorb the participatory ethos, even as other disciplines, perhaps most notably education and anthropology, were being transformed by it. It concludes with some thoughts about what the adoption of a participatory approach might look like in literary critical studies, with special attention to the transactional model of reading theorized by Louise Rosenblatt beginning in the late 1930s.