Evaluative Criticism

Ezra Pound takes it for granted that criticism should mostly be evaluative. Figuring out where the best stuff is, why it's good, and using that as a model for one's own writing. There's a palpable excitement there when he's talking about Rochester or Calvacanti. Zukofsky does the same the A Test of Poetry. I come out of that tradition.

Northrop Frye, a literary theorist very famous in the age of New Criticism (though himself not a New Critic), argued that evaluation was not the proper function of criticism. That is only possible, however, if we already know what the good stuff is and why we should be studying it. In other words, evaluation has already taken place, but we just don't want to talk about it or justify our judgments. We just take the already existing canon as our standard of value and leave it at that.

What I find interesting is the situation in which values are uncertain. Then critical opportunity arises; we can argue again what the best stuff is, why it is good, what the stakes are. So Marjorie Perloff talking about poetry is always going to be interesting, because there's an argument there about value. Other "popular" critics like Vendler and Bloom also make arguments about what's worthwhile and why.

The idea that criticism should mostly be interpretive or hermeneutic,: telling us what the works mean, is foreign to someone like Pound. I'm not that interested in interpreting works myself. I mean, I still do derive meanings from works I read, and devise theories of what they mean, but those interpretations are not the main point of my criticism anymore.