New Critics' Terms for What Poems Are and What Critics Do with Them

"Poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once."  (Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy" 335)

"[A poem] is embodied in language [and] is an object of public knowledge." (Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy" 335)

"[A poem is] integrated so that the symbol stands [complete]" (an inferrence from Wimsatt and Beardsley's criticism of Eliot's "The Wasteland" in "The Intentional Fallacy" 343)

"[A poem produces] the subtle quality of patterned emotions which play at the subdued level of disposition or attitude" (an inference from Wimsatt and Beardsley's criticism of affective criticism based on emotional responses in "The Affective Fallacy" 353)

"[A poem contains] translatable emotive formulas" (Wimsatt and Beardsley on Brooks' analysis of "Tears, Idle Tears" in "The Affective Fallacy" 354).

"[A critic is]  a teacher or explicator of meanings [and the interpretation is a] teaching.  (Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Affective Fallacy" 354)

"there is a difference between the motive, or logic of an emotion, and the surface or texture of a poem constructed to describe the emotion, and that both are important to the poem" (Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Affective Fallacy" 354)

What we have is poetry where kings are only symbols or even a poetry of hornets and crows, rather than of human deeds.  Yet a poetry of things.  How these things are joined in patterns and with what names of emotion remains always the critical question."  (Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Affective Fallacy" 356)

"the poem [is made up of] clear and nicely interrelated meanings, its completeness, balance, and tension, [a] structure of emotive objects so complex and so reliable . . . " (Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Affective Fallacy" 356).

"[Poems are] finely contrived objects of emotion" (Wimsatt and Beardsley, 'The Affective Fallacy" 356)

"In the poet's finely contrived objects of emotion and in other works of art the historian finds his most reliable evidence about the emotions of antiquity--and the anthropologist, about those of contemporary primitivism . . . In short, though cultures have changed, poems remain and explain."  (Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Affective Fallacy" 356)