Tensions

        Drawing upon Richards and Ogden's aesthetic principles, New Critics often described works in terms of the "tensions" within them.  When Odysseus seeks to return to his kingdom from Troy, Homer begins the poem by emphasizing how hard he worked to save his crew, and how utterly they were doomed by their folly.  For a New Critic, this establishes a tension between human plans and human folly that the great poet revisits in the poem with enough repetition that the pattern becomes a "theme" which leads readers to a resolution of the tension.  In Homer's case, the patient planner, Odysseus, cannot save his crew, but even with few allies in Ithaka, he is able to outwit the foolish suitors who have besieged his wife and household in his absence.  The success of long-range planning and patience over temporary folly is the poem's New Critical "unifying theme."  To demonstrate this theme's relevance to interpreting the poem, the critic must single out all important instances of the theme, showing it to be wide-spread and involving otherwise important characters and actions whose diverse attributes are given "unity" by detection of the theme.