The background of new criticism.

At the beginning of the 20th century, British writer Hume and American writer Pound put forward the idea of emphasizing accurate image and language art, which was the beginning of new critical theory. In the 1920s, Eliot and Richards respectively laid the theoretical foundation of new criticism with the poetic concept of symbolism and the critical method of text analysis, and became their main representatives. The new critics have many members and diverse views. Their similarities are mainly: 1. From the aesthetic point of symbolism, they regard their works as independent and objective symbols, self-sufficient organisms isolated from the outside world, and are called "organic formalism"; 2. They think that literature is a special language form in essence, and the task of criticism is to analyze the text of the work and explore the interaction and hidden relationship between the parts, which is called "word meaning analysis". Symbolism provides them with aesthetic theory, and word meaning analysis is their specific comment method.

Eliot's masterpiece Tradition and Personal Talent (19 17) puts forward the theory of "depersonalization" from the perspective of opposing romanticism. Romantic thinks that poetry is the expression of the poet's emotion, and he thinks that subjective emotion is only material. If you want to enter the work, you must first go through an impersonal process, transforming personal emotion into universal and artistic emotion, and transforming experience into art. Aiming at the direct expression of romanticism, Eliot thinks in Hamlet (19 19) that "expressing emotions in artistic form" As soon as this happens ... that emotion is triggered. This is a creative method of symbolism implying feelings with concrete things, which has a great influence on new criticism's attention to discovering the hidden and ambiguous things in the text.