The Literary Criticism of John Middleton Murry

Extract

To Remember the literary criticism of John Middleton Murry only as the “Inner Voice” praising the effort to “Muddle Through,” as T. S. Eliot has characterized it, is to ignore the comprehensive, largely concrete system of literary evaluation which preceded the later doctrine of romanticism. Unfortunately for contemporary literary criticism, most critics of Murry have seen fit to concentrate on what Murry wrote after he began to apply an externally-formulated religious or philosophical theory to literature, or have interpreted the early work in the light of that which followed. Too many who have remembered The Mystery of Keats and Heroes of Thought have forgotten the positive virtues of The Problem of Style and Countries of the Mind. And very few remember that Murry, developing an aesthetic theory similar to Eliot's “objective correlative,” used such a concept as the basic assumption in a consistent system of practical literary criticism. By making a more or less arbitrary distinction between the work primarily concerned with literature per se and that which followed, I believe that it is possible to discover many valuable insights and concepts which can have, or have had, validity for literary criticism today.