A Critic's Jobs of Work by R. P. Blackmur

As a New Critic R. P Blackmur thinks that, a text is autonomous whole. Any attempt to go outside the text to find meaning is what Blackmur denies. He wants to assign, a critics job in this essay on this very ground. He says that a work of art should be judged objectively independent of any attention of author and reader.

A true critic objectively judges the text. He explore the internal properties of the text such as image symbol, irony, paradox, ambiguity, structure etc. and finds out the meaning . Blackmur distinguishes amature critic from professional. Amature critics are not expert. They work not for money but for their interest to pass criticism. Such critics are independent of any kind of influence. Contrarily, professional critics are expert they work for certain institutions and are confined by the propagation of their schools of the thought. Such critics attach themselves to the particular doctrine and murder their insight.

Blackmur concentrates his ideas on the “self consciousness" with which critics examine what they do. Critic's job for Blackmur, is inevitable with development in the analysis of language, psychology and the resurgence of interest in the relation of poem to reader.

He considered how to make aesthetic judgment in a work of art as Kant and many other theorists of his time. For them perfect reader is a good critic but for Blackmur literary work is distinct from poet, reader and world. He assumes the work is an object with a degree of autonomy and approach but never violate “the thing in itself from its own point of view" Thus for Blackmur, criticism is for the present time only, pragmatic and finally ironic. In all reading there must be the "physical distance" or a distinction between experience of the beautiful and of agreeable. Here, he is very implicit in the most celebrated idea, that text is self- sufficient whole and it doesn't have any relation with the other.

Finally, it seems essential to assert Blackmur's view on art and criticism in terms of psychic force of critic. According to him, critic must reduce his/ her intense purpose. If critical purpose is narrowed down during the period of criticism, criticism tends to be amateurish. To reduce teleological purpose of criticism, critic should be intuitive. If critic walks on the path of intuition he/ she adventurously travels in the realm of preconscious. Once criticism starts from the realm of preconscious that mode of criticism becomes apt and appropriate because art is a looking glass of preconscious.

Blackmur recognizes that there are limits to what the critic can accomplish in analysis: “After all, it is only the fact about a poem, a play, and a novel that can be reduced to tractable form, talked about, and examined. However, the limits on the rest can only be known but not talked about. He favors Brooks' attack on the "Heresy of Paraphrase".