Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

and the beautiful over the moral and the true that the French symbolist found most
remarkable. As a result, much of Poe’s now recognized value as cultural capital is due to
the work of criticism undertaken by authors who, although living at great distances from
him, shared a similar aesthetic vision. This discussion not only reinforces the importance
that criticism plays in the consumption and redistribution of cultural capital but also
reveals that dissonances amongst different set of canonizers exist, where critical
interpretation plays a primordial role. While one specific group of authorities may
perceive that breaking artistic norms and conventions of morality is an automatic act of
self-exclusion, others may regard these transgressions as valuable assets, for they allow
art to evolve and establish its own criteria by breaking taboos and exploring new aesthetic
principles.
As an interpretative tool for the works of the metaphysical and the modern poets,
the objective of New Critical thought as championed by T.S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks and
F.R. Leavis ultimately aimed to reassess the pertinence of these texts within the literary
tradition. In this sense, the New Critical endeavor can be interpreted as an act of revision
of the canon, thus initializing the trend for ensuing adjustments. In essays such as “The
Metaphysical Poets,” T.S. Eliot scrutinizes what he calls the “Johnsonian canons of taste”
and sets out to assert the prominent legacy left by the metaphysical poets such as John
Donne, Andrew Marvell, and their contemporaries. More specifically, through extensive
criticism, he raises their positioning in the canonical order while lowering that of then-
celebrated poets such as Dryden and Milton, whom he blames for, amongst other things,
“the dissociation of sensibility” (“Metaphysical” 1103). Eliot’s influential admirer, F.R.
Leavis, also praised the work of the Metaphysical poets in his 1936 book Revaluations,
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