'New Criticism … is dedicated to professionally structured and articulated expositions of technique at the expense of professionally structured and articulated expositions of social meaning. What Laity means by 'unthinkable merges' is that the professional critic should attempt to bridge the gulf. This is what many of the essays in Laity and Gish's important and useful collection do. Eliot construed as the 'last stronghold' of an antiquated critical tendency is already very near to Eliot construed as a psychoanalytic exemplum of repression - and the methodology of many of the essays harmonizes with this highly suggestive description of their subject … Peter Middleton, in 'The Masculinity behind the Ghosts of Modernism in Eliot's Four Quartets', offers an ingenious interpretation of Eliot's later poetry which recasts its long acknowledged cultural conservatism in Freudian terms as a failure of mourning … Charles Altieri's 'Theorizing Emotions in Eliot's Poetry and Politics' sets itself against strong Freudian readings of Eliot, seeking instead to describe and evaluate Eliot's achievement in transforming the emotional content and power of poetry … I think it is a remarkable and fecund comparison. The essay impressively repositions the critic addressing 'Eliot's sexuality' by asking her to recognize in Eliot's singular transformation of the emotional content of poetry a direct challenge to her own habits of negotiating the desire for authentic self-expression.' Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
