them vivid images, intense feelings, or heightened consciousness, is neither anything which can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic to take into account." Wimsatt and Beardsley on an ideal, objective criticism: "It will not talk of tears, prickles or other physiological symptoms, of feeling angry, joyful, hot, cold, or intense, or of vaguer states of emotional disturbance, but of shades of distinction and relation between objects of emotion." "The critic is not a contributor to statistical countable reports about the poem, but a teacher or explicator of meanings. His readers, if they are alert, will not be content to take what he says as testimony, but will scrutinize it as teaching." References Sources Barry, Peter (2009). Beginning theory; an introduction to literary and cultural theory, 3rd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Keast, William (1954). "Review of The Verbal Icon." Modern Language Notes 8 (1956): 591–7. Mao, Douglas (1996). "The New Critics and the Text Object." ELH 63 (1996): 227–254. Wimsatt, W.K & Monroe Beardsley, "The affective fallacy", Sewanee Review, vol. 57, no. 1, (1949): 31–55. Wimsatt, W.K. with Monroe Beardsley (1954). The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Literary criticism New Criticism