Critical Standards

Ever seen The Dead Poets Society? I bet most of you have. If not you should check it out sometime - it’s quite an emotionally manipulative film but it’s that rare thing: a really rather good emotionally manipulative film. But this shouldn’t concern us. What I want to highlight is that the film begins and ends with scenes based around an essay from an English Literature textbook. The essay suggests that if one were to draw a graph and make one axis “perfection” and the other “importance”, plotting the appropriate points for a given poem would yield an overall measure of its importance. The film ridicules this notion but it’s quite clear what the essay author was driving at: he was looking for some sort of scientific, quantifiable way of measuring artistic merit.