Typologies of Criticism

In an interview with Ekbert Faas, Robert Bly mentions a piece he wrote that appeared in The American Poetry Review that draws on Jung.

I wrote an article for The American Poetry Review recently giving examples in poetry of the "four intelligences" Jung talks about. They are thinking, feeling, grasp of the senses, and intuition.

Curious and not wanting to wade through the microtext searching for an issue from the 1970s, I picked up Bly's collection American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity where he revisits the material in a piece called "The Wheel of Intelligence" and stresses that a poet develops maturity by addressing their inferior (or weakest) function. Very little space is devoted to developing or applying the typology.

When I came across the description by David Tacey, "Introduction to Part IV" The Jung Reader p. 295

In addition to the attitude-types, Jung designated four functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation. Sensation tells us that a thing exists, thinking tells us what it is, feeling tells us its value, and intuition tells us its possibilities in time.

I thought that the typology has some applicability not so much to genres or poets but to approaches to literary criticism. A critic could be centred on one or more of these different ways of telling.

And so for day 1545
07.03.2011