A critical argument often arises from a felt lack of understanding, a puzzle, a feeling that not enough has been said about a work that poses interest and difficulty, or merely from exasperation at the failures of one's predecessors and colleagues when one is convinced that all of the wrong things have been said. But it seldom arises out of the desire to fulfil a general plan in order to show how the principles of that plan are the true model of critical practice. Practical criticism has its subject directly in view, and so often the theoretical project quite naturally develops a life of its own. The large literature of the last two decades devoted to the exploitation of theory is often thin on examples, and modest in its claims about the ways in which theoretical reasoning connects directly with practice. Classification systems, such as that of Frye with its typology of myths and genres, suggest themselves as natural meeting points of theory and practice, as do those that explain fundamental features of the working of genres or aspects of poetic language through tropological or rhetorical categories. But the systematic application to the study of a particular text of a theory and its methodology is sufficiently uncommon as to suggest something slightly unnatural in the whole enterprise.

It would seem like a cautionary element in Harold Bloom's ‘The Breaking of Form’ that precisely this ‘how it works’ aspect of the handling of critical theory is also seen in terms of a high level of generality, in a distinction between ‘theory of poetry’ and ‘poetics’ that he draws from Curtius.