Literary criticism, in spite of the claims sometimes made for it, is opinion-sharing. The goal of criticism is not truth, though critics may tell themselves that; the goal of criticism is influence. Influence enough minds into agreement, whether by argumentation or example, and you become correct. (Criticism is not alone in this; from a certain perspective, this may well be true of religious dogma.) From this perspective, the twentieth-century’s most successful critic was T. S. Eliot; whether he was wrong or right about the theory or practice of literature is beside the point.
In literary criticism’s humblest, most basic state, it reviews, and that is what we see in newspapers, on blogs, and at the bottom of an Amazon Web page. The more ambitious it gets, the more it generalizes; the better informed it gets, the more it zooms out and tries to describe larger historical and cultural phenomena. When literary opinion transforms itself into literary idea, when an individual’s literary commentary rises to the expression of a unique, literary understanding (both equally subjective, but totally different), we have a major critic; we have a mind that thinks through the medium of other books, as opposed to a tongue recounting its tastes.
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