criticism for criticism's sake

In its effort to keep pace with the imaginative writers, much of the most intelligent criticism of our time has become ‘Criticism for Criticism’s sake,’ as D.J. Enright has called it. Although, as long ago as 1924, Edwin Muir wrote that ‘all criticism is criticism for criticism’s sake,’ his observations does not contradict Enright’s; for Muir continued: ‘It is a moral habit carried over into art.’ Instead of mediating between the work of art and a nonspecialist public, it has become as specialized and as difficult as modern poetry is reputed to be; more difficult often, because poetry has its own way of communicating complex perceptions, and because critics have added their own complexities to those of their texts.

—Michael Hamburger, “Puerile Utopia and Brutal Mirage,” The Truth of Poetry: Tension in Modern Poetry for Baudelaire to Nineteen-sixties (Harcourt, Brace, 1970)