Mervyn Morris: making West Indian criticism

This essay considers Mervyn Morris’s sustained efforts to decolonize practical criticism. It starts by revisiting the canonical references that play a central role in Morris’s early critical intervention, “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously.” These have often been misconstrued by critics who mistake the nature of critical polemic as conducted within the terms of mid-century anglophone criticism. The essay then considers the civic nature of Morris’s intervention by looking at the venue in which the essay was first published—the Sunday Gleaner—as well as the kinds of local, public-facing periodicals that Morris would prioritize throughout his critical career. It then turns to the crux of Morris’s critical project: not the polemical intervention in itself but its implications for aesthetic education. To this end, Morris’s study notes and questions that accompany Louise Bennett’s Selected Poems (published by Sangster’s Book Stores in 1982), which Morris edited, are considered.