Modern criticism, I think it will be conceded, begins with Eliot, whose paradigms were such writers as Donne and Crashaw, for whom interpretation was required even in their own day as a condition for determining what was being said by means of what in fact was said, and hence deep interpretation was the standard way of reading. But criticism, then, began to assume the form of other systems of deep interpretation - psychoanalysis and marxism - and under this pressure, all texts became concealments, and deconstruction an inevitability. This gives the critic a great power, virtually the power of the priest, since only he or she knows what truly is being transmitted, and so constitutes the true reader. The rest of us either have to be taught to read, or take the critic as the authority. This has had two immediate corollaries. In the first instance, it developed in response a style of writing made to order for the critic, who came to serve the role of the censor in political systems which drive the writer to acts of increasingly complex concealment, where every letter is in effect the purloined letter. And of course the other corollary was the inevitable impact on critical writing itself, which becomes increasingly obscure, to the point that only other critics can read it and their interpretations are uncertain and obscure, and set forth in any case in texts that in turn require criticism - to the point where criticism exemplifies the literary ideal and a critic like Geoffrey Hartman can claim that the critic is the true artist of our time - or that literature itself is justified to the degree that it makes literary criticism possible.