Impressionistic criticism is the kind of criticism that restricts itself to describing the critic’s own subjective response to a literary work, rather than ascribing intrinsic qualities to it in the light of general principles.

http://www.answers.com/topic/impressionism-literature
Another theory of criticism that studies the work in relation to the audience includes Impressionistic Criticism. Like reader-response criticism, impressionistic criticism is concerned with the interaction of the text and the individual. However, impressionistic criticism differs from reader-response criticism in one very important way. Impressionistic criticism’s audience is the critic him or herself. Therefore, the main focus of the impressionistic critic is on the personal responses that the work evokes and how the work affects him or her.

http://literaryexplorer.blondelibrarian.net/crit.html

Impressionistic criticism:
A kind of criticism that tries to convey what the critic subjectively feels and thinks about a work of art.
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/Impressionistic_criticism.html

In the 1830s and 1840s, Romantic, impressionistic criticism was becoming increasingly common, but it was tempered by the growing influence in America of German criticism as reflected in the writings of Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England; it strove to include both the analytical and the impressionistic and was supposed to achieve a balance between the two extremes.

http://www.enotes.com/nineteenth-century-criticism/knickerbocker-group

New Critics wanted to avoid impressionistic criticism, which risked being shallow and arbitrary,
and social/ historical approaches which might easily be subsumed by other disciplines. Thus, they
attempted to systematize the study of literature, to develop an approach which was centered on the
rigorous study of the text itself.

http://www.fortunecity.com/boozers/volunteer/254/Literary_Criticism.htm

And realizing that most of such impressionistic criticism is irrelevant to the music it purports to elucidate, modern theoreticians have tried to insure relevance by banning imaginative fantasies and insisting that the critic talk of nothing but the music itself. The idea is that the critic attend strictly to the score at hand and engage in rigorous technical analysis, eschewing all else except perhaps historical considerations or comparison with other musical works.

http://denisdutton.com/criticism_and_method.htm

In point of fact it may turn out that the melodramatic story of the impressionistic critic, which is obviously irrelevant to music in the ordinary non-critical sense, does more to help us understand the work and, perhaps ironically, is therefore relevant in the sense desired by criticism.

http://denisdutton.com/criticism_and_method.htm

For Wimsatt, as for all the New Critics, such impressionistic approaches pose both practical and theoretical problems. In practical terms, it makes reliable comparisons of different critics difficult, if not irrelevant. In this light, the affective fallacy ran afoul of the New Critics’ desire to place literary criticism on a more objective and principled basis. On the theoretical plane, the critical approach denoted as affective fallacy was fundamentally unsound because it denied the iconicity of the literary text. New Critical theorists stressed the unique nature of poetic language, and they asserted that–in view of this uniqueness–the role of the critic is to study and elucidate the thematic and stylistic “language” of each text on its own terms, without primary reference to an outside context, whether of history, biography, or reader-response.
In practice, Wimsatt and the other New Critics were less stringent in their application of the theory than in their theoretical pronouncements. Wimsatt admitted the appropriateness of commenting on emotional effects as an entry into a text, as long as those effects were not made the focus of analysis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_fallacy

Dubos recognizes differences in the arts conditioned by their symbols of expression; but he compares and rates the arts according to their effect upon the senses, and so prepares the way for a purely impressionistic criticism. Burke did not agree with the Frenchman’s ratings, nor did he in any manner imitate his book, however much he respected it; but he was in substantial agreement with Dubos as to the operation of æsthetic causes; and just as Dubos saw in the desire of the mind to be stimulated by something the prime motive for interest in the arts, Burke found in two of our strongest passions, love and terror, a definition of the chief ends of artistic endeavor, the beautiful and the sublime. 2 Burke was not much affected by painting. This art, the aim of which is to represent the beautiful, has, he says, little effect on our passions. But poetry, to which he was sensitive, and which, he holds, does not depend for its effect upon the power of raising sensible images, is capable of stirring the passions with a vague sense of the sublime, and is, strictly speaking, not an art of imitation.

http://www.bartleby.com/60/174.html