Cleanth Brooks

The New Criticism that Brooks championed seems to have been a means of coming to terms with the literary modernism that emerged in the early twentieth century in the writings of Eliot, Yeats, Pound, and Joyce, and in their successors. The criticism of T. S. Eliot, in particular, sought a critical and historical justification for his own difficult and obscure poetry in the French symbolists and the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, and Eliot's revaluation of these poets implied a revision of literary history-or of the literary canon, to put it in contemporary terms.

Brooks' achievement was to apply the method of close reading, with its emphasis on poetic tension, or paradox, or irony, to virtually the entire English and American literary tradition, including prose fiction and drama as well as nondramatic verse. His early critical works like Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and, especially, The Well Wrought Urn (1947) were very influential in this development; but undoubtedly his most enduring contribution to literary education arises from the anthologies he edited for college students in freshman composition and introductory literature courses: Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction(1943) with Robert Penn Warren, and Understanding Drama (1945) with Robert B. Heilman.