New Criticism

• 1. Introduction

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  New Criticism arrived in American universities with a deceptively simple demand: read the words on the page. Nothing else. Not the author's biography, not the historical moment, not the reader's feelings. Just the text, examined with the care of a watchmaker peering at gears. For several decades in the middle of the 20th century, this approach dominated how literature was taught and judged across the United States. The movement drew its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism, and it would reshape what it meant to be a serious reader of poetry and fiction. How did a group of scholars, many of them Southerners connected to a single teacher, come to define literary study for a generation? What exactly were the rules they lived by, and why did those rules eventually face such fierce opposition?

• 2. What Came Before

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  The older schools that New Criticism pushed against had deep roots in 19th-century German scholarship. American universities had long followed a philological and literary history tradition, one that tracked the meaning of individual words across foreign and ancient languages, traced comparative sources, and dwelt on the biographical circumstances of authors. For the scholars who would become New Critics, this felt like a detour around the actual work of literature. They argued that all this attention to external factors entirely neglected the aesthetic qualities of the poem in favor of context that surrounded it. Yet their other target was equally important: the so-called literary appreciation school, which confined itself to pointing out beautiful passages and morally uplifting moments in a text. New Critics condemned this as a version of Romanticism, dismissing it as too subjective and emotional to count as serious analysis. They wanted something that felt sturdier, more systematic, and above all more objective. That ambition, articulated in Ransom's essay "Criticism, Inc." and Allen Tate's "Miss Emily and the Bibliographer", drove the entire project. Ransom himself went so far as to argue that criticism must become more scientific, or at least precise and systematic.

• 3. The Inner Circle

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  John Crowe Ransom taught at Kenyon College, and the students who gathered around him would carry his ideas across American universities. Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren all studied under him, and all were Southerners. Paul Lauter, a professor of American Studies at Trinity College, read this regional thread as significant enough to call New Criticism a reemergence of the Southern Agrarians. Beyond Ransom's orbit, the Cambridge scholar I. A. Richards contributed foundational texts: his books Practical Criticism, The Principles of Literary Criticism, and The Meaning of Meaning offered what was claimed to be an empirical, scientific approach to reading, and these shaped the emerging New Critical methodology. T. S. Eliot's critical essays proved equally influential. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" Eliot laid out his theory of impersonality, insisting that poetry must shed the personal voice of the poet. In "Hamlet and His Problems" he developed the concept of the objective correlative. His evaluative preferences had lasting consequences: his condemnation of John Milton and John Dryden, his enthusiasm for the metaphysical poets, and his insistence on impersonality all shaped which writers the New Critical canon elevated. Cleanth Brooks later wrote that the New Critic, like the Snark, is a very elusive beast, meaning the movement never coalesced around a single manifesto or formal institutional structure. What held it together was a set of interlocking ideas about what literature was and how it should be read.

• 4. Rules of the Game

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  William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley introduced two of the movement's most contested concepts. In 1946, they published "The Intentional Fallacy", arguing strongly against the relevance of an author's intention in analyzing a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; meaning imported from outside the text was considered irrelevant and potentially distracting. Their companion piece, "The Affective Fallacy", made a parallel argument against the reader: personal or emotional responses to a text were equally invalid as tools of analysis. The method that remained was close reading, known in French literary studies as explication de texte. Studying a passage in New Critical style required careful, exacting scrutiny of the formal elements: rhyme, meter, setting, characterization, and plot. From these elements the reader worked toward the theme of the text. The New Critics also looked beyond theme for paradox, ambiguity, irony, and tension, treating these as signs of literary complexity and as guides toward what they called the single best and most unified interpretation. Brooks and Warren's textbooks Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction became classroom staples during the Cold War decades between 1950 and the mid-1970s, when the New Criticism was at its height in American high schools and colleges.

• 5. The Counterattack

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  Stanley Fish was trained by New Critics, and he eventually turned that training against them. In his 1970 essay "Literature in the Reader", Fish criticized Wimsatt and Beardsley directly, giving voice to the reader-response school of theory that rejected the Affective Fallacy's dismissal of readerly experience. Terence Hawkes, writing from the same direction, argued that close reading rested on an assumption about stable, independent subjects and objects of study. He called this the ideology of liberal humanism and accused the New Critics of disguising the interests at work in their critical processes. Hawkes believed a critic ideally creates the finished work by reading it, rather than remaining an inert consumer of a ready-made product. Brooks responded in his 1979 essay "The New Criticism", conceding that no critic in his right mind could forget the reader, since readers are essential for realizing any poem or novel. He granted that reader response is certainly worth studying. But he tempered that concession immediately, warning that placing the meaning and valuation of a literary work at the mercy of any and every individual reader would reduce literary study to reader psychology and the history of taste. The broader disciplinary challenge came from structuralism and post-structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by feminist literary criticism, deconstructionist theory, New Historicism, and reception theory. Feminist critics pointed out that New Criticism's framework had no room for questions of sexual identity or the body. Post-colonial critics noted it could not accommodate dual identity, personal experience, or political bias in writing.

• 6. What It Left Behind

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  Rene Wellek defended the New Critics against the charge that they simply wanted to replace literature with science. In his essay "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra" from 1978, he pointed out that a number of them had outlined their theoretical aesthetics specifically in contrast to scientific objectivity, complicating the standard complaint. Even critics of the movement acknowledged its lasting effects. Close reading never disappeared from university syllabi; it became a foundational tool underpinning poststructuralism, deconstruction theory, New Testament narrative criticism, and reader-response theory itself. New Criticism has also been credited with anticipating the insights of the linguistic turn and for showing significant parallels with logical positivism. The body of primary texts the movement left behind remains substantial: Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn, Warren's "Pure and Impure Poetry", and the shared Theory of Literature by Wellek and Warren. What started as a rejection of biographical distraction and sentimental appreciation became the ground from which most subsequent literary theory, including theories built explicitly against it, had to push off.