Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism

Readers over age 40 may recall the New Criticism from college English. To oversimplify, New Criticism was a modernist approach that viewed and interpreted a work of art (most commonly a poem) as a self-contained artifact, focusing on a close analysis that revealed the interior life of the poem-its language, metaphors, ambiguity, irony-without regard for the author's biography or other external circumstances. Winchell gives a masterful, meticulously researched, richly textured biography of one of the approach's founders and leading practitioners. A staunch Southerner and a 1928 graduate of Vanderbilt, Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) taught in the 1930s at LSU, where, among other things, he was cofounder and coeditor of the Southern Review. In 1947, he went to Yale and published his best-known work, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), on 10 English poems. But more than an account of one life and career, this is a broad chronicle of the origins, ascendancy and subsequent decline of one school of criticism and an examination of how such schools forms evolve and clash with antithetical approaches. Winchell vividly renders a milieu (one that included Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate) and an approach to literature that has largely-and, he argues, unfairly-been dismissed. In a style both courtly and digressive, he casts a wide and tightly woven net, drawing in intellectual and social relationships among a panoply of poets, prose writers, critics and their acquaintances and relations. This is an essential addition to the history of 20th-century American poetry. (June)