New Criticism
Quick answer: New Criticism taught readers to study the poem itself: close reading, paradox and unity. What the school believed and why poets still profit from it.
New Criticism was the dominant school of Anglo-American literary criticism from the 1930s to the 1960s, and its core teaching fits in one sentence: study the poem itself, the words on the page, rather than the poet's biography, intentions or historical moment. Its instrument was close reading, the patient analysis of how image, rhythm, paradox and tone cooperate inside a single text.
This is a movement of critics rather than poets, though several founders, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, wrote fine poems themselves. It belongs in a poet's glossary because it built the classroom you probably learned poetry in, and because its method, read the words, only the words, all the words, remains the fastest way to improve your own revision.
History and Key Figures
The name comes from Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism, but the ideas brewed earlier: I. A. Richards's Cambridge experiments in reading poems stripped of authors' names, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, and T. S. Eliot's essays arguing for impersonality. In America the school grew from the Southern Fugitive circle into the textbooks Understanding Poetry (Brooks and Warren, 1938), which trained generations of students.
Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn (1947) supplied the classic statements: a poem's meaning cannot be paraphrased away, and paradox is poetry's native language. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley added the famous warnings against the intentional fallacy, judging by what the author meant, and the affective fallacy, judging by how the reader happens to feel.
The Method in Practice
A New Critical reading assumes the poem is a self-sufficient object whose parts justify each other. You track images across the whole text, weigh every ambiguity as potentially deliberate, and ask of each formal choice what work it does. The school prized poems whose tensions resolve into complex unity, which is why it canonised Donne and the metaphysicals.
Its blind spots are real: history, politics and the author's life do matter, and later schools built careers correcting it. But as a discipline of attention it has never been surpassed.
Why Poets Should Care
Turn the method on your own drafts. Read your poem as if you had found it unsigned in a library book: no credit for what you intended, only for what the words demonstrably do. Ask whether your images cooperate or merely coexist, whether your ambiguities are earning or embarrassing. That authorless reading is the closest you can come to seeing your poem as an editor, judge or stranger will see it.
What poets can take from this
- Revise as if the poem were anonymous; intentions that never reached the page do not exist.
- Track each image through the whole draft and cut any that ignore the others.
- Interrogate every ambiguity: accidental ones blur the poem, chosen ones enrich it.
- Practise paraphrasing a favourite poem, then list everything the paraphrase loses; that remainder is the poetry.
- Close read one great short poem a week, pencil in hand; it is free tuition from the best teachers.
Try it yourself
Take a poem you drafted at least a month ago and write a one-paragraph close reading of it as though a stranger wrote it, quoting its own phrases as evidence. Then revise the poem using only what the reading exposed.
Questions
Is New Criticism a poetry movement?
No, it is a school of criticism and pedagogy, though founders like Ransom, Tate and Warren were practising poets of the Fugitive group. It shaped how poems were taught and judged for decades, which is why poets still encounter its assumptions.
What is the intentional fallacy?
Wimsatt and Beardsley's term for judging a work by what its author meant rather than by what the text achieves. For poets it doubles as revision advice: a meaning you intended but did not embody is not in the poem.
What replaced New Criticism?
From the 1960s onward, structuralism, deconstruction, feminist and historicist approaches displaced it in universities, restoring context the school had bracketed out. Its core practice, close reading, survived every successor and remains standard equipment.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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