No less a historian of criticism than René Wellek has called Cleanth Brooks "the critic of critics." Both senses of the phrase are appropriate descriptions of Brooks. Not only was he considered to be the critic of his generation of critics but...

Author and college professor Cleanth Brooks and fellow teacher Robert Penn Warren, founder of the 'Southern Review,' worked together in several universities such as Yale, where their joint collaboration entitled 'Understanding Poetry' was a popular textbook even before both joined the school's faculty. An...

Cleanth Brooks, English professor and one-time editor of the 'Southern Review' publication of the Louisiana State University, was a traditionalist in both his lifestyle and poetry. He was a conservative Episcopalian and he disliked free verse. He was the co-author of the classic college...

In the following interview, Brooks and Spurlin discuss the response of other writers to the New Criticism.

Below, Beck and Rhoades compare Brooks's New Criticism and Stanley Fish's Reader-Response theory.

In the following essay, Duvall argues that the spiritual values required by Eliot's Modernism and Brooks's New Criticism are fraught with contradiction and lead to a static literature.