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 also, as Wellek reminds us in an essay collected in The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work (1976), he was critical of other critics. During the 1940s and 1950s he was widely regarded as the most lucid and instructive close reader of literary texts. The readings he published in Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) were considered to be outstanding instances of New Critical practice. He further carried the tenets of New Criticism to countless university students through An Approach to Literature (1936), which he edited with John Thibaut Purser and Robert Penn Warren, and...