[Brooks regards] the use of language in at least his kind of critical writing as something essentially different from the poetic use. It is unlikely that he would be much disturbed by the charges one has heard that he talks about literature, but does not make literature of his talk.

It may be making virtues of natural limitations, but Brooks's style seems a deliberately plain, steady, utilitarian style. The critical commentary does not emulate but only serves the poem, assists it in the performance of its "miracle of communication," like the disciples distributing the bread and fish.

One may weary a little at the limited variety of Brooks's rhetorical and logical devices—the series of leading questions, offering tentative readings of a line, a figure, picking up relevances, discarding plausible irrelevancies, toward the definitive statement; the "if not exactly …, still" or "it may mean …, but it might also...