SOURCE: An obituary in The Times, London, May 16, 1994, p. 19.

[Below, the critic surveys Brooks's career, characterizing his impact on literary studies as immense.]

Cleanth Brooks was the most influential and widely-read exponent in his generation of what was known as "New Criticism"—a school of critical theory which came to dominate the teaching of literature on American campuses after the war. It was particularly in his own country, as a professor of rhetoric at Yale for nearly 30 years, that he made his impact, for in Britain F. R. Leavis had already completed much of the groundwork to the new critical approach during the 1930s.

Their theories on the importance of a literary work as a closed entity, the intrinsic worth of which could be measured through careful structural analysis rather than examination of its historical context, certainly had parallels. So, too, did the revolutionary impact each had on...