SOURCE: Burt, Stephen Jennifer Lewin. “Poetry and the New Criticism.” In A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Neil Roberts, pp. 153-67. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

In the following essay, Burt and Lewin provide brief literary histories of poets and critics such as Tate, Ransom, and Warren, as well as later New Critics such as Empson, Winters and Blackmur, evaluating their poetry in light of their theories of New Criticism.

‘Never have poetry and criticism in English been so close together’, Allen Tate wrote in 1955, as they were at the height of the largely American movement now called the New Criticism (Tate, 1968, p. 214). In the late 1920s, after the upheavals of High Modernism, some younger critics who were also poets began to explain the principles which had emerged from their tastes. These principles helped generate new approaches to literature and especially to poetry, concentrating on close verbal analysis; new journals...