SOURCE: "Henry Vaughan: Quietism and Mysticism," in Essays in Honor of Esmond Linworth Marilla, edited by Thomas Austin Kirby and William John Olive, Louisiana State University Press, 1970, pp. 3-26.
Brooks was the most prominent of the New Critics, an influential movement in American criticism which also included Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and which paralleled a critical movement in England led by I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, and William Empson. Although the various New Critics did not subscribe to a single set of principles, all believed that a work of literature had to be examined as an object in itself through the close analysis of symbol, image, and metaphor. For the New Critics, literary works were not manifestations of ethics, sociology, or psychology, and could not be evaluated in the general terms of any nonliterary discipline. For Brooks, metaphor was the primary element of literary art, and the effect of that metaphor of primary importance. His most characteristic essays are detailed studies of metaphoric structure, particularly in poetry. In the following excerpt from the text of a lecture first given in a somewhat expanded form in 1962, Brooks offers an insightful reading of "The Retreate," "Night," and several of Vaughan's other poems, finding that though "in his celebration of childhood and innocence, [Vaughan seems at many points to look forward to the poetry of the nineteenth century, in some of his nature poetry, and in his meditative quality, he is in fact very much closer to Donne and Herbert than he is to the Romantic poets of the Age of Wordsworth."]
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