In the following interview, Brooks and Spurlin discuss the response of other writers to the New Criticism.

Below, Beck and Rhoades compare Brooks's New Criticism and Stanley Fish's Reader-Response theory.

In the following essay, Duvall argues that the spiritual values required by Eliot's Modernism and Brooks's New Criticism are fraught with contradiction and lead to a static literature.

[Spears is an American educator and critic. In the review below, he favorably assesses Brooks's The Language of the American South, noting his concern with the significance of language in the interpretation of literature.]

In the following essay, Tassin suggests that the New Criticism endures in its own right and as the bedrock upon which other schools of criticism are constructed.

In the following review, Clark examines several books and essays by Brooks, illustrating Brooks's belief that religion and art are complementary in man's search for truth and meaning.

In the following essay, Calhoun gives a concise history of the development of Formalistic Criticism, especially the New Criticism of Brooks and others.

Certain skeptical doubts which I have long felt concerning "the new criticism" have been considerably sharpened by Mr. Cleanth Brooks's latest volume, The Well Wrought Urn, as well as by his recent essay on "Irony and 'Ironic' Poetry." I am not happy about this, since on a number of points I am in sympathy with the purposes which differentiate Mr. Brooks and the writers commonly associated with him from most of the other critical schools of the day. (p. 83) I...

Cleanth Brooks is usually identified with one method, "close reading," and with a search for such devices as paradox and irony in English poetry from Shakespeare to Yeats. He has been accused of "critical monism" by R. S. Crane [see excerpt above]. (p. 196) [I want] to make a plea for Cleanth Brooks as a historian of criticism, as a critic of critics. His comments on criticism constitute an extensive part of his work that has not received the attention it deserves. (p. 197)

[An educator and critic, Andrews frequently writes about William Faulkner. In the essay below, she analyzes Brooks's studies of Faulkner.]

If Brooks as critic may be said to have a characteristic method, it is that of demonstrating that a formula or generalization is inadequate because it will not fit all the complex facts of the individual case. Applying this method to Brooks's own work, we observe immediately that his last three books, at least, are not limited to close reading, since one, The Hidden God, deals explicitly with the religious implications of literature and the other two, William Faulkner and A Shaping Joy, are, in their...

Below, Daniel favorably reviews Brooks's William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. Brooks's own southern heritage, Daniel argues, gives added clarity to his interpretations of Faulkner.

In the following review, Daniel explains Brooks's theory of the evolution of poetic style.

We may enumerate several distinct senses in which, for Brooks, poetry is "dramatic" rather than propositional. (1) Poems communicate to the reader not directly but through the agency of a dramatic persona engaged in responding to a situation, whose speeches are arranged so as to be "in character" rather than objectively true. (2) Poetry is not organized according to the model of logical exposition but seeks to dramatize prelogical, associative states of consciousness…. (3)...

[Below, Hall favorably reviews Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth-Century Poetry and compares it to Brooks's earlier work The Well Wrought Urn.]

In the following review, Freer contrasts Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth-Century Poetry with earlier writings by Brooks, asserting that "one of the chief subjects of this book is actually the evolution of Brooks's thought."

In the following review, Hall favorably reviews the content and structure of Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth-Century Poetry.

[Crews is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt from an essay that surveys several recent volumes of Faulkner criticism, he assails Brooks's recent and past interpretations of Faulkner's work as "Agrarian party line" and "indefensible."]

The long analysis of The Waste Land in Modern Poetry and the Tradition is a good example of Brooks' earlier [critical] method. As Brooks himself admits, the greater part of his discussion of The Waste Land deals with the "prose meaning" of the poem. What Brooks does is to summarize the theme, to call attention to important contrasts, to paraphrase difficult passages, to indicate shifts in tone, to trace recurrent symbols and to interpret their meanings in different contexts, and to trac...

Professor Cleanth Brooks of Yale has written a long, handsome, and unfailingly sensible book about all of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels [William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country]. He is obsessed by no thesis, driven by no design: he simply wants to help us to read the novels as sympathetically and thoroughly as he has, and as they deserve to be read. To those who would shrink the novels into histories of the South or tracts on the Negro Problem, or bloat them into symbol-lands, to those who woul...

In the following excerpt, Lyday presents mixed opinions of Brooks's ideas.

The title of ["The Well Wrought Urn"] is taken from Donne's "Canonisation," where "a well wrought urne" is said to become as well "the greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes." It is no accident either that Mr. Brooks should take his title from Donne, that the first essay in reading should be on this poem by Donne, or that his last should be on a poem by Yeats. Mr. Brooks' type of criticism is a result of the special kind of reading which we...

In the following review, Rollin praises Brooks's body of work and its impact on criticism.

I have been reading Mr. Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn with enjoyment and admiration, and want to write down the points at which I disagree with it. The minds of critics often work in this disagreeable way, and I hope I am right in taking for granted that the book as a whole does not need summarizing or defense. Indeed I agree so fully with his general position that if I were attacking him I should be attacking myself. (p. 691) The general criticism I want to make of Mr. Brooks's approa...

Fifteen years ago Cleanth Brooks published William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. It was then and remains now the best single critical work on the novels of Faulkner's fictional saga. In the years that followed, many of Brooks's readers looked forward to the promised companion volume that would deal with the works Faulkner set beyond the boundaries of his apocryphal county. From time to time essays appeared which gave previews, essays ranging from Faulkner's poetry to his view of ...

[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 o...

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

[In "A Shaping Joy: Studies in the Winter Craft"] Brooks remains a reader's reader. In a sense he is not a writer at all, for he is a writer without style. Style, he quotes Yeats as saying is "'a still unexpended energy, after all that the argument … needs, a still unbroken pleasure after the immediate end has been accomplished—a most personal and wilful fire."… Style by Yeats's definition we have in Eliot, in Tate, in Ransom—other...

[William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country is at once] the most courteous, modest, sensible and helpful of existing guides. For a guide is most nearly what it is, a handbook for strangers…. In many ways … [this is] the book one might have expected from Brooks as Southerner and distinguished teacher but curiously not the book expected of Brooks as New Critic, author of The Well-Wrought Urn, the relentless verbal inquisitor. (p. 110)

[Brooks's thesis in Modern Poetry and the Tradition] may be summed up as follows: The Augustan neo-classicists regarded metaphor only as a decoration of thought. This is false. In poetry, idea and image are one. The romantics ranked wit and fancy below imagination, intellect below emotion, and considered irony beneath their dignity. This is false. Wit and irony are essential elements in serious poetry. Both regarded poetry as an elevated way of expressing elevated beliefs. ...

[Mitgang is an American journalist, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following obituary, he provides an overview of Brooks's life and career.]

[William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond] as a whole is less impressive than The Yoknapatawpha Country because its topics are more diverse and because most of it is concerned with less impressive works. Faulkner's poetry and early prose would not be worth discussing at such length were it not for the light they cast on his literary sources and on qualities he was to develop further in his later writing…. For me, however, the principal value of the book is that it completed Brooks�...

[Sundquist is an American educator and critic. In the following review, he provides a mixed assessment of On the Prejudices, Predilections, and Firm Beliefs of William Faulkner.]

[Cleanth Brooks] comes close in many minds to being the New Critic. Having, unlike most of his peers, published little poetry and fiction, he is wholly a critic and an academic. And he is an editorial half of that famous dreadnought, Understanding Poetry, which was as responsible as any work for disseminating the New Criticism. [A Shaping Joy] is much concerned with the label as it represents both condemnation and legitimacy. Brooks sets out in his first two essays (their titles are revealing: "The U...

[The] moralistic emphasis which pervades Mr. Brooks' ["The Hidden God"] may be just as fatal as that "social significance" which he derides in the literary criticism of the 1930's. Over and over again this critic warns us, quite correctly, against finding a "moral," a "lesson," a single meaning in any work of art—even while he himself, in his present criticism, is doing just that. Thus he praises Hemingway's courage and stoi...

Little is wrong with The Hidden God that a new title would not remedy, for actually Cleanth Brooks' book is less about God than about the contemporary search for human dignity. Prof. Brooks' initial premise is that Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and R. P. Warren are concerned with the position of man in a hostile or an indifferent universe. (p. 366) None of this departs much from what seems to be general critical opinion; in fact, The Hidden God is most successful when Brooks says clearly ...

[The Hidden God, a] casual discussion of the works of Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren, is an attempt to indicate the religious relevance that these works may possess for the contemporary Christian reader. At times Brooks seems to be apologizing for the success of these writers and for his own interest in them. His cursory investigations are surely more sharply focused on the potential uses that they may be put to by one uneasy in his Christian faith than on a reading of the texts within a more...