Cleanth Brooks (October 16, 1906—May 10, 1994) was an American literary critic and professor, best known for his publications, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) and Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939). Brooks is said to have revolutionized the teaching of poetry in American higher education and was also a prominent critic of Southern literature as well as the co-founder of The Southern Review.
Book Reviews
Winter 1941
The Whole of Housman: The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman
The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman. Holt. $3.00 The appearance of the Collected Poems provides an occasion for making some tentative generalizations on the total value of Housman and his […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1964
W. H. Auden as a Critic
Auden is pre-eminently the poet of civilization. He loves landscapes, to be sure, and confesses that his favorite is the rather austere landscape of the north of England, but over […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1953
Recovering Milton
Answerable Style: Essays on Paradise Lost by Arnold Stein. University of Minnesota Press. $3.50. Like the fixed stars, the great poets are there all the time. It is not they […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1952
Hits and Misses
The Structure of Complex Words by William Empson. New Directions. $5.00 This is the most mixed-up book that Empson has written to date. It makes excursions into linguistics, semantics, the […]
My Credo: A Symposium of Critics (Continued)
Winter 1951
V. The Formalist Critics
MY CREDO’ (continued) Here are some articles of faith I could subscribe to: That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of its object. That the primary concern of […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1946
The Intimations of the Ode: Reconsiderations V
Wordsworth’s great “Intimations Ode” has been for so long intimately connected with Wordsworth’s own autobiography, and indeed, Wordsworth’s poems in general have been so consistently interpreted as documents in the […]
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Summer 1944
Editor’s Note: Gerard Manley Hopkins
The poet was born in 1844, and died in 1889; and the four essays that follow are in the nature of an anniversary tribute. These papers are not to be […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1944
Cantankerous and Other Critics
The American Way Of Poetry by Henry W. Wells. Columbia University Press. $2.75. Study Out The Land by T. K. Whipple. University of California Press. $2.00. The Anantomy Of Nonsense […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1942
Form and Content
The Double Man by W. H. Auden. Random House. $2.00 Selected Poems by John Peale Bishop. Scribners. $2.00 The collocation of these two books tempts one to propose classifications: […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1939
Poet or Sage?
Collected Poems. By Robert Frost. Henry Holt. $5.00 The publication of Mr. Robert Frost’s Collected Poems provides an appropriate occasion for making an estimate of Mr. Frost’s rank and importance […]
The Kenyon Review Credos
The Formalist Critics
From The Kenyon Review, Winter 1951, Vol. XIII, No. 1 Here are some articles of faith I could subscribe to: That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of […]