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CLEANTH BROOKS AND ROBERT PENN WARREN have achieved a lasting renown both for their independent efforts and their collaborations, and to many their names are fixed in a permanent coupling. The Brooks and Warren method of reading literature came to represent far more than the pedagogy for which it was intended; it was seen to encapsulate the ideology of those who, frequently in disparagement, were branded the "New Critics." Few, if any, of the writers so designated used the label for themselves; it was a handy term for lumping together quite dissimilar literary men, with widely differing strategies, beginning with those to whom John Crowe Ransom pointed in his 1941 volume The New Criticism-I. A. Richards, William Empson, and Yvor Winters. In devoting their attention to "the structural properties of poetry," Ransom maintained, these critics manifested from different points of view an original way of regarding the literary object. What he discerned in these writers was a shift in epistemology, the lineaments of a new way of approaching knowledge, which would soon appear in the work of numerous other thinkers.
But if there was a school of thought that may legitimately be referred to as the New Criticism, it grew out of the close polyphony among three seminal men of letters and practicing poets at Vanderbilt University in the '20s. Ransom, returning Rhodes scholar and published poet, brought with him to the task of reading poetry an essentially ironic mind that, long immersed in Kant and Hegel, had turned to poetry with, as he said, a "fury against abstraction." Donald Davidson, his student and later colleague-a man often overlooked as one of the founders of analytic criticism-came to his close reading of texts with a love of the oral tradition, a mastery of Roman history and literature, and a remarkable lyric talent. And, finally, Allen Tate, their sophisticated student, the modernist of the three, drew upon his Catholic upbringing and his "fierce Latinity" for the metaphysical sense of form with which he approached poetry. These three were the powers behind the founding of a little magazine, The Fugitive (1922-'25), which achieved considerable success and helped launch the careers of several of its contributors. In the many-voiced exchanges of the Fugitive group, which included in all...