New Criticism

In the United States, several poets and critics based in the South would pick up on Richards's work. This group, associated with the Agrarian Revival, would elaborate upon close reading and the autonomy of the poem, eventually developing these principles into a full-fledged critical ethos. In the 1930s, John Crowe Ransom's writing on poetry positioned literature against the rapacious force of dehumanizing scientific logic. Considering the Revivalists' opposition to Southern industrialization, the turn to poetry as a means to maintain contact with a humanistic, organic, and agrarian tradition made sense. Most of the Agrarians shared a sense of distrust in technology and were religious and conservative in their social views. Ransom, Allen Tate, and others saw poetic knowledge as a remedy to an oppressive scientific modernity. For them, poetry offered access to means of human expression and communication that were not available in other, modern discourses.

Organic unity and the heresy of the paraphrase.

In the journal Southern Review, the editors Cleanth Brooks (1906–1994) and Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) provided an influential platform for New Criticism. From 1935 to 1942, Brooks and Warren, in addition to raising the profile of Southern writers, also established New Critical principles of criticism as central to American literary studies. In his 1947 work The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks brought together many of his previous essays into a key text for the movement. Not only articulating its principles, Brooks also provided exemplary New Critical readings of poetry. In positioning poetic against scientific knowledge, he argued that paradox was characteristic of the unique knowledge of the poem. Unlike science, which sought to eliminate paradox, the poetic work achieved its ontological status through contradictions, oppositions, and ambiguity. Brooks also described the "Heresy of the Paraphrase" in order to highlight the importance of the poetic object as a complete and unified whole. No part of the poem could be read outside of the whole, and the whole was constituted by each individual part. Thus, any summarization or paraphrase of a poem was grossly inadequate, as the internal multiplicities of the poem could not be reduced in such a way. Brooks would, in later work, elaborate upon William K. Wimsatt (1907–1975) and Monroe Beardsley's (1915–1985) concepts of the intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy to reaffirm the organic unity and autonomy of the poem. Aimed at biographical and impressionistic criticism, the former dismissed attempts to gauge the poet's intentions through examination of historical context, whereas the latter argued that the poem is not to be judged based upon its emotional impact on the reader.