Cleanth Brooks

Cleanth Brooks (b. 1906–d. 1994), after T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, was arguably among the most influential modern literary critics. He is commonly identified as the representative American “New Critic,” who was subject accordingly both to high praise and to relentless attack through nearly seven decades. The son of a Methodist minister, Brooks studied at Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Oxford, having close and lasting associations with Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom, subsequently accepting faculty positions at LSU and Yale. He presents, in this regard, a unique problem: critical appraisals of his work are commonly embedded in arguments over New Criticism as if it were a coherent “movement”—a point of view Brooks resisted consistently, but with civilized skepticism. Brooks had no explicit ambitions of being a system-building theorist, nor any eagerness to adopt or take up theoretical enterprises advanced by others also identified as “New Critics.” In this tendency he was prescient: virtually all explicit New Critical theoretical claims have proved to be unsustainable or seriously controversial (Cf. Searle 2005 and Schryer 2012 [both cited under Critical Background and Summaries]). Mentions of Brooks are abundant, but focused studies of his writing are surprisingly rare. His frequent complaints that his positions had been misrepresented had the ironic consequence that he appeared to be the de facto defender of New Criticism, because he replied to complaints in detail. Brooks as a colleague (see especially Grimshaw 1998 [cited under Critical Background and Summaries]) was most effective in shaping university literature programs and modeling critical practices, affecting almost all areas of professional disciplinary concern. Brooks was intent on the teaching of literature “as literature,” refining strategies of “close reading” through publications of textbooks, essays, literary history, studies of major authors, and textual scholarship and lectures, always accompanied by professional and public service, as part of the rise of “New Criticism” to dominance, but also grounding English departments as central to humanities education. The complication is Brooks’s ambivalence as to whether comprehensive theoretical systems, including proposals by other New Critics, were compatible with the reflective nature of literature itself. After the 1970s, the fracturing of the loose professional and disciplinary consensus that New Criticism had come to represent, and the crisis-laden proliferation of “newer” approaches and theories supplementing, supplanting, or replacing New Criticism, severely complicated inherited or traditional views of what “theory” in criticism should be, driven in part by the impetus of progress. The vitality and endurance of Brooks’s career—and the theoretical ambiguity of “New Criticism”—lies in his conviction that literature was an essentially civilizing and moral force, dependent less on doctrine than imaginative discovery through reflective engagement with literature.