How It All Got Started
New Criticism wasn't the most organized of movements. Different groups of critics in the U.S. and in Britain were blazing trails on their own, and they hadn't exactly sat down to figure out a road map. So we can't point to one manifesto that shook everything up.
But we can find a whole bunch of sparks that fed the fire—sparks like T.S. Eliot's introduction to The Sacred Wood (1920), Ezra Pound's Pavannes and Divisions (1918), I.A. Richards's Practical Criticism (1929), and John Crowe Ransom's The New Criticism (1941). They all had their own individual foci, but they were all a call to readerly action. These writers believed it was time for a new and practical approach to analyzing literature—as well as discriminating between "good" and "bad" literary works.
These New Critics all believed in a close analysis of form, literary devices, and technique. Their new emphasis on the text was a reaction to the old style of scholarship, which was all about history and the evolution of languages—stuff that took you outside of a poem into whole other worlds of information. The New Critics wanted to stay inside the poem, and to explain why it was good or bad.