Comrades

Robert Penn Warren

Red Warren (we gave him that nickname because of his red hair) and I were fellow Fugitives, and, man, we were tight. Did I mention he was one of my students at Vanderbilt? I was kind of a mentor for him, and that's a responsibility I took very seriously.

So, what would you find us talking about on a given Saturday at Starbucks? Oh, maybe just the importance of formal techniques in the composition of poetry (does it rhyme? is it a sonnet? a ballad? does it have couplets?); or maybe how life in the Old South had gone to hell in a hand basket thanks to Northern industry and materialism. We shed many tears into our half-caffs about what humanity was losing in the modern world.

Robert Frost

I'll never forget the honor and privilege of introducing Frost at the Poetry Society meeting in 1958 that time he won that gold medal. I loved that crazy kid. And boy, could he crank out a poem. That "The Road Not Taken" gets me every time.

It helps that he loved my work. We were just fellow American poets trying to make it in this cynical world. He and I shared a love of rustic settings and traditional forms of poetry. Give us an open field and a snowy evening in the middle of nowhere, and we're good to go.

Randall Jarrell

Randall's another one of my smarty-pants students at Vanderbilt. We spent long summer nights arguing about Shakespeare's sonnets. Strangely, we couldn't come to any agreement about how to interpret Shakespeare, but Randall still stayed at my house and joined in extensive debates about the richness of the Bard's poetry. Even after I got that kid a teaching gig, he still wouldn't join the agrarians. Well, you can't win 'em all.

Cleanth Brooks

Cleanth was one of my New Critic pals at Vanderbilt, before he headed off to Yale. We were both incredibly important literary critics, and who doesn't want to hang out with like-minded individuals? He was a young whippersnapper compared to me, but he took a lot of my ideas about the importance of close reading and made them meaningful for the next generation.

Rivals

Northrop Frye

To call Northrop a rival isn't exactly accurate, but he did drift away from the vision of the New Critics, and who wants membership numbers to decline? Plenty of people dissed New Criticism (don't get me started on New Historicism), but Northrop just went rogue and developed his own vision by creating this elaborate way of interpreting literature based on archetypes. Ultimately, he was less aligned with our faithful fixation on close reading and more into how literature expressed myths that have been around for a long time.

Harold Bloom

Harold loved rivals. He collected them like a tourist gathers shells on an empty beach—he didn't give a hoot what any other critic thought of him. I say more power to him. So, even if he didn't take New Criticism into his fold, we still wanted him on our good side. (He was pals with William K. Wimsatt, so we did have that connection.)

Some believe that Harold brought about the demise of New Criticism because of his obsession with the Oedipal struggle. I mean, all that father-hating started to give New Criticism a bad name. Plus, Bloom didn't treat T.S. Eliot as an idol like a good New Critic should. What's wrong with that guy?