Reading literature through the looking glass of theory.
"Composed upon Westminster Bridge" by William Wordsworth
Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge" gets some major attention from the New Critics—especially from Cleanth Brooks in The Well Wrought Urn. Everyone admits that Wordsworth's sonnet is...
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats
Keats was a favorite of the New Critics—probably because he loved a good paradox. In The Well Wrought Urn (Chapter 8, "Keats's Sylvan Historian"), Cleanth Brooks takes a microscope to "Ode on a G...
All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare
If you read the New Critics, you're bound to read about Shakespeare. In William Empson's 7 Types of Ambiguity, he's on the hunt for complex language to scrutinize under his Close Read-a-Scope. And...
"The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams
A poem like William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" seems to demand a close reading. It's so short that every word suddenly seems extremely important. So it's not surprising that the New Cr...
"A Serenade at the Villa" by Robert Browning
Sometimes the New Critics illustrated big points with one tiny example. Like when Yvor Winters analyzed Robert Browning's poem in his book, In Defense of Reason—he didn't analyze the whole poem,...