New Criticism Texts

Sonnet 116 just might be one of the most quoted and most loved of Shakespeare's many sonnets. And, of course, it's all about love: love is an "ever-fixed mark," even against Time's "bending sickle'...

Donne takes on death in this sonnet, and he's not afraid to pull some punches. It's more of a gentlemanly duel between Donne and the Grim Reaper than a Street Fighter Death Match, you see.This poem...

Donne's "Holy Sonnet 14" addresses God, but not in the way you'd expect. Like most sonnets, it's chock full of imagery, conceits, and dramatic turns. But when Donne uses the sonnet to talk to God,...

Dreamy, haunted, and bizarre, Coleridge's poem about Xanadu and the "stately pleasure-dome" is a confusing read, if we do say so ourselves. But, as such, it's a great poem for exercising your close...

One morning, going over Westminster Bridge, Wordsworth has a shocking realization: London is actually way prettier than he had ever noticed before. (Maybe it had something to do with the fact that...

Romance, loneliness, and poetry—what's not to love here? Plus, "Bright star" is the poem that gave the movie Bright Star its title. And you know how we love movies that are based on poems (way co...

This famous Grecian urn is full of life and music and action—and yet, it's a solid, unmoving object. With such a great central paradox, this poem was a favorite of New Critics everywhere.As you m...

This is a tongue twister of a poem, with beautifully difficult lines like "Why do men then now not reck his rod?" (4). This is just the sort of language that begs for close (and slow) reading… le...

Okay, "The Red Wheelbarrow" is super short, but that can make it all the more difficult to analyze. When you've only got 16 words, a lot depends on each one.Speaking of "depending" on things, what...

Eliot's poem gets at the hollow center of his passive, exiled speakers. They're not good enough to get into heaven, but they're also not bad enough to be sent to hell. Yikes. This poem also has som...

Eliot wanted readers to focus on the poem itself when trying to understand what poetry was all about, in addition to the long tradition of poetry each poem belongs to. (He was a famous poet himself...

In this ground-breaking book, Richards writes about that time he experimented on his students. What did he ask them to do? Well, he handed 'em a packet of poems and said "analyze these," without gi...

Empson was all about analyzing what makes poetry so rich and so interesting. In his view, this was... ambiguity. You know, all those words, images, ideas, etc. that allow a poem to be open to diffe...

Brooks and Warren work hard for the money. Um, we mean, they work hard to define poetry. In this text, they say a poem isn't some bundle of "poetic" things, or just a decorated box that holds some...

One of Brooks's big arguments in The Well Wrought Urn is that you can't summarize (or paraphrase) a poem and retain its meaning. The poem says something in a certain way for a reason. And if you tr...

In this master essay, Wimsatt and Beardsley call out readers who just go through texts hoping to figure out what their authors really meant. According to these guys, authorial intent is not the mos...