Cleanth Brooks

Background

Brooks was born on October 16, 1906, in Murray, Kentucky. His parents were Reverend Cleanth Brooks, and Bessie Lee Witherspoon Brooks (Leitch 2001).

Education

He studied at Vanderbilt and Tulane universities and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

From 1963 to 1972, he was awarded honorary doctorates of literature from Upsala College, the University of Kentucky, the University of Exeter, Washington and Lee University, Saint Louis University, Tulane University, and Centenary College and Oglethorpe University (Singh 1991).

Career

During the 1930's he taught at Louisiana State University, edited The Southern Review with Robert Penn Warren, and collaborated on an influential textbook, Understanding Poetry (1938). The latter, an important example of New Criticism, taught the art of close reading and emphasized a poem's "verbal strategies" as opposed to its "ideas. " In 1939, Brooks' Modern Poetry and the Tradition revaluated English and American poetry by examining the decline of wit. Brooks maintained that the 18th century had spurned metaphysical wit - the wordplay of John Donne and Andrew Marvel - ushering in an age of didactic, unparadoxical poetry. Brooks modified his theory in The Well Wrought Urn (1942), a series of analytic readings based on the assumption that Pope as well as Yeats, Gray as well as Donne - indeed all poets - are concerned with unifying disparate images and figures of speech. In this classic of critical ingenuity, Brooks scrutinizes the paradoxes of individual poems and argues vigorously against the notion of poetry as adornment of feelings and ideas. The Hidden God (1963) turns somewhat from intense analysis toward the exploration of underlying religious and ethical themes in modern literature. Also in this later "contextual" vein, William Faulkner, The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963) shows the breadth of Brooks' scholarship in its discussion of social and cultural problems reflected in Faulkner's major works. Brooks taught at Yale University from 1947 to 1984. As a controversial founding father of the New Criticism, he continued to direct the attention of students and fellow critics to the concrete experience of reading particular works. He died May 10, 1994, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Achievements

• With his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing "the interior life of a poem" (Leitch 2001) and codifying the principles of close reading. His best-known works, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) and Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry.

Works

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  • William Faulkner: First Encounters

    ( In this clear-sighted and enjoyable book, Cleanth Brook...)

  • Fundamentals Of Good Writing - A Handbook Of Modern Rhetoric

    (There is no easy way to learn to write', is the opening l...)

  • The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

    ( A classic that has been widely used by several generati...)

  • Modern Rhetoric

    (Publisher Harcourt, Brace & World - 1970 - 3rd Edition - ...)

  • Understanding Fiction

    (1943 Hardcover from rockymountaincardsandbooks.com)

  • The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren

    ( The clarity of style for which Mr. Brooks has long been...)

  • Understanding Poetry Third Edition

    (GREAT VERY RARE FIND)

  • An Approach to Literature
  • A shaping joy;: Studies in the writer's craft

Membership

Brooks held memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society (Singh 1991).

Connections

Father:

Cleanth Brooks

Mother:

Bessie Lee Witherspoon Brooks

Wife:

Edith Amy Blanchord

References

• Critical Theory Since Plato (Revised Edition)
• By Julie Rivkin - Literary Theory: An Anthology: 2nd (second) Edition