For most of my life, I hated poetry. One year, I had a great English teacher who really showed me what poetry was all about and got me interested. This book was just what I needed. I bought it because it had the look of the best prose book around (Writing Prose: Techniques and Purposes, Oxford University Press). It is a great introduction to poetry. It's full of great poems. It's just great. Gosh. You're going to love it. I get excited just thinking about it.

Anyway, it's basically just a big six-hundred page anthology of poems, *with commentary*. And that's key. There are a lot of great poems that you just can't get without a little bit of context.

My adventures in poetry never went further than this book, but I still read it often.

If there is only one book that teachers should let literature students read, it should be this one. Definitely the Bible of writers (and amateur writers), critics, or those who simply love the written Word. Cleanth Brooks gives as wide a perspective as possible about the different literary movements and the notable poets.It's just a shame that this book is VERY hard to find. A reprint would benefit English literature programs greatly.

I came across this book as I was looking for material to help me write a presentation on the divine hiddenness for a philosophy of religion course, thinking it would be a philosophical discussion on the subject. It isn't, not directly.

It was originally a series of lectures delivered during the thirties, updated and revised for print in the fifties by the author himself. It talks about the role of the artist, the problem (described by Tillich) in modern culture of man being reduced to "a mere thing", the problem where the world has been arranged so that "everything is a means to ends which are themselves means", without any ultimate goal, and how the true artist offers mankind a vision to grow beyond this.

He also explores the relation between the various author's visions/philosophy and the Christian vision/philosophy towards life, at first mostly how it relates to virtue (courage, discipline), to the reality of evil as something that cannot be explained away, but must be confronted (this was hauntingly well done), to the experience of the eternal within the temporal (mostly Eliot), conversion (all the authors), the corrosiveness and destruction of rationalism of any sort (everyone but Hemingway), and redemption (mostly Warren). It wasn't overdone or proselytizing, it was a fair appraisal of the author's themselves (Hemingway is _not_ made into a Christian, etc.). I actually found it very corrective and illuminating for my own understanding of these things, it made them much more concrete, manifest, less obscure and theoretical.

The conclusion again briefly revisits the role of the artist within a society as one who offers you a vision of reality and explores it, helps you encounter it; whereas most of what passes for art today is really kitsch, a narcotic playing on assumed sympathies, entertainment rolled off a factory line that deadens the mind and dulls the wits. He notes how these authors bring the reader to a new encounter with reality, and the author himself did this for me in the process, while whetting my appetite for more of these authors.

I am taking a college English class which includes an introduction to literary criticism. We were not assigned this book as our textbook, but I had occasion to write an essay recently for class and referred to this book as one of my secondary sources. This book is an excellent resource book. It is very clearly written. The topics covered are "The Intention of Fiction", "How Plot Reveals", "What Character Reveals", "What Theme Reveals", "Stories for Study", and "Fiction and Human Experience: How Four Stories Came to Be Written." It uses many, many, stories written by famous authors to illustrate each topic. I feel certain one could find at least one story from just about any textbook used in an English 101 class. Even if you are not studying literary criticism explicitly, this book is a good resource just for understanding how to look for things like theme and plot, just to name a few. It's a good book to get you thinking the way you need to think in order to write a paper. Even though I don't plan to major in English, I know I will use this book again and hopefully Amazon.comwill be able to find it for me!

Who Owns America? is a collection of informative, challenging, iconoclastic and articulate essays on the nature of industrialism, corporate capitalism, the bureaucratic state, private property, the "good" society, and neo-Jeffersonian visions of a decentralized America. From David Cushman Coyle's "The Fallacy of Mass Production", to Frank Lawrence Owsley's "The Foundations of Democracy", to James Muir Waller's "America and Foreign Trade", to Robert Penn Warren's Literature as a Symptom", to Hilaire Belloc's "The Modern Man", these and many more observant and insightful commentaries deserve as wide a readership as possible and are highly recommended to students of American politics, economics, and history.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed any of Faulkner's works or is interested in learning about Faulkner and his writings. My English teacher lent me his copy of this book, and I must say that it is very informative and interesting, at least in the parts I have read. I am waiting to read the sections concerning certain books that I have yet to read until I read them. Fundamentally, this book helps you get at the root of some of Faulkner's works that you may not be sure you understand as well as you'd like to or would like to know a bit about before you begin reading.

I've been known to bristle: to bristle at condescension; to bristle at unsupportable proclamations of absolutes. Therefore, as I read the rhetoric of a Cleanth Brooks, whom I suppose I must admire since he is a very famous critic, I become very much in touch with the things that irritate me about literary criticism: the assumption that intellectual capacities have been too early stymied in the reader and the vacuous and malingering abstractions of those whose lofty intellects we are suppose to gasp at in awe as those intellects fly free of the boundaries imposed by earth's pull, demonstrated verbosity the apparent key to wingless flight. Of course, it may well be argued that I am insecure and find new ideas (even old ones examined anew) both threatening and difficult to understand. Or it may be that my philosophical underpinnings have been too heavily influenced by the Greeks, who were often irritated at hubris. It may be that my concept of literature is that it is an egalitarian resource for the mind, the accessibility of which offers more hope to the humble human than all the legions of self-help authors combined, and that my bristling is in part motivated by exclusionary rhetoric. Ideas need not pander, but neither do they need to float down from on high. So forgive my bristling, but Brooks's parenthetical rhetoric-"The underlying paradox (of which the enthusiastic reader may well be unconscious) is nevertheless thoroughly necessary, even for that reader" (4)-early in The Well-Wrought Urn sets off my hubris alarm bells and leaves me, since I have already been condescended to, alert for the unsupportable absolutes that will surely follow. The first one comes clipping fast upon the heels of "the enthusiastic reader": "The calm of the evening obviously means 'worship,' even to the dull-witted and insensitive" (5). This an absolute enforced through ridicule at dissent, and so far the only thing of substance Brooks has demonstrated is my simple innocence and the punishment that will follow disagreement; however, dwelling upon Brooks's rhetoric may cause us to miss the argument within it.
Therefore, let me leave those bristle-producing elements aside in favor of analyzing the argument, bearing in mind, nonetheless, that Brooks has attempted to hang an ad hominem argument over the head of dissention, much like Dionysius hung the sword above Damocles's head. Let us, however, fear not the snapping horsehair; but neither let us miss the feast for love of our defiance. To wit, writes Brooks: "We resent the arrogance implied in judgments which seem to have any tinge of absoluteness about them, and, as a rule, no profession of personal humility on the part of the critic who renders them is sufficient to assuage us" (216).
True enough, and Brooks anticipates the reaction to his own arrogance and rightly points out that "no profession of personal humility" can redeem the critic thus perceived. However, it is the dismissive reader who might then miss what otherwise flows from Brooks: a cogent and persuasive bit of work. So we must choose to ignore the ever-present condescension that drips off of Brooks like an overworked sweat and acknowledge that he has provided in The Well Wrought Urn both insightful analyses and well-considered argument.
This latter remark may seem a reversal of my intuitive bristling, a step away from my belief that what would follow would be an indefensible absolute. Pshaw. Brooks is, indeed, full of it; that's why he needed to hang the sword. Nonetheless there is a sharp edge to his argument, even if the conclusion fails to pierce with a valid point (Indeed, it is blunted by qualification and contradiction).
To the edge then, if not to the point: Brooks's argument has awakened me to a very profound weakness in my own readings, that weakness being an inattention to textual weave, the connectedness of ideas and imagery. Only inconsistently do I concern myself with the details of poetry and, instead, rely on the stuff to wash over me whole, and only here and there do I perceive its intrarelationships.
Of course, there is validity to having the aesthetic of a thing wash whole over its admirer. I for one can stand in front of a Renoir, mesmerized, over long, unbroken periods of time, sensing the beauty and, indeed, reveling in it. But I am no art critic, no expert on what I am seeing. I experience only effect. All well and good for an art admirer and all that is required. If, however, I am a student of art, technique suddenly becomes an issue. That is, if I am a good student. I must understand each brushstroke-each part-in relation to the whole. I must understand why the work is good. Were I to forgo that understanding, I would be a poor student indeed.
And, in fact, that is what Brooks is saying of poetry and those of us who are students of literature; we must immerse ourselves within the poetry we study and uncover the brushstrokes, the paint daubs, the relationships of colors.

I first read "The Well Wrought Urn" in 1978, when I was a first year grad student. Now I assign it for English majors taking their final undergraduate seminar. "The Well Wrought Urn" is a collection of essays on various poems. The essays were published in various journals in the 1940s. Why is the book still read? It is read because these essays are superb examples of literary criticism at its best: insightful, accessible, graceful, witty. It is read because when one reads a poem, then reads Brooks' essay about it, then reads the poem again, one learns a great deal about how to understand poetry and gain from it meaning and pleasure. Brooks' insights aren't the only valid insights into these poems, but they are good ones. It's not that we read these essays to understand these specific poems, but to understand how to approach any poem. There's a lot of interesting literary criticism available in libraries, though far more is not very interesting or graceful. Few essays, however, are more helpful to students as tools for teaching the technique of literary analysis. Of course, Brooks, as a New Critic, is using a style of literary criticism not presently trendy. Still, the technique of discovering insights about poetry is still the same, no matter what the theory one uses.

The review below this one is worthwhile, but I would suggest that the author misses the joke. What he takes as condescension is a condescension that includes the readers within the circle of initiates. It doesn't scoff at the reader. Thus, it is meant to help English majors think that they are a sort of blessed priesthood who have been initiated into the secrets of the fellowship. (When I was in grad school, that's what I thought we were.) Of course, this is all somewhat tongue in cheek and meant to be witty.

About twelve years ago I had the pleasure of hearing Brooks, then quite elderly (I don't know if he is still alive), present a paper at a conference. I remember him as slim, polite, self-effacing--the essence of the Southern gentleman at his best.

This book, written nearly a half-century ago, has never been out of print. To read it is to see why. With Cleanth Brooks, who taught at Yale for most of his career, you feel as if you are sitting in a seminar with the most brilliant professor you've ever known, one who is also a true gentleman with extraordinary solicitude for his students/readers. He takes you through the poems line by line and helps you to *see* the artistry of the poet at work. And so sparkling is his prose style that the essays are themselves works of art. This book is especially appropriate for students who are just beginning to appreciate poetry.

Literary criticism is supposed to sweep away the fogs and webs of literary misreadings so that the degreed individual with an interest in such matters can make sense of what he reads. However, in the case of LITERARY CRITICISM: A SHORT HISTORY by Wimsatt and Brooks, both fall far short of explicating what is surely the daunting task of summing up nearly two thousand years of criticism stretching from the ancient Greeks to the then modern age of 1957. Nearly all of the book is a turgid, nearly unreadable mess that places obstacles in the paths of those who love literature. Exactly who is the intended reader? Clearly, the authors had in mind the vanishingly small percent of erudite readers much like themselves. I am an adjunct professor of English, and I had trouble making sense of the nearly 750 pages that is the text. I thought I knew fairly well the criticisms of such writers as Dryden, Longinus, and Wordsworth, but after I finished reading the parts of the text that dealt with them, I was not so sure. Clearly, what is needed is for future writers of criticism to avoid the temptation to spout out scholarly jargonese at the drop of a hat. I do not recommend this book, unless some perverse dissertation adviser mandates it.