The Big Names in New Criticism
New Criticism's heavy hitters primarily batted for two teams: Team U.S.A. and Team U.K. On the U.S. side, we have John Crowe Ransom, who was a professor at Vanderbilt University, and who gave New Criticism its name with the title of one of his books. His students ended up being some of the most important new voices on the block (and since this was back in the 1930s, we're afraid these guys' names really do read like a boy band): Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks.
Warren and Brooks wrote the book that actually became the textbook for college students studying poetry. Their Understanding Poetry (1938) taught the techniques that students would need if they were going to study the poem, the whole poem, and nothing but the poem.
As it turns out, if you want to get a theory off the ground, it's a good idea to get your book in the backpacks of English majors everywhere. (Take note, Shmoopers.)
Other key players in the U.S. are Yvor Winters—who used New Criticism to give moral readings of literature—Kenneth Burke, R.P. Blackmur, William K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley. Wimsatt and Beardsley became famous for their intense hatred of critics who talked about authors' personal lives; for a dose of this medicine, check out their essay, "The Intentional Fallacy."
Over on the other side of the pond, I.A. Richards was leading the charge in his own classroom. He was interested in how people interpret literature. So he got scientific about the problem: he handed out thirteen poems, without so much as telling his students the names of the authors. And then he asked students to analyze them—What do the poems mean? How do you know?
Not surprisingly, this little experiment showed how very difficult it was to analyze a poem without any context, even if you were at the top of your class at Cambridge. One of Richards's students, William Empson, went on to offer an answer to this difficulty: his Seven Types of Ambiguity is a tour de force of ways to read closely, without any history books on your desk.
All of these critics actually had a lot in common—and not just how quickly they'd roll their eyes if you argued that Shakespeare left clues in The Tempest to explain why he left his second best bed to his wife. The New Critics all wanted to spend days picking apart a text word by word. And they all had poetry in common: they analyzed it, and wrote quite a bit of it too.
It's probably not a coincidence that so many of the New Critics were hard-writin' poets themselves, not just poetry scholars. Part of why they could so closely analyze the devices in a poem was because they were thinking like writers. John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, I. A. Richards, William Empson, and Yvor Winters all published poetry. How do you like them apples?