Influence
Understanding Poetry was an unparalleled success and remains “a classic manual for the intellectual and imaginative skills required for the understanding of poetry” (Singh 1991). Further, critics praise Brooks and Warren for “introducing New Criticism with commendable clarity” (Singh 1991) and for teaching students how to read and interpret poetry. Arthur Mizener commended Brooks and Warren for offering a new way of teaching poetry:
For us the real revolution in critical theory…was heralded by the publication, in 1938, of Understanding Poetry…for many of us who were preparing ourselves to teach English is those years….this book…came as a kind of revelation. It made sense because it opened up for us a way of talking about an actual poem in an actual classroom, and because the technique of focusing upon a poem as language rather than as history or biography or morality, gave a whole new meaning to and justification for the teaching of poetry (qtd. in Singh 1991).
In an obituary for Brooks, John W. Stevenson of Converse College notes Brooks “redirect and revolutionize the teaching of literature in American colleges and universities” (1994). Further, Stevenson admits Brooks was “the person who brought excitement and passion to the study of literature” (1994) and “whose work…became the model for a whole profession” (1994).
Along with New Criticism, Brooks’ studies of Faulkner, Southern literature, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (appearing in Modern Poetry and the Tradition) remain classic texts. Mark Royden Winchell calls Brooks’ text on Faulkner “the best book yet on the works of William Faulkner” (1996). Eliot himself commended Brooks in a letter for Brooks’ critique of “The Waste Land” (Singh 1991). Further, Winchell praises Brooks for “help invent the modern literary quarterly” (1996) through the success of The Southern Review.
As testament to Brooks’ influence, fellow critic and former teacher John Crowe Ransom calls Brooks “the most forceful and influential critic of poetry that we have” (qtd. in Singh 1991). Elsewhere, Ransom has even gone so far as to describe Brooks as a “spell binder” (qtd. in Singh 1991).
Read more about this topic: Cleanth Brooks
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“Mothers have as powerful an influence over the welfare of future generations, as all other causes combined.”
—John Abbott. The Mother at Home; or the Principles of Maternal Duty, John Abbott, Crocker and Brewster (1833)
“Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)