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New Criticism, developed in the mid-twentieth century by Wimsatt, Beardsley, Brooks, and Warren, insists that a literary text should be analyzed as an autonomous, self-contained object—divorced from authorial intention, historical context, and reader response. Its core method is close attention to formal elements: diction, imagery, irony, paradox, tension, and unity. The 'well-wrought urn' metaphor captures the ideal: a poem is a perfectly balanced artifact whose parts cohere into an organic whole. New Criticism established close reading as the dominant academic practice in Anglo-American literary studies for several decades.
Practice identifying the 'intentional fallacy' and 'affective fallacy' in your own readings—notice when you reach outside the text for explanations. Analyze a dense lyric poem using only internal evidence, then compare your reading to one that incorporates biographical context, and assess what each approach can and cannot explain.
To understand New Criticism, it helps to know what it was reacting against. Before the mid-twentieth century, academic literary study was dominated by historical scholarship and biographical criticism: what sources did Milton draw on? What did Keats mean by "beauty is truth"? What does this poem reveal about the author's psychology? New Critics found this approach frustrating because it shifted attention away from the work itself toward everything *outside* the work. Their corrective was radical: the text and nothing but the text. This methodological austerity is what makes New Criticism both powerful and — as later critics argued — limited.
The two key prohibitions Wimsatt and Beardsley codified are the intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy. The intentional fallacy is the error of treating the author's stated or inferred intention as the measure of what a text means. Why is this a fallacy? Because once a text is written, it becomes an independent object in the world; what the author "meant" is not accessible except through the text itself, and whatever we infer about intention comes *from* the text, not before it. You cannot appeal to authorial intention to resolve a textual ambiguity without circular reasoning. The affective fallacy is the complementary error: treating the reader's emotional response as the standard of literary value. "This poem moves me" is a psychological report about the reader, not an analysis of the poem. New Criticism wanted literary criticism to have the rigor of a discipline — replicable, text-anchored, communicable to others — and it achieved this by insisting on the text as the shared object.
The positive program follows from your prerequisite in close reading. New Critics saw irony and paradox as the highest literary values because these formal features capture tension without resolving it into a simple thesis. Cleanth Brooks's famous claim is that poetry characteristically says things that cannot be said in paraphrase — the poem's meaning is the formal whole, not a propositional content you can extract. The poem is what it is. The well-wrought urn metaphor captures this: a poem should be examined as a craftsman's object, attending to how its elements — imagery, sound, diction, rhythm, structure — work together to create a unified, self-contained whole. This is organic unity: the parts of the poem are integrated like organs in a body; you cannot remove a piece without changing everything else.
This gave literary studies something it had lacked: a teachable, rigorous method that could be deployed in a classroom. You could sit a group of students in front of a dense lyric poem with no biographical context, no historical apparatus, and ask: how does this poem work? What does the imagery do? How does the syntax create or undercut the stated meaning? Close reading became the core skill of literary education for decades because New Criticism made it legible as a discipline. The method's limitations — its blindness to history, ideology, gender, power — became visible only as later schools (structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, deconstruction) brought those dimensions back in. But the close reading practice that New Criticism bequeathed remains indispensable: whatever else you bring to a text, you must attend to what it actually says and how it says it.
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