New Criticism is one of the most important schools of literary theory in the twentieth century. It changed how readers approach a text by insisting that the poem or novel itself is the only thing that matters, not the author’s life, not history, and not the reader’s feelings.
For literature students preparing for competitive exams, New Criticism is essential. Questions on close reading, the intentional fallacy, the affective fallacy, and irony in poetry all trace back to this school. If you are new to literary theory and want a broader foundation before reading this post, start with this Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. This post covers the origins of New Criticism, its key concepts, major theorists, important quotes, and exactly what you need to know for your exams.
Background and Context
New Criticism emerged in the United States and Britain during the 1920s and reached its peak influence between the 1930s and 1950s. It was partly a reaction against the Romantic habit of reading poetry as an expression of the poet’s personal feelings, and against the biographical and historical criticism that dominated universities at the time.
The movement drew from earlier ideas by T.S. Eliot, who argued in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that poetry is not the expression of personality but an escape from it. I.A. Richards at Cambridge also prepared the ground with his book Practical Criticism (1929), where he showed students reading poems without any knowledge of the author and still producing valid interpretations. This proved that a text could stand on its own.
The term “New Criticism” became standard after John Crowe Ransom published a book called The New Criticism in 1941, naming the movement and gathering its arguments in one place. The school dominated American literary education for decades and shaped how English literature is still taught in many institutions today.
Table of Contents
Key Concepts Explained Simply
Close Reading
Close reading is the foundation of New Criticism. It means reading a text slowly and carefully, paying attention to every word, image, and structure. A New Critic does not ask what the poem means to them personally. They ask what the text does, how its parts work together, and what formal features create its meaning.
For example, when reading Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” a close reading focuses on the tension between permanence and change in the poem’s imagery and how the structure of the ode form supports that tension. The meaning lives inside the specific language of the poem, not outside it.
The Intentional Fallacy
W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley introduced this term in their 1946 essay “The Intentional Fallacy.” The argument is simple: what the author intended to mean does not determine what the poem means. The text is an independent object once it is published. Judging a poem by what the author “meant to say” is a fallacy, a critical error.
This idea was radical because it removed the author’s authority over their own work. It also made literary criticism more democratic. Any careful reader could analyze a text without needing to know anything about the writer’s private letters or diaries.
The Affective Fallacy
In a companion essay from 1949, Wimsatt and Beardsley described the affective fallacy. This is the opposite error: judging a poem by its emotional effect on the reader. A poem that makes you cry is not automatically a good poem. A poem that leaves you cold is not automatically a bad one. Quality is in the text, not in the reader’s emotional response.
These two fallacies together define the New Critical position. The text is the object of study. Everything else is a distraction.
Tension, Irony, and Ambiguity
New Critics loved complexity. Allen Tate introduced the concept of “tension” in poetry, arguing that the best poems hold opposites together without resolving them. Cleanth Brooks developed the idea of irony and paradox as central to poetic language. He argued that all good poetry works through paradox because ordinary language cannot capture the full range of experience.
William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) extended this further. Empson showed that the richest poems contain multiple meanings at once, and that this ambiguity is not a flaw but a feature of literary language.
The Poem as Organic Unity
New Critics argued that a poem is an organic whole. Every part contributes to the whole, and you cannot remove a word or change a line without affecting the entire work. This is called organic unity. It is why New Critics resisted paraphrasing poetry. To say “the poem is about death” is to lose the poem entirely. The meaning is inseparable from the specific words used.
Important Quotes
“A poem should not mean / But be.” — Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica
This is one of the most quoted lines in New Criticism. MacLeish captures the idea that a poem is not a statement of meaning to be decoded. It is an object that exists in its own right. For exams, this line often appears as a starting point for questions on the New Critical approach to meaning.
“The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it).” — W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy
This explains why New Critics rejected authorial intention. The poem is autonomous. Once written, it belongs to language and not to the person who wrote it. Exam questions often ask students to explain or evaluate this position.
“The language of poetry is the language of paradox.” — Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn
Brooks argued that poetry always works through apparent contradiction. A poem says two things at once, and the tension between them creates meaning. This concept of paradox is tested frequently in theory exams.
“Poetry is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.” — T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Eliot’s idea of impersonality is the ancestor of New Criticism. He argued that the poet depersonalizes emotion through the “objective correlative,” a set of objects or situations that evokes a particular feeling without stating it directly.
“Practical criticism attempts to deal with actual poems… rather than with poetry in the abstract.” — I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism
Richards grounded the entire New Critical method in the practice of reading actual texts. His experiments with students reading poems without author names directly influenced the close reading method.
Exam Relevance: Key Points for Competitive Exams
New Criticism appears in theory papers as one of the formalist schools, often grouped with Russian Formalism. Here are the points you must know:
- The intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy are the two most commonly tested concepts from Wimsatt and Beardsley. Know each definition clearly and be able to distinguish them.
- Close reading as a method is the practical application of New Critical principles. Exam questions often ask you to perform or describe a close reading.
- The idea of the text as an organic unity is connected to the New Critical opposition to paraphrase. Cleanth Brooks called paraphrasing a poem “the heresy of paraphrase.”
- New Criticism is often compared with Russian Formalism in exam questions. Both schools focus on the text, but Formalism focuses on literariness and defamiliarization, while New Criticism focuses on irony, paradox, and organic unity.
- Related topics that appear alongside New Criticism include structuralism, reader-response theory, and Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author.”
Quick Revision: Key Points to Remember
- New Criticism emerged in the 1920s to 1950s and focuses entirely on the text itself.
- John Crowe Ransom named the movement in his 1941 book The New Criticism.
- T.S. Eliot’s theory of impersonality and I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism prepared the ground for the school.
- The intentional fallacy is the error of judging a poem by what the author intended.
- The affective fallacy is the error of judging a poem by its emotional effect on the reader.
- Cleanth Brooks argued that all poetry works through irony and paradox.
- The “heresy of paraphrase” refers to the New Critical belief that a poem’s meaning cannot be separated from its exact words.
- Organic unity means every part of a poem contributes to the whole, and nothing can be changed without affecting the entire work.
Conclusion
New Criticism shifted the center of literary study from the author to the text. Its key contribution is the principle that a poem is an autonomous object, and that close, careful reading of its language, structure, and form is the only valid critical method. The concepts of the intentional fallacy, the affective fallacy, organic unity, and paradox remain foundational ideas in literary theory. Understanding New Criticism gives you a clear framework for analyzing any literary text, and it also helps you understand why later schools like reader-response theory and deconstruction emerged as reactions against it.