Brooks, Cleanth

(b. 16 October 1906 in Murray, Kentucky; d. 10 May 1994 in New Haven, Connecticut), literary critic, author, and educator who was a leading member of the New Criticism movement in American literature.

Brooks was the son of Cleanth Brooks, a minister, and Bessie Lee Witherspoon Brooks, a homemaker. Brooks’s father encouraged his son to read widely in literature. This habit was further developed by his attendance at the McTyeire School, a small private institution in Tennessee, which gave him grounding in classical Greek and Latin.

In 1924 Brooks entered Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was exposed to the prominent southern literary group known as the Fugitives, a cadre of writers and literary critics—among them Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Randall Jarrell—who laid the foundations for the New Criticism movement, in which Brooks himself would later be a leading light. Abandoning his youthful desire to become a lawyer, Brooks threw himself into the study of literature. “The thing that I got most out of Vanderbilt,” he recalled later, “was to discover suddenly that literature was not a dead thing to be looked at through the glass of a museum case, but was very much alive.”

After receiving his A.B. degree from Vanderbilt in 1928, Brooks earned an M.A. degree at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1929. Winning a Rhodes scholarship, he studied at Exeter College, Oxford University, in England, earning another B.A. in 1931 and a B. Litt. degree in 1932. He then began a fifteen-year career (1932–1947) at Louisiana State University (LSU), rising from lecturer to professor of English. Meanwhile, on 12 September 1934 he married Edith Amy Blanchard. They had no children.

Robert Penn Warren joined the LSU faculty soon after Brooks. This renewal of their earlier relationship at Vanderbilt would prove fruitful personally and professionally for both men. Brooks launched his literary career in 1935 with his first book, The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain. That same year he and Warren founded the Southern Review, which Brooks edited until 1942.

Frustrated at the dearth of decent textbooks for undergraduate literature courses, Brooks, Warren, and John Thibaut Purser produced An Approach to Literature: A Collection of Prose and Verse with Analyses and Discussions (1936). This work foreshadowed Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students (1938), which went through several editions and may be characterized as one of the bibles of the New Criticism movement. With its detailed analyses, the book revolutionized the teaching of poetry.

Even as a student, Brooks later described himself as “appalled at the fact that so much of the conventional graduate study seemed to have nothing to do with the interior life of the poem … Graduate training at that time didn’t pay much attention to it. It was all purely historical and biographical.” The New Criticism sought to remedy this defect with an emphasis on the inner meaning and structure of a piece of literature, wholly apart from the biographical background of the author or the cultural setting of the work. A poem, for example, must be examined for its internal metaphor, irony, and paradox. As life itself is infinitely complex, only a poem can fully capture this complexity. To paraphrase a poem was for Brooks the highest form of heresy. The critic must never let his description of the poem act as a substitute for the work itself; his only duty is to explicate its meaning for the modern reader, regardless of the age of the poem.

The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) brilliantly illustrated this last fact, as Brooks drew on poetry from the Elizabethan Age to modern times to illustrate New Critical techniques. Regardless of the historical milieu of a poem, in each case Brooks teased out similar qualities of metaphorical complexity. As he stated in the opening essay, “The language of poetry is the language of paradox.”

Brooks continued to produce landmark college texts, with Understanding Fiction (1943), in collaboration with Warren; Understanding Drama (1945), coauthored with Robert Heilman; and Modern Rhetoric (1949), also with Warren. A long-running editorial project was The Percy Letters (1944–1988), a nine-volume compilation of the works of English bishop and scholar Thomas Percy (1729–1811), in collaboration with A. F. Falconer and David Nichol Smith.

In 1947 Brooks moved to Yale University, where he was professor of English for the next thirteen years and then Gray Professor of Rhetoric until his retirement in 1975. He spent a decade (1953–1963) as a Library of Congress fellow, and two years (1964–1966) as the cultural attachè at the American embassy in London, providing him an opportunity to lecture widely throughout England. From 1980 to 1981 he was a senior fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.

After his retirement from Yale, Brooks’s scholarship remained as fruitful and productive as ever. He lectured widely and continued to publish prolifically. As a southerner he was almost inevitably drawn to the works of William Faulkner. In 1963 he had produced William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, which one reviewer called “the best single critical work on the novels of Faulkner’s fictional saga.” William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978) was a study of Faulkner’s non-Yoknapatawpha novels. William Faulkner: First Encounters (1983), intended especially for undergraduates, provided brilliant explanations of some of Faulkner’s more difficult works. In The Language of the American South (1985), based on his Lamar Memorial Lectures at Mercer University, Brooks returned to his earliest scholarly interest in American dialects.

Brooks was widely honored by his colleagues, with numerous visiting professorship appointments and eighteen honorary degrees. He died of cancer of the esophagus at age eighty-seven and is buried in suburban Hamden, Connecticut.

Brooks authored or edited more than thirty books and scores of articles. As early as 1940, John Crowe Ransom hailed him as “very likely, the most expert living ‘reader’ or interpreter of difficult verse,” and the historian of criticism René Wellek labeled him nothing less than “the critic of critics.” James J. Sosnoski perhaps summed up his contributions best: “[Brooks’s] two greatest achievements are that he made difficult modern writers accessible to a generation of scholars for whom it was inconceivable that a great writer could exist in the twentieth century, and he taught the next generation of critics how to read closely.” No less significant were his textbooks, which have continued to illuminate modern literature for generations of students.

Brooks’s papers are at the University of Kentucky, Yale University, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the University of Tennessee. Modern studies of Brooks are Lewis P. Simpson, ed., The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work (1975), and Mark Royden Winchell, Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modem Criticism (1996). Lewis P. Simpson, ed., Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence (1998), details the rich relationship between the two men. See also John Michael Walsh, Cleanth Brooks: An Annotated Bibliography (1990). John Paul Pritchard, Criticism in America (1956); Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (1956); and Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (1963), all have sections on Brooks. James G. Lesniak, ed., Contemporary Authors, vol. 35 (1992), has a revealing interview with Brooks. An obituary is in the New York Times (12 May 1994).

William F. Mugleston