A fresh look ...

... at the New Critics: When Lit-Crit Mattered. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The New Critics were still in the ascendancy when I was in college, but their advocates tended sometimes toward the overbearing. Still, I learned a lot from it (though what is "The Intentional Fallacy" other than a turgid explication of D.H. Lawrence's admonition to trust the story, not the storyteller?). But a poem is not a lab specimen; it is a portal to life.