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[3] A reader analyzing a poem is akin to a mechanic taking apart a machine in order to figure out how it works. There are many different reasons to analyze poetry. A teacher might analyze a poem in order to gain a more conscious understanding of how the poem achieves its effects, in order to communicate this to their students.
The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry is a 1947 collection of essays by Cleanth Brooks. It is considered a seminal text [1] in the New Critical school of literary criticism. The title contains an allusion to the fourth stanza of John Donne's poem, "The Canonization", which is the primary subject of the first chapter of the book.
Understanding Poetry, according to an article at the Modern American Poetry Web site, "codified many of the so-called New Critical ideas into a coherent approach to literary study. Their book, and its companion volume, Understanding Fiction (1943), revolutionized the teaching of literature in the universities and spawned a host of imitators who ...
In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and tropes. The formalistic approach reduces the importance of a text's historical, biographical, and cultural context.
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature.Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods.
Archetypal literary criticism is a type of analytical theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths and archetypes (from the Greek archē, "beginning", and typos, "imprint") in the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary works.
The hey-day of the New Criticism in American high schools and colleges was the Cold War decades between 1950 and the mid-seventies. Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction both became staples during this era. Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style required careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage ...
Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779–81) was possibly the first thorough-going exercise in biographical criticism. [1]Biographical criticism is a form of literary criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the relationship between the author's life and their literary works. [2]