21 Facts About Cleanth Brooks

Cleanth Brooks was an American literary critic and professor.

Cleanth Brooks is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education.

Cleanth Brooks was the preeminent critic of Southern literature, writing classic texts on William Faulkner, and co-founder of the influential journal The Southern Review with Robert Penn Warren.

Cleanth Brooks was one of three children: Cleanth and William, natural born sons, and Murray Brooks, actually born Hewitt Witherspoon, whom Bessie Lee Witherspoon kidnapped from her brother Forrest Bedford Witherspoon as a young baby after the natural mother had died.

Cleanth Brooks later was able to change his name to Murray Brooks and continued to raise him as her own, causing quite a rift in her own family and alienating herself from Cleanth and William.

Cleanth Brooks mentioned on more than one occasion that she so doted on Murray that she no longer had a relationship with Cleanth Brooks and William.

Cleanth Brooks then returned to the United States and from 1932 to 1947 was a professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

From 1941 to 1975, Cleanth Brooks held many academic positions and received a number of distinguished fellowships and honorary doctorates.

Cleanth Brooks delivered the lecture both in Washington and at Tulane University in New Orleans, and it was included as "Literature in a Technological Age" in a collection of his essays.

From I A Richards' The Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism, Brooks formulated guidelines for interpreting poetry.

Cleanth Brooks formulated these guidelines in reaction to ornamentalist theories of poetry, to the common practice of critics going outside the poem, and his and Warren's frustration with trying to teach college students to analyze poetry and literature.

Cleanth Brooks took this notion of paraphrase and developed it further in his classic The Well Wrought Urn.

Cleanth Brooks describes summative, reductionist reading of poetry with a phrase still popular today: "The Heresy of Paraphrase".

Cleanth Brooks argues "through irony, paradox, ambiguity and other rhetorical and poetic devices of his or her art, the poet works constantly to resist any reduction of the poem to a paraphrasable core, favoring the presentation of conflicting facets of theme and patterns of resolved stresses".

Cleanth Brooks says that "a detailed description of my emotional state on reading certain works has little to do with indicating to an interested reader what the work is and how the parts of it are related".

Cleanth Brooks's reputation suffered in the 1970s and 1980s when criticism of New Criticism increased.

Cleanth Brooks rebuffed the accusations that New Criticism has an "antihistorical thrust" and a "neglect of context".

Cleanth Brooks insisted he was not excluding context because a poem possesses organic unity, and it is possible to derive a historical and biographical context from the language the poet uses.

Cleanth Brooks argues "A poem by Donne or Marvell does not depend for its success on outside knowledge that we bring to it; it is richly ambiguous yet harmoniously orchestrated, coherent in its own special aesthetic terms".

In "The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks," Crane writes that under Brooks's view of a poem's unity being achieved through the irony and paradox of the opposing forces it contains, the world's most perfect example of such an ironic poem would be Albert Einstein's equation E=mc, which equates matter and energy at a constant rate.

Further, Winchell praises Cleanth Brooks for "help[ing] invent the modern literary quarterly" through the success of The Southern Review.