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Cleanth Brooks Introduction
Cleanth Brooks Introduction
Introduction
Early Years
Brooks was born in Murray, Kentucky, one of six children of a Methodist minister. He attended
McTyeire School, a private classical academy in Tennessee, and received his B.A. from
Vanderbilt in 1928 and his M.A. from Tulane University in 1929. He next studied as a Rhodes
scholar at Exeter College at Oxford, returning to the United States in 1932 to begin his teaching
Academic life
While at Oxford, Brooks became good friends with Robert Penn Warren, another Vanderbilt
graduate and Rhodes scholar; when Warren joined LSU's English department in 1934, the two of
them started to work together on criticism and pedagogy. Disturbed by the inability of their
students to interpret literary works, Brooks and Warren prepared a booklet designed to teach the
Literary Work
Their desire to improve literary study in the classroom led to Brooks and Warren's influential,
Understanding Fiction (1943), Modern Rhetoric (1949), and, with Robert Heilman,
Understanding Drama (1945). From 1935 to 1942, Brooks and Warren co-edited the “Southern
Review”, making it one of the foremost journals of its era. They published not only critical
essays but also creative writing by 'Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and others. In the first
year alone, the authors appearing in the Southern Review included JOHN CROWE RANSOM,
Alien Tate, WalIace Stevens, KENNETH BURKE, R. P. Blackrnur, Randall jarrell, Ford Madox
Ford, and Yvor Winters-leading poets and critics of the time. Brooks's two most Important
critical books, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn: Studies In
the Structure of Poetry (1947), focus on poetry, and he extended and reinforced their arguments
in essays, reviews, and lectures. For example, with J. E. Hardy, he edited and wrote detailed
commentary for Poems of Mr. John Milton (1951), showing that Milton's verse, which T. S.
ELIOT had attacked as numbing and monolithic, could be appreciated as subtle and complex. In
1947 Brooks left LSU for a professorship at Yale University (Warren later followed), where he
taught until retiring in 1975, He researched, wrote, and published many essays and books on
Death