Well Wrought Way With Poems : Cleanth Brooks’ criticism offered remarkable insight over two generations

In the history of American best sellers, only one book of pure literary criticism--literary criticism unconnected to the Bible or to an alleged collapse of American values--has ever made it to the list. The year was 1947, and the book was “The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry” by Cleanth Brooks, who died at Yale earlier this month at the age of 87.

Brooks was a practitioner of “New Criticism,” a criticism that challenged the historicism dominant in his day (and dominant again in our own) by asserting that the greatest works of literature transcend history and that close attention to what writers actually write can reveal why they do.

Brooks agreed with T. S. Eliot that poetry proceeds by “perpetual slight alteration of language,” and such was his skill at tracking alterations that the reader of a poem he analyzed could all but hear the poet’s quill scratching on the page. Brooks erased the difference between practical and academic criticism, between advice given to a writer during the writing and analysis afterward. He was a poet himself as well as a critic and was co-founder, with poet Robert Penn Warren, of a literary magazine, the Southern Review.

The title of Brooks’ best seller came from “The Canonization,” by the 17th-Century poet John Donne, a poem celebrating the secular sanctity of lovers who, like saints, count the whole world as nothing compared to their love. Wars rage, lawsuits drag on, but lovers know what really matters. When life is done, if the story of their love should prove no epic fit to fill the walls of a king’s “half-acre tomb,” it may yet suffice for a simple urn to hold their ashes. And then, if the urn be “well wrought,” it may teach love--and indifference to the world--to those who come after.

“The Well Wrought Urn” was Brooks’ own well wrought urn. Poetry and he were lovers. For two generations and more they have come to life together on his pages, enabling thousands to find their way to a lifelong love of their own.

May he rest in peace and beauty. And may his book live long in print.