<DIV>Marked by a rigorously close textual reading, detached from<BR> biographical or other extratextual material, New Criticism was the<BR> dominant literary theory of the mid-twentieth century. Since that<BR> time, schools of literary criticism have arisen in support of or in opposition to<BR> the approach advocated by the New Critics. Nonetheless, the theory remains<BR> one of the most important sources for groundbreaking criticism and continues<BR> to be a controversial approach to reading literature.<BR> <I>Praising It New </I>is the first anthology of New Criticism to be printed in fifty<BR> years. It includes important essays by such influential poets and critics as<BR> T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters,<BR> Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, and Robert Penn Warren.<BR> Together, these authors ushered in the modernist age of poetry and criticism<BR> and transformed the teaching of literature in the schools. As the American<BR> poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted: &ldquo;I do not believe there has been another<BR> age in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry has<BR> been written.&rdquo;<BR> This anthology now makes much of the best American poetry criticism available<BR> again, and includes short biographies and selected bibliographies of its<BR> chief figures. <I>Praising It New</I> is the perfect introduction for students to the<BR> best American poetry criticism of the twentieth century.</DIV>