Cleanth Brooks, one of the giants of literary criticism, died last May 10. He was 87 years old. He taught thousands of us how to read a poem or a story. Some he taught over a half-century by way of the classroom, some in his numerous public lectures across this country and abroad, and many of us through his textbooks. I am thinking particularly of Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction (both written with Robert Penn Warren). These were the texts of choice in the 1950’s and 60’s, and as we prepared our lessons and answered the questions posed at the end of each selection, we all became “New Critics.”

Brooks was a native of Murray, Kentucky, and graduated from Vanderbilt and Tulane. It was at Vanderbilt that he first became involved with the writers and critics later known as the New Critics, a group that included Warren, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom. In 1935, at Louisiana State University, he and Warren established the Southern Review, one of the most distinguished literary magazines of its time. He published Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) during his tenure at LSU and the equally important The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) during his first year at Yale. These books, in addition to the textbooks, produced a cultural revolution in literature.

Brooks’ approach to literature was a reaction to the criticism exemplified by the following passage from a popular textbook of the 1930’s: “The song of the nightingale [in Keats’ “Ode”] brings sadness and exhilaration to the poet and makes him long to be lifted up and away from the limitations of life. The seventh stanza is particularly beautiful.” Brooks argued that if the poem is worth teaching at all, it is as a poem. He never argued that the poet’s intention, the reader’s response, or the historical context of the poem were not useful for criticism. He simply believed they did not have the same importance as the poem itself.

As the new lions and lionesses of the criticism of the 1970’s and 80’s roared onto the literary savannah, several responses occurred. One was a willful distortion of what Brooks had written, namely, that only the text was important. Another response was what Warren referred to as “Frenchified” criticism. Structuralists argue that language is an arbitrary system committed to no reference to reality, and without cognitive value. Thus, a sign before a curve saying “Bridge Out” has the same value as a sign in the same place that says on the same occasion, “Speed, 55 miles an hour.” As one American editor of structuralist essays remarks, “there is no a priori reason to believe that the system of signs in Superman is any less coherent than in King Lear. Values are a function of ideologies.” While the structuralists were searching about for the “deep” structure beneath language and social customs, the French deconstructionists went them one better and deconstructed the “deep” structure. But both agreed that literature deals with nothing outside itself. Thus, the sign saying “Bridge Out” is . . . well, you see the point. As Brooks observed during the Brick Lectures at the University of Missouri in Columbia, “The consequences of any such conception of literature seem to me to be devastating to any concept of its humanistic value.”

I might add that on a level of pure survival, people who ignore or misinterpret “road signs” do not endure or prevail. Those who persistently get it wrong do not pass on their genes to offspring free to espouse such skepticism or solipsism in another generation, which might bring up Foucault, but I shall forebear. Several years ago, while my wife and I lived in Baton Rouge, we had occasion to invite Mr. Brooks to dinner, along with Lewis and Mimi Simpson (Lewis being one of the editors of the revived Southern Review). I was bemoaning the general condition of English departments, critical theory, and the decline of America. I recall that Brooks was as disturbed as I was about the pervasiveness of relativism in recent critical theories. Yet his courtliness, his bearing as a gentleman, reminded me and reminds me still that the proper thing was not to despair, but to stand firm. He was categorically different from the “power” critics and literary gangsters of today.

Our next meeting was a melancholy one. His beloved wife “Tinkum” had died, and he had brought her from New Haven to Baton Rouge for burial. While my wife and I said what words we could, he was on the lookout for the arrival of the Anglican rector who would conduct the service. He wanted to be sure the rector used the 1928 prayer book. Seated by Tinkum’s grave near the end of the service. Brooks tapped his foot to a Renaissance song being played by his niece and nephew, which quietly yet emphatically affirmed the rhythms of this world and the next. Many shall miss Cleanth Brooks—his company, his conversation. But for those of us who were his students in one sense or another, he remains a powerful presence.