The standard account of R. P. Blackmur's career that few readers have questioned has him beginning as a New Critic producing his best essays, including those on Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, and other poets, in the 1920s and 1930s. It is this period of Blackmur's career, when he was most purely a "close reader" of texts, that the majority of his readers admire and on which they base their classification of him as a New Critic. Laurence B. Holland states that Blackmur is "the most brilliant and durable of the New Critics"; A. Walton Litz concludes that he "was in many ways the most satisfactory literary critic of his generation"; and Russell Fraser, most boldly of all, asserts that The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation (1935) and The Expense of Greatness (1940) constitute "the best literary criticism produced in our time."

To characterize Blackmur as...