[In "A Shaping Joy: Studies in the Winter Craft"] Brooks remains a reader's reader. In a sense he is not a writer at all, for he is a writer without style. Style, he quotes Yeats as saying is "'a still unexpended energy, after all that the argument … needs, a still unbroken pleasure after the immediate end has been accomplished—a most personal and wilful fire."… Style by Yeats's definition we have in Eliot, in Tate, in Ransom—other formalist critics who are certainly far from impressionistic. But no critic, not even Eliot, is less personal or wilful than Brooks. His relation to his subjects, which are uncompromisingly literary, is that of a fine lens. When his subject is an individual work, he performs a kind of quintessential act of reading—not line by line or paragraph by paragraph, but a concentrated reading—for which we almost always have...