The title of ["The Well Wrought Urn"] is taken from Donne's "Canonisation," where "a well wrought urne" is said to become as well "the greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes." It is no accident either that Mr. Brooks should take his title from Donne, that the first essay in reading should be on this poem by Donne, or that his last should be on a poem by Yeats. Mr. Brooks' type of criticism is a result of the special kind of reading which went with the establishment of the present high reputation of Donne's poetry and habits of mind; something difficult, closely patterned, arbitrary but consistent, intensely fused, passionately learned, and full of private or concealed symbolism: to which the clues are in the visible ironies, paradoxes, telescoped images, and rapid contrasts in attitude and tone….

[Brooks] applies the methods of the "new criticism" to ten standard poems. The...