[What Mr. Ransom pleads for in "The New Criticism" is] a rather commonsensible way of looking at poetry. He asks us to regard it not as an instrument for setting up useful psychological mechanisms, nor as a set of documents to be studied by the literary historian, nor yet as the expression of more or less valuable ethical doctrines, but rather to recognize poetry as offering a knowledge of the world in which we live, as distinct from the world of scientific discourse, and to judge a poem on the basis of its "structural properties."

Mr. Ransom does not explicitly define the "new" criticism, the novelty of which lies for him in its extraordinary acuity, its "depth and precision." He does, however, point out what he considers to be its two chief errors, that of making literary judgments in psychological rather than in cognitive terms, and that of...