The real contribution of the New Critics lies not so much in their providing a method for examining a poem as it does in their providing an account of the essential structure possessed by all lyric poems. Once a sense of the basic stuff of the poem is grasped, the method to be followed in analyzing it presents itself quite naturally and unmistakably. "A poem," Mr. Ransom tells us, "is a logical structure having a local texture." He then proceeds to distinguish these two basic elements. He determines the "logical structure" of the poem by formulating a statement of its argument, and he isolates the "local texture" by focusing on "the devices which are, precisely, its [poetry's] means of escaping from prose."

Ransom is not fashioning some sort of arbitrary structure for the poem when he makes his distinction between its logical and nonlogical elements. What he has...