SOURCE: Szili, József. “Poetry as Cognition and as Structure-The Views of Ransom, Rate and Brooks.” In Literature and Its Interpretation, S. Simon, pp. 113-62. The Hague, Hungary: Mouton Publishers, 1979.

In the following essay, Szili focuses on the critical theories proposed by Ransom, Crowe, and Tate, particularly their concepts regarding poetry.

Croce considered his own critical tenets as the new criticism, and Joel Elias Spingarn, a historian of literary criticism and student of the Renaissance, gave this title, The New Criticism, to a lecture inspired by Crocean ideas. He demanded a purely aesthetic approach to literary works and rejected every method and theory of literary scholarship which—instead of focusing on the work—focused on the life and personality of the author, the impressions of the critic, dogmatic rules and norms of poetry, or on “history, politics, biography, erudition, metaphysics”.¹ Nevertheless, the name of the school of the...