Cleanth Brooks

Introduction

Early Years

Brooks was born in Murray, Kentucky, one of six children of a Methodist minister. He attended

McTyeire School, a private classical academy in Tennessee, and received his B.A. from

Vanderbilt in 1928 and his M.A. from Tulane University in 1929. He next studied as a Rhodes

scholar at Exeter College at Oxford, returning to the United States in 1932 to begin his teaching

career at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Academic life

While at Oxford, Brooks became good friends with Robert Penn Warren, another Vanderbilt

graduate and Rhodes scholar; when Warren joined LSU's English department in 1934, the two of

them started to work together on criticism and pedagogy. Disturbed by the inability of their

students to interpret literary works, Brooks and Warren prepared a booklet designed to teach the

skills of close reading by providing examples.

Literary Work

Their desire to improve literary study in the classroom led to Brooks and Warren's influential,

best-selling textbooks: An Approach to Literature (1936), Understanding Poetry (1938),

Understanding Fiction (1943), Modern Rhetoric (1949), and, with Robert Heilman,

Understanding Drama (1945). From 1935 to 1942, Brooks and Warren co-edited the “Southern

Review”, making it one of the foremost journals of its era. They published not only critical

essays but also creative writing by 'Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and others. In the first
year alone, the authors appearing in the Southern Review included JOHN CROWE RANSOM,

Alien Tate, WalIace Stevens, KENNETH BURKE, R. P. Blackrnur, Randall jarrell, Ford Madox

Ford, and Yvor Winters-leading poets and critics of the time. Brooks's two most Important

critical books, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn: Studies In

the Structure of Poetry (1947), focus on poetry, and he extended and reinforced their arguments

in essays, reviews, and lectures. For example, with J. E. Hardy, he edited and wrote detailed

commentary for Poems of Mr. John Milton (1951), showing that Milton's verse, which T. S.

ELIOT had attacked as numbing and monolithic, could be appreciated as subtle and complex. In

1947 Brooks left LSU for a professorship at Yale University (Warren later followed), where he

taught until retiring in 1975, He researched, wrote, and published many essays and books on

modern fiction and literary criticism, as well as editing textbooks.

Death

He died on May 10, 1994.