Keats and the New Critics

(From the Introduction)

The term "New Criticism" has been applied to the work of critics before our time, but in its current use it brings to mind a body of work that originated with T. S. Elliot and I. A. Richards. John Crowe Ransom first employed the term in the present sense; it now applies to such critics as Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Kenneth Burke, R. P. Blackmur, and Ransom himself in America, and to William Empson, L. C. Knights, G. Wilson Knight, and F. R. Leavis in England.

Two elements distinguish the New Criticism from what preceded it. The New Critics in general have a high esteem for Metaphysical poetry, and, more than their predecessors, they emphasize close analysis of individual works of literature. They place Donne and other Metaphysicals above the poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they are chary of making generalizations concerning the poets.

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This study will show Keats's place in the scales of poetic values set up by five New Critics and will examine the interpretations that they have given some of Keats's poems.