This chapter surveys the rise of New Criticism in American letters during the interwar years through the 1950s. It pays attention to the influence of two overlapping associations: the Fugitive Poets and the Nashville Agrarians. The Fugitives, a group of Vanderbilt English professors and Nashville notables, had formed in the years leading up to World War I to discuss current trends in literature and philosophy. The Agrarians, southern commentators trained in a variety of disciplines, collaborated on a symposium in the 1930s that decried the deleterious effects of industrial capitalism and promoted values that purportedly undergirded an agrarian economy. Together the two groups came to shape the tenets of New Criticism. New Critics mourned the turn away from formalist principles that had established the criteria by which one should evaluate literature. Agrarians bemoaned the demise of a set of values that ostensibly emerged from a labor system that championed family farming, property ownership, and small government. Both New Critics and Agrarians, then, engaged in reclamation projects as they sought to salvage what they believed to be all that was good and beautiful in the world.

The critical essay emerged in the eighteenth century in writing that described natural and artistic objects, and in the process inspired readers to think about the nature of their experience. This chapter traces the critical essay’s evolution from Joseph Addison’s Pleasures of the Imagination through the work of nineteenth-century essayists like Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt, culminating in the academic literary criticism of New Critics such as I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks and more recent practitioners such as D. A. Miller and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.