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How did I.A. Richards, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, and Cleanth Brooks bring New Criticism into university literature courses?

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Antique book open to the frontispiece of The Iliad of Homer, showing the title and an engraved portrait of a bearded man, with old books in the background. — literature *The Iliad*, an epic of the Trojan War attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, is considered a foundational work of Western literature.

In the 1940s, I.A. Richards, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, and Cleanth Brooks were instrumental in shifting academic literary studies from impressionistic methods toward a formalist approach known as New Criticism. By adapting their critical theories to reform the university curriculum, they moved the focus of study away from historical or biographical context and toward the intrinsic value of the text itself.12

Their influence was established through several key contributions:

I.A. Richards: Through his work at the University of Cambridge, Richards developed "practical criticism," an experimental pedagogy that used close reading to analyze poems without relying on external data. His books, such as Practical Criticism (1929), provided the methodological foundation for this approach.342
William Empson: A student of Richards, Empson furthered the analytical focus on language in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), demonstrating how linguistic complexity and uncertainty enrich poetic meaning.54
John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks: These American critics helped formalize and popularize the movement. Ransom’s 1941 book, The New Criticism, provided the school with its name, while Brooks famously articulated the "heresy of paraphrase," emphasizing that a poem's meaning is inseparable from its specific form and language.26