How did John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks help establish New Criticism in American universities?

John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks were instrumental in establishing New Criticism as a dominant academic approach in American universities through their theoretical writings, editorial work, and influential textbooks.12

Ransom provided the movement with its name and a loose organizational framework in his 1941 book, The New Criticism. His tenure at Kenyon College, where he founded and edited the influential literary magazine The Kenyon Review, provided a vital platform for disseminating these critical principles.13

Brooks reinforced the movement’s popularity through his authoritative college textbooks, including Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), both coauthored with Robert Penn Warren. Additionally, Brooks coedited The Southern Review from 1935 to 1942, which advanced New Critical methods and showcased new Southern writers. His seminal work, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), famously articulated the "heresy of paraphrase," a core tenet emphasizing that a poem's meaning is inseparable from its specific linguistic form. Together, these efforts shifted academic focus toward the close reading and structural analysis of individual texts.21