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How did Romantic ideas such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s organic form influence New Criticism?

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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.

Although New Criticism is often associated with an anti-Romantic stance, the movement was significantly influenced by Romantic theory, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept of organic form.1

Coleridge defined organic form as a structure that grows naturally from a work’s subject and materials, rather than one imposed by artificial rules. New Critics adapted this idea to support their focus on the intrinsic value of a text as an independent unit of meaning. By treating a poem as a self-contained aesthetic structure, New Critics sought to demonstrate its "organic" coherence through rigorous close reading.2314

This approach allowed them to argue that poetic form and content are inseparable; because the "meaning" of a poem is found in the experience of its specific words and tensions, any attempt to paraphrase the language alters the content itself—a principle famously termed "the heresy of paraphrase" by Cleanth Brooks. Thus, while New Criticism rejected many Romantic ideals, it relied on the Coleridgean notion of organic unity to justify its formalist methodology.314