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Why did some critics connect New Criticism with modernist literature?

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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.

Critics connected New Criticism with modernist literature because the former served as a methodological counterpart to the latter, providing the tools necessary to analyze the complex, experimental nature of modernist works.1

The connection was established through several key factors:

Shared Characteristics: New Criticism focused on the formal qualities of a text—such as irony, paradox, and allusive difficulty—which were defining features of modernist writing.1
Close Reading: New Critics developed techniques of close analytic reading that were particularly well-suited to the dense, layered language often found in modernist poetry and prose.213
Promotion of Modernism: Many New Critics were themselves poets or writers who actively promoted and analyzed difficult modernist texts, helping to establish them within the literary canon.3
Conservative Perspectives: Both movements were often associated with a rejection of Romanticism and, in some cases, a shared skepticism toward revolutionary social hopes or democratic ideals, favoring instead a focus on aesthetic structure and tradition.14

By shifting the focus from historical or biographical context to the text itself, New Criticism provided a systematic framework for interpreting the challenging, non-traditional forms that characterized the modernist era.213