R. P. Blackmur

American literary critic

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R.P. Blackmur was an American literary critic associated with the New Criticism movement. This school of thought, prominent in Anglo-American literary theory after World War I, emphasized the intrinsic value of a literary work and focused on close, analytic reading of the text itself. New Critics, including Blackmur, prioritized understanding a work as an independent unit of meaning, largely disregarding historical or biographical context. Their approach involved detailed examination of poetic language, figurative devices, and the interplay of form and content, believing that any alteration of a poem's language changed its meaning. Blackmur's work, such as The Double Agent (1935), exemplified this method of close reading.12

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American literature
Moral-aesthetic critics
…reading can be found in R.P. Blackmur’s The Double Agent (1935), Allen Tate’s Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936), John Crowe Ransom’s The World’s Body (1938), Yvor Winters’s Maule’s Curse (1938), and Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Though they were later
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…reading can be found in R.P. Blackmur’s The Double Agent (1935), Allen Tate’s Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936), John Crowe Ransom’s The World’s Body (1938), Yvor Winters’s Maule’s Curse (1938), and Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Though they were later
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