Research On The Cleanth Brooks’ Poetic Theory

In the twentieth century, Nietzsche declares:"God is dead, humankind is free", as reflected this times of spirit, art of poetry is in a "crisis of belief", and "The New Criticism" attempts to break through from this ruins of spirit and rebuild their value system. Cleanth Brooks who is one of the most important scholars of the New Criticism is building the miracle of belief in poetry criticism field.The core concepts of Brooks’s Poetic Theory can be roughly divided into "the theory of Poetic Structure", criticism standard of "paradox" and "irony", criticism practice of "close reading", etc. This paper includes three chapters, the author analyses the main categories with the structural ized way, to circumvent the problem that I may have the relevant information lacked and limited. Therefore, this article mainly adopts intrinsic study means of literature, analyses the text practice of Brooks’s Poetic Theory, from which to disentangle some problems that relate to poetry criticism. At the same time, combining the western poetry criticism traditional of the twentieth century, as well as benefiting from the contemporary poetry criticism theory, I strive to conduct a objective, systematic integration and analysis to the object of study from a historical standpoint, and to a certain extent, inductive enlightenment significance of Brooks’s "structured" poetic theory to the immediately literary criticism value reconstruction.The general introduction part of the thesis first discusses the spirit of the age and poems’ epoch style of the20th century, but it is not as simple discussion, but as an turning point,then this paper gets on to the value judgment standard of poetry criticism theory. Thereby, this paper introduces the background and content of Brooks’s Poetic Theory and presents relevant comments, as well as makes a summary and conclusion from a new perspective.The second chapter this thesis aims to mining multiple connotations of "structure theory" that as the key principle of Brooks’s Poetic Theory, and essential abstraction was sum up. And the paper traces to the source of two important category-"paradox" and "irony", which are as important theory terms, still popular so far. The two sides of his theory are internally consistent with each other, it will show up only in clearing up this seeming contradiction.The third chapter this thesis analyzes examples of Brooks’s poetry criticism in his most important Theoretical work on poetry criticism<the well wrought urn>, the abundant aesthetical quality of the poetic theory are demonstrated. Moreover, the thesis analyzes the origin, reasons and means of "close reading", and tries to applying this method to the different styles and forms of poems. This aims to reveal that there are its universality, but also its inherent limitations to current academic research in Brooks’s Poetic Theory.In the section of conclusion, combining the cultural symptoms with modern significance "the invalidation of the reconstruction of the value", this thesis puts the Brooks’s Poetic Theory in the context of times, attempting to find out the problems that cultural criticism becomes the dominant discourse now, and corrects the "nothingness" deviations of the literariness ignored. Finally, the paper stresses the importance of the reevaluation of Brooks’s poetic theory, he always focus on textural analysis to the poetry an ancient art from different dimension, the worth and the doctrine of art redemption of his poetic theory are both discussed in this end.