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8 unusual facts about Cleanth Brooks


Cleanth Brooks

From 1963 to 1972, he was awarded honorary doctorates of literature from Upsala College, the University of Kentucky, the University of Exeter, Washington and Lee University, Saint Louis University, Tulane University, and Centenary College NJ (Singh 1991).

He argues "A poem by Donne or Marvell does not depend for its success on outside knowledge that we bring to it; it is richly ambiguous yet harmoniously orchestrated, coherent in its own special aesthetic terms" (Leitch 2001).

Denmark, Tennessee

Cleanth Brooks, literary critic and professor, was born in Denmark, although some accounts claim he was born in Murray, Kentucky

Guild of Scholars of The Episcopal Church

The Guild was founded in 1945 and has included such eminent members as Cleanth Brooks, Brooks Otis, Henry Babcock Veatch, Frederick Pottle, W. H. Auden, Dell Hymes, Hyatt Waggoner and Richard W. Bailey.

I. A. Richards

Other critics primarily influenced by his writings also included Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate.

Sailing to Byzantium

Cleanth Brooks asks whether, in this poem, Yeats chooses idealism or materialism and answers his own question, "Yeats chooses both and neither. One cannot know the world of being save through the world of becoming (though one must remember that the world of becoming is a meaningless flux aside from the world of being which it implies)".

Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture

Among the more than 300 Fellows of the Society have been Mircea Eliade, Denise Levertov, Sallie McFague, Cleanth Brooks, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and John Updike.

The Canonization

New Critic Cleanth Brooks used the poem, along with Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man" and William Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802", to illustrate his argument for paradox as central to poetry.


Eugene Paul Nassar

Eugene Paul Nassar (born 20 June 1935), Professor of English Emeritus of Utica College, Utica, New York, is the author of several books of literary criticism in the close analysis tradition of his teachers, John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, Christopher Ricks at Oxford University, Arthur Mizener of Cornell University, and his critical model and mentor, Cleanth Brooks.


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