Yale Critics

Yale Critics refers to a group of influential literary scholars affiliated with Yale University in the mid-20th century, notably including Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. They emphasized close reading of texts, focusing on how a literary work’s form, language, and structure reveal its themes and meanings. Their approach promoted understanding literature as an integrated aesthetic experience, rather than just a reflection of historical or social contexts. This movement helped shape modern literary criticism by prioritizing the text itself and its literary devices, encouraging readers to see literature as an art form with internal coherence and significance.