The Well Wrought Urn

The title contains an allusion to the fourth stanza of John Donne's poem, "The Canonization", which is the primary subject of the first chapter of the book.

The Well Wrought Urn is divided into eleven chapters, ten of which attempt close readings of celebrated English poems from verses in Shakespeare's Macbeth to Yeats's "Among School Children."

The unique contribution of The Well Wrought Urn is that it combines the close reading analysis of the previous volumes while answering some of the criticism directed at Brooks's theory.

Brooks vehemently rejected this historical relativism, believing it amounts to "giving up our criteria of good and bad" and thus repudiating "our concept of poetry itself".

[4]: 198  Brooks opts instead to offer "universal judgments" of poems and treat them as self-contained entities, able to be interpreted without recourse to historical or biographical information.

Heilman writes, to declare the literary work self-contained or autonomous was less to deny its connections with the nonliterary human world, past and present, than to assert metaphorically the presence in the poem of suprahistorical uniqueness along with the generic or the hereditary or the culturally influenced.

This is that Brooks and the New Critics did not discount the study of the historical context of the literary work, nor its affective potential for the reader, nor its connection to the life experiences of the author.

The bulk of the book is devoted to close reading of poems by John Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Keats, Lord Tennyson, Yeats, Thomas Gray, and T. S. Eliot.

And I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying some sort of frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in hand.

[2]: 221  In doing so, Brooks brings up another central tenet of his critical theory, one which he will deal with more explicitly in the coming chapters: the notion that no true poem can ever be reduced to its paraphrasable prose content.

[2]: 223 The most famous and best-known application of this doctrine of dramatic appropriateness is Brooks's analysis of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn".

[4]: 165 Part of the intent of The Well Wrought Urn is to dispel the criticism that Brooks in his earlier works had dismissed the eighteenth and nineteenth century English poets, particularly the Romantics.

This was a rejection of the typical method of interpretation for these poets, which is to judge them by the Romantic standards of their day and in the light of their biographies.