Their book, and its companion volume, Understanding Fiction (1943), revolutionized the teaching of literature in the universities and spawned a host of imitators who dominated English departments well into the 1960s.
"[3] According to Warren's obituary in The New York Times: "Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, which he wrote with Mr. Brooks, taught an entire generation how to read a work of literature and helped make the New Criticism dominant in the decade surrounding World War II.
It was an approach to criticism that regarded the work at hand as autonomous, as an artifact whose structure and substance could be analyzed without respect to social, biographical and political details.
"[4] Writing in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Harold B. Sween said: "Among the rank and file of university faculty in the English-speaking world, few works of this century have gained the influence of two of his [Brooks'] textbooks written in collaboration with Warren, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943).
Brooks and Warren gained universal recognition for changing the focus of reading poetry (and fiction).
Some propositions — including many involving values, emotions, feelings, attitudes and judgments — can't be conveyed through communicating practical information or with scientific precision.
In ordinary life, people must deal with forms of communication that use some of the methods of poetry, including editorials, sermons, political speeches, advertisements and magazine articles.
This mistake can lead to thinking of poems as collections of pretty language pleasing for its associations with pleasant things.
The things represented don't themselves shape the poetic effect, which depends on the "kind of use the poet makes of them."
The introduction also states (but doesn't develop the thought )that poems are inherently dramatic, with an implied speaker who reacts to a situation, scene or idea.
In a "Foreword" introducing discussions of individual poems, the authors say that poetry takes the general human interest that people have in other people (expressed at other times in news articles about such things as outlaws, lovers killing lovers or other tragedies, to cite some examples) and put into a form "that preserves it" even after initial curiosity wanes.
Using the ballad "Johnie Armstrong" as an example, the authors show how a narrative poem, far more than a novel or even a short story, will use bare "facts" in a dramatic way that gives them an emotional and intellectual meaning, whether or not the reader or listener has analyzed those or other elements.
By presenting concrete, explicit statements (as in "The Wife of Usher's Well"), the poet can convey an emotional impact as well as information, which more abstract language can't do.
The reader can also be drawn into a more immediate appreciation of a poem by drawing out ideas from suggestions rather than the poet making explicit statements.
Conveying fresh, vivid impressions of things is fundamental to good poetry, the authors assert.
The poems are meant to be modern (although, in the third edition at least, the authors recognize that it's a stretch to include Gerard Manley Hopkins).