Cleanth Brooks

Cleanth Brooks was born on 16 October 1906 in Murray, Kentucky, the son of a Methodist minister. After a classical education at the McTyeire School he studied at Vanderbilt University, where he met Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom, then took a master's degree at Tulane University and studied at Exeter College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. From 1932 to 1947 he taught English at Louisiana State University, where he and Warren founded The Southern Review in 1935. Troubled by students' difficulty in reading poems, the two wrote textbooks that taught close reading, above all Understanding Poetry (1938). Brooks's own books, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn (1947), made him a leading voice of the New Criticism. He taught at Yale University from 1947 to 1975, becoming Gray Professor of Rhetoric, and wrote major studies of William Faulkner. He died in 1994.

Faith: Faith not well documented; his criticism held that literature is not a surrogate for religion, and he wrote on religious themes in modern writers in The Hidden God. Source: Wikipedia