In 1941, John Crowe Ransom lobbed a bomb into literary theory as it had been known. His book published that year, The New Criticism, was the foundation of a new school of thought: "New Critics" ignored all historical and biographical data in their judgment of a text, considering it irrelevant. "Only the words matter" was their standard; context was the enemy. If the author stated his intentions in a work elsewhere than in the text but that intent wasn't clearly discernible in the text, well, then, he had failed.

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