"SlowTime," "a Brooklet, Scarce Espied": Close reading, Cleanth Brooks, John Keats

This chapter addresses the mid-twentieth-century intervention of close reading in literary studies, through Cleanth Brooks's publications-from the 1930s classroom-projected Understanding Poetry (coedited with Robert Penn Warren, with four editions by the 1960s), to the public-pedagogy of the essays collected in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), to Brooks's later, and late post-New-Critical reflections. This track is signposted by his evolving regard of Keats's Odes, from disparagement to heroizing, and always with care for "the fate of the humanities." Addressing attacks on close reading and Brooks in particular, this chapter concludes with careful attention to Keats's first draft of Ode to Psyche (1819) to show a historically conscious, historically sharpened, smartly provisional literary aesthetic that amounts to a quiet intervention, of consequence to humanities today.