Unfortunately, Cleanth Brooks was unable to recall how Stanley Fish developed critical acumen during his graduate student days, when he for a time served as Brooks's assistant. Brooks remembered Fish as "an excellent reader, highly intelligent, [who] worked carefully and thoroughly. I have only commendation for what he did for me. But the little human interest things about him, quirks, special happenings, particular sayings—of these I have no record whatsoever" (letter to Beck, May 1990). Fish's fondest recollection of "Mr. Brooks" is of seeing him walk down the street with William Wimsatt "whom as you probably know was seven feet tall. Mr. Brooks was a low key and gentle instructor who exerted authority through his person and academic stature" (letter to Beck, May 1990). No doubt Fish was quietly formulating his own attitudes toward—or perhaps more accurately, against—what Brooks had theorized, since, like most post-structuralists, he defines his critical stance in large part as a reaction against the New Critics.

No subsequent interaction between Brooks and Fish appears to have been documented, except, in 1979, when they met at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. This encounter occurred, significantly, just before the 1980 publication of Is There a Text in This Class?. The occasion was a symposium entitled "Three Critics/Three Poems," featuring Brooks, speaking on Thomas Hardy's "Channel Firing"; Hugh Kenner, on Charles Tomlinson's "The Way of a World"; and Stanley Fish, on two short poems, Ben Jonson's "To the Reader" and (according to Richard Kelly's report) "a found poem comprised of a random list of names of linguists" (UT Newsletter n.p.). This, obviously, was the classroom experience which Fish recounts in Is There a Text in This Class?, the seminal essay and core of Text. Brooks's and Kenner's presentations were extremely competent and by then orthodox examples of New Critical analysis. Fish's performance, which Kelly describes as follows, was something quite other:

The first two speaker-magicians dazzled the audience by pulling unexpected rabbits out of old hats. The third magician, Stanley Fish, also extracted rabbits from his hat but with this difference: his hat was posted with a notice—"This hat contains rabbits; it is a trick hat with a concealed compartment; anyone can do this trick if he has the right hat." (Kelly n.p.)

According to Kelly, the University's English department, where Brooks was then visiting professor, was afterward buzzing with talk of "Brooks's and Kenner's incisive readings" and "Fish's challenge that all interpretations are accidents of history and personal subjectivity: the critic conditioned by his time and his background, creates his own structure, his own meaning." In recent correspondence, Fish did not profess to recall the incident, while Brooks remembered Fish's performance on that evening as "curious, even absurd." Brooks left this, his last recollected collaboration with his former student, astonished with Fish's apparent notion that "a charismatic teacher could make a class under his dominion believe anything that he told them about a text that he put up for them to discuss" (letter to Beck, April 1990). Clearly, the incident solidified Brooks's suspicion that his former pupil was and is a critical relativist, a philosophical position that Brooks had, throughout his career, consistently opposed.

III. Brooks and Fish: A Comparison

Because Cleanth Brooks and Stanley Fish, each having become exemplar for an important school of criticism, did interact as teacher and pupil for a time, it is useful to locate the apex of their division into apparently antipodal approaches to literature. As to their development, one "missing link" is surely to be found in I.A. Richards's "practical criticism." That both Brooks and Fish admit to having derived some primary elements of their theories from Richards's affective theory makes of their divergences a continuum.

René Wellek describes the New Critics as a group which rejects "the kind of metaphorical, evocative criticism practiced by the impressionists" and also as a group who "were united in their opposition to the prevailing methods, doctrines, and views of academic English literary scholarship" (146). C.E. Pulos, in The New Critics and the Language of Poetry, states that "I.A. Richards is commonly regarded as the founder of the new criticism," a claim Pulos admits "though not strictly true … is comprehensible" (49). Richards's book The Principles of Literary Criticism outlines his method of critical theory. Richards envisioned a system of criticism built on the twin pillars of "account of value" and an "account of communication" (25). Finally, Richards believed that criticism has to address two questions: "what gives the experience of reading a certain poem its value?" and "how is this experience better than another?" (5). Richards's contribution to the New Criticism was two-fold: his departure from interpreting literature through history—he believed that "the permanence of some art has often been an excuse for fantastic hypothesis"—and his emphasis on the organic nature of the poem. Richards believed that "every poem … is a strictly limited piece of experience, a piece which breaks up more or less easily if alien elements intrude" (78).

Despite his espousal of what were to be New Critical principles, Richards can be seen more properly as the founder of reader-response theory. Indeed, a 1980 compilation of post-structuralist writings states that "reader-response criticism could be said to have started with I.A. Richards's discussion of emotional response in the 1920s" (Tompkins x). Richards's critical theory places primary emphasis on the reader's experience, that "the reader must be required to wear no blinkers, to overlook nothing which is relevant, to shut off no part of himself from participation" (80). Richards views the genesis of experience as being communication: "an experience has to be formed … before it is communicated, but it takes the form it does largely because it may have to be communicated" (25). Richards later posits that the experiences one has in reading are "exactly the same kinds as those that come to us in other ways" (78). In "Literature in the Reader," the second chapter of Text, Stanley Fish admits that Richards's "principle article of faith," his "talk of readers and responses … sounds very much like mine" (52). In the final analysis, however, Richards supports New Critical positions by stating that "within racial boundaries, and perhaps within the limits of certain very general types, many impulses are common to all men" (190). Richards believes that common experiences are important to understanding poetry because they lead to similar readings of a poem. This difference between him and most of the post-structuralists, including Fish, may have influenced Brooks's belief in the integrity of the literary text. Through his dual emphases—on the text and on the reader—Richards was important to the development, first, of Cleanth Brooks's unitary theory of interpretation and, second, of Stanley Fish's reader-response hermeneutics.

We are left, then, with separate critical performances from Brooks and Fish as avenues to some understanding of the complementarity of their positions and practices. Both have described and demonstrated their critical strategies in The Well Wrought Urn and Is There a Text in This Class?, with such parallel components as complementary prefaces in Brooks's "The Problem of Belief and the Problem of Cognition" and Fish's "Demonstration and Persuasion." Both situate themselves in relationship, often defensive in tone, to precursor critics; and both make the reader, whether Brooks's scholarly one or Fish's common reader, a powerful medium between the literary text and the world.

Brooks's preface to The Well Wrought Urn presents as the plan of the book to examine, in terms of a common approach, a number of celebrated English poems, taken in chronological order from the Elizabethan period to the present, to which he adds the following defensive caveat: "Whether or not the approach is really a common approach, and whether or not the examination reveals that the poems possess some common structural properties, are matters for the reader to determine" (ix, italics added). These poems are to be "the concrete examples on which generalizations are to be based."

Technical explanations are relegated to the appendix. Brooks's method opposes two extremes, the reading of the poem "in terms of its historical context" and the "relativistic" "temper of our times" (x). He intends to ask whether or not a poem can be read sub specie aeternitatis and whether or not a critic "can make normative judgments" (xi). As with almost all of Brooks's criticism, his tone is defensive in reaction to earlier critics; indeed the New Criticism, like its successor schools of critical theory and praxis, came into being to counter the prevailing notions of how to read literary texts. For Brooks, those strong precursors are historical-biographical critics who attribute the poem to events in the life of the poet.

Brooks then presents essays on Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Gray, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats, followed by three theoretical treatises: "The Heresy of Paraphrase" and his two appendixes, "Criticism, History, and Critical Relativism" and "The Problem of Belief." In the first appendix, Brooks chiefly reacts to the "old historicists" who would assert that since the critic is "plainly the product of his own day and time," he or she cannot judge the poems in universal terms. Brooks interestingly admits that "the foregoing discussions of poetry may, indeed, be hopelessly subjective" but that "for better or worse, the judgments are rendered … as if they were universal judgments" (217); Indeed, the notion of universal norms and criteria is at the center of Brooks's theory then and now. I. A. Richards is left out of this chapter because Brooks's objective is not consciously to attack affective criticism. It is principally in the chapter on "Wordsworth and the Paradox of the Imagination" that Brooks really addresses Richards, but always in reference to specific readings of particular poems rather than to debate on any theoretical level (140-49). Suffice to say that by Brooks's own admission, Richards played, along with Ransom, an important role in the formulation of his (Brooks's) critical position and, in individual acts of reading, was always to be taken into consideration in regard to a unitary interpretation of any text.

Fish's debt to his important precursors is set forth in his critical Bildungsroman, Is There A Text in This Class?. Fish very methodically outlines the evolution of his critical philosophy, beginning with the introductory chapter, "How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Interpretation" (the allusion to Dr. Strangelove a clue to the playfully satiric tone of the volume). Herein Fish relates how he first jousted with the theories of Wimsatt and Beardsley (to which Brooks also adhered), stating that "in order to dislodge the affective fallacy, for example, one would have to show first that the text was not the self-sufficient repository of meaning and, second, that something else was, at the very least, contributory" (2). For Fish, that "something else" is the reader. He recounts how he "substituted the structure of the reader's experience for the formal structures of the text on the grounds that while the latter were the more visible, they acquired significance only in the context of the former" (2). A crisis that arose when he realized that he was arguing for a literary theory which was an amalgam of New Criticism and post-structuralism was resolved in the end by stating:

Whereas I had once agreed with my predecessors on the need to control interpretation lest it overwhelm and obscure texts, facts, authors, and intentions, I now believe that interpretation is the source of texts, facts, authors, and intentions. (16)

Because Text is admittedly subjective and autobiographical, it is not surprising that Fish somewhat defensively recollects his departure from the New Criticism. If "How I Stopped Worrying" is a Bildungsroman, the final two chapters, "What Makes an Interpretation Possible" and "Demonstration versus Persuasion…." are Fish's apologia for his anti-New Critical, anti-formalist, and anti-post-structuralist beliefs. He states that "the first thing one must do is not assume that he is preaching to the converted. That means that whatever the point of view you wish to establish, you will have to establish it in the face of anticipated objections" (368).

Ultimately Fish resembles Cleanth Brooks in his desire not to be labeled as a particular type of critic; but whereas Brooks was resisting only one label (that of being typed a New Critic), Fish tries to resist being thrice-branded, as New Critic, formalist, and post-structuralist. The first threat is repelled by his confession of faith in everything antithetical to New Criticism. Fish believes he successfully avoids the formalist label "by displacing attention from the text, in its spatial configurations, to the reader and his temporal experience" (4). Finally, in "Normal Circumstances and Other Special Cases," he attempts to dissociate himself "from a certain characterization (actually a caricature) of the post-structuralist or Derridian position," which holds that "the denial of objective texts and determinate meanings leads to a universe of absolute free play in which everything is indeterminate and undecidable" (268). By positioning himself in opposition to most major schools of critical theory, Fish demonstrates, though quite genially, that his own theories depend on distancing strategies, born in anxieties of influence, though in full awareness of their antithetical conception. In "How I Stopped Worrying …", Fish admits that in the development of his reader-response hermeneutic, insofar as he and the New Critics agreed on the "integrity of the text," he was "more dependent on new critical principles than I was ready to admit" (7). Although Fish does not mention Brooks by name, he does position himself in opposition to his former teacher elsewhere in Text, in his reading of Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" (about which more later) and in "What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable." In the latter essay, Fish differentiates between "a classroom whose authority figures include David Bleich and Norman Holland, [where] a student might very well relate a text to her memories of a favorite aunt" and "classrooms, dominated by the spirit of Brooks and Warren [where] any such activity would immediately be dismissed as nonliterary, as something that isn't done"; in other words, Fish ends by agreeing with most of his contemporary theoreticians, that Brooks stands for the "monolithic or stable," forever opposed to any situation wherein the "unwritten rules of the literary game" are multifarious and (playfully) fluid (343).

If, however, there is any convergence in the ways that Brooks and Fish pursue the task of critical praxis, it must be demonstrated in comparable critical performances. To that purpose, one may usefully place Is There a Text in this Class? alongside The Well Wrought Urn, both of which combine in a collection of loosely related, separate essays a demonstration and collaboration of their authors' approaches. The two volumes are similarly structured, with both authors beginning most essays by aggressively confronting previous commentators on the texts under consideration. Moreover, Brooks and Fish have, to a considerable degree, centered their commentary on seventeenth-century English poetry, with Milton coming in for significant attention from both critics. Their essays on Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" form, in fact, an interesting bond between the two volumes of criticism. The fact that these are paired meditation poems makes them a suitable ground for encountering the anxiety that may exist between Fish and Brooks. "Il Penseroso," in that it demonstrates the thoughtful, or critical mind at work, might be regarded as a trope on the critical act; therefore, when Fish opens "What it's Like to Read …" (which he calls "the purest example" of reader-response criticism [116]) with "I have only one point to make and everything else follows from it: L'Allegro is easier to read than Il Penseroso" (112), he indirectly reflects that challenging dis-ease. Moreover, Fish's choice of the two poems not only indicates that he, like Brooks, needs a conveniently delimiting poem (if he is to engage Milton within the boundaries of Text), but also that he (Fish) wants at the same time to confront Cleanth Brooks.

Brooks's essay, "The Light Symbolism in 'L'Allegro-Il Penseroso," begins in conventional fashion by placing his own reading in the context of earlier efforts by Samuel Johnson, who is said to be "about the critic's proper job": to "inspect the poems" but "not emote over them" (50), and in contrast to those after Johnson who merely express appreciation without calling for "careful reading" (51). His real point of departure is E.M.W. Tillyard, who, in Brooks's opinion, comes "close to the main matter" in "pointing our close connections" between Milton's companion poems. His own reading defends a unitary thesis, positing that "the light-shade imagery amounts to a symbolism" and that this symbolism is related ultimately to the "meaning of the poem, including its tone" (52-53). For Brooks, Milton has produced one poem in which there is a "tension between two choices … which can appeal to the same mind" (rather than a contrast between two different minds) (53). The remainder of the essay develops in detail what Brooks sees as balancing qualities (positive-negative, involved-detached, etc.), by which "Milton's oppositions tend to come together" (56), as well as "cross over" tendencies, whereby antithetical elements bring the two poems together in less obvious ways (57-59). For Brooks, revealing Milton's overweening principle of unifying "patterns of opposites" undercuts critics' charges that Milton has thrown "materials into the double poem 'every which way'" and thereby undercut the "total effect" of one poem (57). The essay climaxes on an assertion that the light symbolism to be found in both poems in turn unifies the contrasting patterns of opposites, that one, not two, perceiving but detached individual undergoes an aesthetic experience both as happy and as pensive man:

If both poems are characterized by a leisurely flowing movement as the spectator in each case drifts from pleasure to pleasure, and if in both poems he is the detached spectator—not the participant in the world he wanders through—… the spectator moves through what are [in both poems] predominantly half lights. It is as if the half-lights were being used in both poems as a sort of symbol of the aesthetic distance which the cheerful man, no less than the pensive man, consistently maintains. (59)

The essay ends by positing intertexual relationships between the paradoxical light-dark symbolism of "L'Allegro-Il Penseroso" and Paradise Lost in the establishment of the central paradox in Milton's poetic vision (66). By the end of this masterful essay, not only the two companion poems but Milton's entire opus has become in effect a single "poem."

Brooks provides further insight into his method, or rather betrays its central vulnerability, when he observes in "What Does Poetry Communicate?" that the reader of convoluted poetry, the one capable of "untangling" Milton's complex imagery, or that of any paradoxical poet, is likely to be, not the common reader, but a highly erudite one, a professor of English like himself (75).

For Fish, the ground of his confrontation with Brooks resides, obviously, in his assumption that, in contrast to Brooks, he is dealing with two very different poems, one ("L'Allegro") which cannot be the object of critical analysis and another ("Il Penseroso") which must be. In the introduction to Text, he takes on all those precursor critics who have "mistakenly" attempted critical reading of "L'Allegro":

… that as a poem whose parts are arranged in such a way as to exert no interpretive pressures it is unavailable to criticism insofar as interpretation is its only mode. It follows then that since others who have written on the poem have to a man sought to interpret it, they are necessarily wrong. (6)

Brooks is, of course, among such critics; but interestingly enough, Fish is united with Brooks in his desire to protect the poems from the adverse comments of "the critics [who] are moved to fault the poem for a lack of unity," but Fish would—and here he means Brooks—also guard it from those who "supply the unity by supplying connections more firm and delimiting than the connections available in the text." They do this, not because they read differently, but because of "their critical preconceptions" (6). Looking back upon the time he wrote his essay on "L'Allegro," Fish is prepared to admit that at the time he had wanted to "posit an object in relation to which readers' activities could be declared uniform, and that object was the text;… but this meant that the integrity of the text was as basic to my position as it was to the position of the New Critics." He found that he could not both declare his "opposition to new critical principles and … the integrity of the text." Fish goes on to describe how he escaped this cul de sac, his primary enterprise being to distance himself from Brooks and his theories, thereby freeing the reader "from the tyranny of the text" (7).

In "What It's Like to Read L'Allegro," Fish does not overtly make Brooks his point of departure; rather he goes farther back to an exchange in the TLS of Oct-Nov 1934 (about line 46, concerning who comes to the window) in order to maintain that all the readings concede to alternate readings, provide supporting details from the poem, then try to make sense of the ambiguity by rewriting the poem so as to "arrange the images and events into a sequence of logical action" (116). When he does mention Brooks by name, it is to declare, respectfully, that "Cleanth Brooks is not quite right when he declares that the unreproved pleasures of L'Allegro 'can be had for the asking'; they can be had without the asking" (118-119). Through this mild assertion, Fish denies overtly the text's dominance over the reader while covertly deflecting any dominance which Brooks, through his reading, might have over his (Fish's) critical enterprise. Fish agrees, however, that one task of the reader-critic is to deal with ambiguity, that his approach does not point to one "meaning" or "belief" (117); but he does not deny that the text has meaning (117). He does posit "a unity not of form but of experience" and a subject, "freedom" (124). These two admissions, that a unitary response is possible and that ambiguity exists, complement the most important principles in Brooks's theories.

In "Il Penseroso," Fish sees a [calculated?] "pressure" on the reader to interpret the poem which is absent from "L'Allegro" (128). "L'Allegro" is therefore easier to read than "Il Penseroso" (112-113) because, although they are companion poems,

1. their light-shadow imagery is an "opposing" pattern (Brooks calls it a shared pattern);
2. the poems proceed from two different mindsets, with "L'Allegro's" being careless and constant shifting, in an associated "series of discrete parts" (nobody's home), while "Il Penseroso's" is a melancholy "fixed mind" (Brooks's "observer" appears in both poems).

Fish concludes by stating that "'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' are the reader; that is, they stand for modes of being which the reader realizes in his response to the poems bearing their names," and that the formal and thematic features of each poem are intimately related to their meanings (132). At no other point in the essay is Fish closer to Cleanth Brooks, whose idea of an ideal reader likewise posits a unitary response when the poems are, as Brooks insists must be, read as one poem. Brooks's "spectator" thereby becomes Fish's reader! Fish remains adamant, however, in his belief that each reader can and will formulate a different reading of this or any literary text.

Close examination of these two essays—Brooks's "The Light Symbolism in 'L'Allegro-Il Penseroso" and Fish's "What It's Like to Read L'Allegro and Il Penseroso" suggests some similarities in method: close reading, often lifting discrete words and phrases out of context; stressing functional ambiguities in contexts; (with differing emphases) considering reading as an ongoing process; and insisting (again with differing emphasis) on the authenticity and primacy of the text. Not surprisingly, although Fish firmly asserts against Brooks and others that it is the reader who produces the text, the two critics come to some similar conclusions about what is occurring in the poems. We would agree with Ralph Rader, whom Fish answers in "A Reply to Ralph Rader," that Fish is very much a formalist and that his method is indebted to the New Criticism (142-43).

As key essays within their respective larger collections, the two essays on Miltonic texts underscore the underlying bond between Cleanth Brooks and Stanley Fish. Although neither Brooks nor Fish ceased to develop and practice his theories after (respectively) The Well Wrought Urn and Is There A Text in This Class?, these books occupy comparable positions in their development as critics. Both grew out of teaching situations; both demonstrate and defend basic hermeneutical strategies; both carry titles (the "Urn" and a "Text") which metaphorically signify the desired results of their critical enterprises.

At this point it is fitting to avoid closure by enlarging the scope of this study. We have attempted to demonstrate linkages between the allegedly antipodal positions of Cleanth Brooks and his former "reader" Stanley Fish. If Bloomian anxieties form only ephemeral linkages, surely similarities in style, graphic organization of their research, and similar fields of expertise create startlingly tangible connections. We have attempted to demonstrate that Fish's reader-response theory may be seen as an outgrowth of Brooks's New Criticism, with I.A. Richards forming an unlikely bond between the two. This continuum rubs against the thinking of those contemporary theorists who disavow any debt to the New Criticism by reasserting its continuing vitality. In common with Brooks's New Critical praxis, Fish's reader-response hermeneutic positions in the first act of reading an attempt to grasp the organicity of the text. That subsequent readings may discover flaws or fragments only reinforces the assumption that, for both critics, a self-supporting textual structure can exist, one upon which an informed or experienced reader may agree. In this context, the New Criticism clearly stands as the fountainhead of, if not all post-modern critical theory, certainly, through the unconscious bonds uniting Cleanth Brooks and Stanley Fish, the school of reader-response.