[In the following review, Rollin praises Brooks's body of work and its impact on criticism.]

This will be a personal kind of review. The news of Cleanth Brooks's death came while I was reading his book. I was surprised as well as saddened because I had seen him recently at two different professional meetings, looking fit and still wonderfully full of zest for the life of letters. The announcement of his passing reminded me how much my own life of letters owed to him. My undergraduate professors (I later came to understand) were New Critics, and their focus on the text not only taught me how to read but fired me with renewed enthusiasm for literature itself. (Years later, as a brand new assistant prof, and anxious to learn the trade, I asked a veteran English Ed professor how he would teach "L'Allegro/Il Penseroso"; when he replied, "First, I'd draw a map of Asia Minor on the blackboard," my heart sank, and I realized what had been wrong with my English education—and English education generally—prior to Cleanth Brooks.) In graduate school, I had the opportunity to take a seminar in Romantic Poetry with Professor Brooks, and on the first day he announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, I really don't know anything about Romantic Poetry, but we're going to learn together." That was modesty, of course, but a mark of the man, as were the courtesy and consideration he extended even to graduate students. One of the local sights was William K. Wimsatt, a hulking and rumpled six-foot five-inches looming over the dapper five-foot six-inch Brooks, as they ambled across campus, talking away about (we knew) momentous matters—perhaps their collaborative Literary Criticism: A Short History, which would become my bible. In the course of writing my dissertation, I discovered that one of the few articles on Robert Herrick that showed much understanding of that poet's special genius was "What Does Poetry Communicate?"—from The Well-Wrought Urn, of course. In my first teaching position I was assigned a course in reading poetry required of all English majors, and naturally I used Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry. And so it went, and so it still goes: Cleanth Brooks has been teaching me for over forty years and, while critical fashions come and go, he will continue to teach well into the next century through his students and his books.

Thus, I trust I will be understood to be praising Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth-Century Poetry when I say it has all the virtues of a series of superb undergraduate lectures. Each chapter is a graceful and lucid study of poems as familiar as Henry King's "An Exequy," Lovelace's "The Grasse-hopper," and Marvell's "The Garden" (how interesting and useful to study these very different poems together!) as well as "An Horatian Ode." Other chapters are bound to spark new interest in less well known poets, such as Richard Corbett ("The Faerys Farewell"), James Shirley ("The glories of our blood and state"), Aurelian Townshend (several poems), Sir Richard Fanshaw ("The Fall"), and Lord Herbert of Cherbury (also several poems). Some of Brooks's readings are controversial; all illuminate.

In essence, however, this book is an apologia pro vita litteraria. "I trust," says Brooks in his "Epilogue," "that the preceding chapters constitute solid testimony to my own regard for the importance of establishing authorship, datings, biographical and historical references, and the specific and sometimes archaic uses that make up the poet's text." And indeed, each chapter does show him bringing information "extrinsic to the text"—biographical documents, definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary, historical records, etc.—to bear upon his careful analyses of all that is intrinsic to the text.

That the New Critics religiously ignored biography and history was always, of course, a bum rap, a consequence of their efforts to unearth what had for so long been buried beneath layer upon stultifying layer of half-baked biographical criticism and misapplied historical criticism—the text itself and the possibilities of the literary experience. To do so did require deliberate downplaying of "the relevance of extrinsic evidence," as Brooks admits he did in The Well-Wrought Urn. But some readers may be as surprised as I was to learn that while he was completing that pioneering book of criticism he published a scholarly edition of The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Richard Farmer. "The Republic of Letters," he notes, "needs both kinds of activity."

That may, of course, be regarded today as a non-issue. So too is Brooks's concern with the writer's "sincerity," which Northrop Frye settled long ago when he noted that all we can really mean by sincerity in literature is the effective communication of emotion. For all the formalists' efforts at a kind of rational criticism, they often began or concluded with the irrational—a work's "greatness" or lack thereof—and such personal aesthetic judgments elevated to absolutes are not absent from this book. So too is the tendency to rate poems and poets like baseball players, into "major" and "minor."

Nevertheless, whether read as an example of that all too rare phenomenon today, accessible literary criticism, or as a fascinating document in the history of twentieth-century criticism Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth-Century Poetry transcends its limitations. It instructs. It delights. It is an appropriate valediction from one who changed literary criticism and literary education for the better, forever.