Arnold’s ideas had great influence in shaping both literary study and broader discussions of culture both in Great Britain and in the United States. The first notable American disciples were a group of writers known as the New Humanists. Chief among the group are Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and Stuart Sherman.

Dedicated to the promotion of so-called high culture, these writers evaluated poetry using Arnoldian standards. In a number of writings Babbitt attacks the Romantics for their emotional excess and for promoting what he describes as the celebration of the “native” over the more refined civilization that in his view marks humankind’s greatest achievements. More, in his Shelburne Essays (1904-1921; 11 vols.), insists that great poetry can be appreciated only when readers have a highly developed historic sense. More also devoted considerable energy to rehabilitating the neoclassic poet Alexander Pope, whose satires depend on readers’ knowledge of the social and political milieu to be fully effective. For More, Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) is substantially more valuable than any work by the Romantics because it treats great human themes with exceptional insight and skill. Although not a New Humanist, the critic Edmund Wilson also contributed to cultural criticism in essays and collections that stress the social dimensions of literature, especially modern literature.

The successors of the New Humanists were the New York Intellectuals, a group of more than two dozen philosophers, sociologists, historians, and literary critics, including the influential writer-critic Lionel Trilling. Throughout his career Trilling expressed interest in the way literature reflects social values and simultaneously shapes them. Trilling tends to value literature that reflects qualities such as sincerity and authenticity, although he frequently found merit in the more experimental work produced by his contemporaries.

One of the most influential and controversial cultural critics of the first decades of the twentieth century was Cambridge scholar F. R. Leavis. As a critic of culture, Leavis railed against modernist trends toward mass production and democratization that emphasized a “watering down” of intellectual accomplishments. Committed to developing an antidote to this trend, Leavis offers in several works a program for the establishment of a university curriculum that would prepare a small group of intellectuals to resist and reverse trends toward what he saw as insidious proletarian standards of intellectual attainment and moral conduct. Leavis sees the study of literature as central to that education, because literature provides a vehicle for understanding and appreciating the moral dimension of humankind. Literature can also serve as a check against any ideology—especially Marxism—that promotes notions of equality based on economic measures at the expense of intellectual advancement. Hence, for Leavis the study of poetry becomes part of a moral imperative to preserve civilization. The best poems are those with discernible social context; these poems can help people understand what is valuable to them personally and to society as a whole.

In New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation (1932), Leavis takes great pains to show the reciprocal effects of poets and the intellectual milieu in which they work. His review of William Butler Yeats’s career and his commentary on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) reveal his bias for poetry that reflects the age in which it is written, even when the poet was highly critical of his times, as was Eliot.

Beginning in the 1920’s, a major challenge to the hegemony of cultural criticism was mounted both in Europe and in the United States. Led by the Russian formalists, European critics developed the practice of structural criticism, arguing that the primary role of the critic is to understand...