New Literary Criticism Seeking to bring new respect, new theories, and philosophies to critical literary scholarship, New Criticism presented critics with a language to isolate and discuss a unified framework of aesthetic quality and apply it to individual works of art. New Criticism is a process of interpretation, a method of reading a text, as well as a theoretical endeavor. New critics look for patterns of symbols and metaphors that point toward an underlying sense of unity in form, rhythm, or structure; they expect a literary work to hold together, to express stability, to be coherent. “Poetry…depends on the set of relationships, on the structure, that we call poetry” (Penn Warren 990). The most difficult task of the New Critic is to discover and describe the thematic oppositions within a text which he attempts to transcend or resolve. Irony and ambiguity provide the most powerful forms of this contextual pressure. The most successful literature, therefore, struggles against the resistance of its own materials, of its own structure, attempting to win "at clarity and passion" (Brooks 805). Works Cited Brooks, Cleanth. "Irony as a structural principle" The critical tradition. Ed., David H. Richter, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. Penn Warren, Robert. Selected essays on "Pure and Impure Poetry". New York: Vintage Books, 1958.