Understanding Poetry was an influential American college textbook and poetry anthology by Cleanth Brooks

Cleanth Brooks

Cleanth Brooks was an influential American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education...

 and Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...

, first published in 1938

1938 in poetry

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* In Nazi Germany, the Reichsschrifttumskammer banned German expressionist poet Gottfried Benn from further writing.-Australia:* Rex Ingamells and Ian Tilbrook, Conditional Culture, published in...

. The book influenced New Criticism

New Criticism

New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...

 and went through its fourth edition in 1976.

The textbook "widely influenced ... the study of poetry at the college level in America." The Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc., or ', is a non-profit educational organization founded in 1953 as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists...

 has named the book one of the "Fifty best books of the century."

Understanding Poetry, according to an article at the Modern American Poetry Web site, "codified many of the so-called New Critical ideas into a coherent approach to literary study.