During the nineteen-thirties there emerged in America a group of critics who came to be known as the founders of the so-called New criticism. Its pioneer was John Crowe Ransome. Other critics who belonged to this new concept in literary criticism were Robert Graves, William Empson, Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. George Watson says: "In the American New Critics, contempt for late nineteenth-century values is general, not only for historical criticism and its accompanying pedantries, but for agnostic enlightenment, democratic optimism, industrialism, ands such international \ideals and Marxism. It is a frankly reactionary movement, and the word 'New' must always have held for it an air of pleasing paradox". In the late nineteen-thirties a general attack on historical criticism was fiercely mounted. The New Critics condemned poetry for its use for any other purpose beyond itself. It should not be studied for any other purpose whether historical or moralistic. These critics declared that if poetry is worth reading at all, it is worth reading as poetry only, not for any purpose beyond it.
The detailed explanation of the basic doctrines of the New Criticism appeared as late as 1946-49 in two articles published in then 'Sewanee Review' by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. The articles were entitled "The International Fallacy' and "The Affective Fallacy". Two of the assumptions of romantic criticism are held up to the light in these articles and pronounced fallacious: "The design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art". Their slogan was 'Poetry for poetry only, and not another thing'. However, some of the New Critics were a little tolerant too. They said: "We must accord to critics the right of the free choice as between different basic methods".
