From the 1930s to the 1960s, New Criticism became a critical force in the United States. It was the most powerful perspective in American literary criticism. The representatives were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren. "The influential critical methods these poet-professors developed emphasized the sharpening of close reading skills. New Criticism privileged the evaluation of poetry as the justification of literary scholarship". "Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry" (1938) became one of the most influential college poetry textbooks of the 1930s and was revised and reprinted well into the 1970s. (Morrisson: 29).