For us the real revolution in critical theory...was heralded by the publication, in 1938, of "Understanding Poetry"...for many of us who were preparing ourselves to teach English is those years...this book...came as a kind of revelation. It made sense because it opened up for us a way of talking about an actual poem in an actual classroom, and because the technique of focusing upon a poem as language rather than as history or biography or morality, gave a whole new meaning to and justification for the teaching of poetry (qtd. in Singh 1991).