A style of INTERPRETATION made popular and arguably obsolete in English departments during the twentieth century. If John Crowe Ransom baptized “New Criticism” with his 1941 essay of that name, I. A. Richards wrote its sacred scripture. Practical Criticism debuted in 1929, and saw several printings and three editions in the following decade. Part textbook, part scratchwork, part manifesto, the book held a canonical status in the syllabi at Cambridge, where William Empson was Richards’s student, and at several colleges in the United States. At a time when the HUMANITIES vied for legitimacy with expanding programs in the natural and social sciences, New Criticism provided a strategy for literary studies: poems, like problems, could be solved. New Criticism relied on a method stunning for its simplicity—what has come to be called “close reading.” Isolating the poem from its context, students learned to identify patterns within the work itself. There was an interest in form (e.g., that rhyme may indicate a hitherto unseen relationship between words, or that the sound of a line may run against its sense), but not only. New Critics wagered that the poem, understood as a whole, bore all of the information necessary for its interpretation. Empson spoke of the poet’s (and sometimes the poem’s) “unconscious”; W. K. Wimsatt of its “unity” and “organization”; Cleanth Brooks of its “essential structure.” If close reading could slip now and again into a vicious circle (all clues for interpretation are contained in the poem itself, by virtue of its being poetry, and yet good poems are distinct from bad poems on the grounds that some contain better clues than others), the method nevertheless met a pressing need. Poetry wanted to look like SCIENCE, and New Criticism made for it a bespoke disguise. Throughout Practical Criticism and later works like Poetry and Science, Richards went out of his way to handle poems as if they were natural artifacts susceptible to experiment and control. As against “preconceptions” and “stock-responses,” he preached reading “with a view toward advancing our knowledge of what may be called the natural history of human opinions and feelings.” The idea determined the book from the top down: poems were presented without attribution, and read without help from HISTORY. For the “advancement of poetry,” it was essential to cultivate objective judgment. Although New Criticism fancied itself a humanist approximation of the sciences, it is not obvious that literary interpretation could accede to that logic whereby hypotheses are entertained and dismissed. The propositions in Practical Criticism were numbered conspicuously like those in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and given that Wittgenstein’s text would have been much discussed at Cambridge, Richards may have had the MODEL in mind. But if Richards, like Wittgenstein, imagined his book a ladder, it is difficult in the end to envision him asking his readers to kick it aside after they had finished with it. The New Critics believed their conclusions were not just true, but good. That they could not be falsified. The stoicism so moving at the end of Wittgenstein’s precocious masterpiece, the utter refusal of its own authority, is a scientism for which literary study yet longs. One might ask what would happen should it be granted its wish. Automation of its practices, perhaps?