Elder Olson has said that at the Biblical Tower of Babel the people did not begin to talk nonsense but only what seemed like nonsense. This paper concerns an intellectual tower where important debates are held, but unfortunately the language is not a universal one; therefor, because all too often terms have evolved without adequate definition, disagreement occurs where reconciliation appears impossible. The very title of this thesis could be misleading to the reader if he considers debate in its formal sense. What is here intended is the controversy in the efforts of respected scholars to understand and establish the nature of poetry, and for me it is also a personal debate as I follow their assumptions in order to make some judgments in the concluding chapter about their successes and limitations. The informality of the structure of the debate does not diminish the seriousness of its dialectic. To the contrary, the debate is very serious not only to those involved but to any person who concerns himself with the state of the literary arts in the modern world. The debate is among critics representing certain generally defined schools of criticism; however they are not primarily spokesman for a school: they are among the mainstays. Each represents high scholarship, and each is deserving of praise solely as an isolated critic – or a critic without a collective classification. At the same time they each acknowledge themselves to be members of their respective schools of criticism. The debate is not constructed on the basis of two teams, negative and affirmative, with two members for each side. Instead there will be three positions presented by four critics. The essence of the debate is their scholarly struggle to bring to the poetic arts the most responsible and valuable critical approach and their sincere disagreement among themselves as to what the nature of poetry is and how the critic should deal with its subject matter.

When Tennessee Department of Education adopted Common Core in 2010, Tennessee implemented New Critical ideas associated with the college classroom, but did not present this connection to English teachers. Comparing high school education reforms like A Nation at Risk (1983) and TNCore to the New Critical works of Cleanth Brooks, T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, reveals that New Criticism is the literary method grounding current ELA education reform. Referencing Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015), Diana Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010), and questionnaires completed by Tennessee teachers, this study tracks New Criticism’s influence from the college classroom to the high school classroom. Presenting English teachers the history behind what and how they teach will equip them to explain their methodology to students.