OBITUARY: DEREK TRAVERSI ; Last Surviving Original Member of the School of 'New Criticism'

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Derek Traversi was the last living link with the group of critics who, in the years just before and through the Second World War and into the 1950s, founded and popularised what has since become known as 'New Criticism'.

Deeply influenced by T.S. Eliot and his re- evaluation and fresh analysis of the metaphysical poets of the early 17th century, writers such as I.A. Richards, William Empson, F.R. Leavis and the contributors to his journal Scrutiny " Wilson Knight and L.C. Knights in England, and later in America Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and many others " comprised a very loosely connected movement that formed in part as a reaction to the …