One could do a serviceable job of narrating the history of professional anglophone literary criticism of the twentieth century by tracing the critical fortunes of Romantic poetry. T. S. Eliot mostly disdained the Romantics, along with their predecessor Milton, as did many of the New Critics. In each case, the baroque stylings and ironies of the Metaphysicals were a better fit. (There are exceptions—F. R. Leavis had much of interest to say about Wordsworth—but as a quick summary it'll stand.) American deconstruction, in turn, found in the figural ambivalences of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats a means of radicalizing the close reading of the literary-academic establishment from within, even coming close on occasion to proposing a new immanent vision of poetry's apocalyptic historicity, before settling on the textual impasse itself as bracing, if limited, corrective to criticism's liberal humanist temptations.
With the arrival of the new historicism came a further repudiation...
