In A Shaping Joy (originally published in 1971), Cleanth Brooks writes about modern literature and the criticism that has been developed to deal with it. Most of the essays concern poets and novelists of the twentieth century, but there are also discussions of nineteenth-century American writers such as Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe, and of traditional English poets such as Wordsworth, Milton, and Marlowe.

Among the functions of literature described in the first essay are those of nourishing the imagination and keeping the language alive and the channels of communication open. The criticism contained in the essays that follow admirably exemplifies these concerns. Whether writing on the world of William Faulkner and the literature of the American South, or on subjects more familiar to the British reader—Joyce, Auden, and T.S. Eliot, for example—Professor Brooks keeps the methods of communication marvelously unblocked. It is criticism of the rarest kind—alert, imaginative and wholly invigorating.

This book will be a beneficial read for students and researchers of English literature, particularly of literary criticism.