In this essay I shall argue that the New Criticism is alive and well. To say this may seem perverse, since there is such general agreement that the New Criticism has lost its prestige and authority. All of us are keenly aware of its failings: it ignores the reader's role, denies the importance of authorial intention, cuts off literature from history, and favors some groups of texts (metaphysical poetry, for example) at the expense of others (Romantic and Victorian poetry in particular). Attacks on the New Criticism have in fact been so sustained and, apparently, successful that it is common today to discover references to the "decline" or "death" of the movement-as though the New Criticism were already in the grave or rapidly on its way there. Sometimes the references are slightly more charitable, as when Morris Dickstein remarks that individual New Critics exist but as a species of "toothless lion."2 This implies that they possess a certain nobility, if not the power to do us harm.