 As for art criticism, Beardsley thought that a great deal of it read like the ruminations of a batter who kept his eyes on the scoreboard, the fans, his contract, his place in history, or his wife in the stands—instead of on the ball. Much of it, in other words, ignored what should be the main object of attention, the work itself. The school of criticism that attracted Beardsley, and that his philosophy of art ultimately underwrites, is the so-called New Criticism. Based in literature, the New Criticism made the literary work the center of critical attention, and denied, or at least greatly devaluated, the relevance of facts about the origin of literary works, their effects upon individual readers, and their personal, social, and political influence. Close reading is what is required of a critic, not biographical information about the author, a rundown of the state of society at the time the work was written, data about the psychology of creation, predictions about the effects of the work on society, and certainly not a piece of autobiography detailing the critic’s own personal response to the work. New Critics were explicators more than anything else, and investigated literary works, and especially poetry, as if they were found objects—worthwhile ores, rare jewels, and mundane rocks, each with its own unique properties. As an expert assayer, the critic must thoroughly and sensitively examine the objects before him in order to discover their exact nature and, in the best cases, special value. The rallying cry, in Allen Tate’s words, was, “We must return to, we must never leave, the poem itself” (Tate 1955, 63). Much the same sentiment is expressed in Beardsley’s remark that “[the critic’s] task is to keep [his] eye on… textual meaning” (PC: 34). Though based in literary criticism, the New Criticism could be, and should be, extended to the other arts, Beardsley thought: all art criticism should make a serious effort to recognize its objects as special, autonomous, and important in their own right, and not subservient to ulterior aims or values; all art criticism should attempt to understand how works of art work and what meanings and aesthetic properties they have; all art criticism should strive for objective and publicly accessible methods and standards to test its pronouncements. The New Criticism did just that, and did what other criticism, and especially Romantic criticism (in a broad sense of the term), did not: studiously focused on the work of art itself, as an object existing in its own right, with its own properties. Far too much criticism was essentially Romantic, the New Critics thought, and concentrated on the artist, not the art.