At school the study of literature can still involve a close reading or practical criticism of a novel, play or poem without much or any recourse to external material. Practical criticism is the method of analysing a poem, in isolation from the circumstances of its production, developed by I.A. Richards in the 1920s. He felt that concentration upon the words on the page, the technical aspects of the ways verse creates effects, would result in meaningful judgements upon whether a poem was intrinsically good or simply reputedly so.

The methodology of practical criticism seeks coherence in images, themes and patterns of language. Richards and his colleagues felt that this practice was scientific and led to objective value judgements. He was part of a group of lecturers at Cambridge University who played a crucial role in the development of the discipline of English literature and who influenced the critical practices of the New Critics, John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks and their colleagues in the US.

Their scientific examination of literature asserted a hierarchy of texts, those that held universal meaning and significance through aesthetic form and those deemed too formulaic to warrant academic scrutiny. The first group of texts is often referred to as the literary canon.