From the 1920s until the 1980s, a very specific approach to evaluating, appreciating, and interpreting poetry dominated high school and university literature classes. That approach, called “New Criticism,” focused on the “formal” elements of a poem that made it a self-contained art form, like rhyme, meter, metaphor, alliteration, assonance, irony, and symmetry.

t attempted to be objective and scientific but could all too often come off as stuffy, emotionally barren, and profoundly exclusionary. Interestingly, about the time The Sugar Hill Gang busted out with “Rapper’s Delight” in the early 80s, New Criticism started going the way of the 8-Track. The super sleek CDs of post structuralism, postmodernism, and multiculturalism made poetry sound much clearer and much more human.

Which is why it is so interesting that Bradley adopts the tool-kit and terminology of New Criticism to argue that rap lyrics are poetry. One of the criticisms of the book is that Bradley ignores the violence and sexist content of rap and focuses solely on technique–the very strategy that so many writers and scholars of color fought against.

It is, fun, however, to see Biggie lyrics dissected in the same space and in the same way as Robert Frost poems. One wonders what Frost would have thought of Too Short’s “Don’t Fight the Feeling” as poetry. For better or worse, Bradley doesn’t go there; rather, he highlights KRS-One’s onomotopoeias: “Woop! Woop!”