My Favorite School of Theory

My favorite school of theory was New Criticism. At first I did not really like it but I started to like it while we were doing our first paper using a New Criticism method. Not at first, but in the end i liked it because of how close the poem was too the author's childhood. I had done "Those Winter Sunday's" by Robert Hayden and I felt like my interpretation of his poem was close to his actual childhood. He grew up in a rather poor African-American part of town and much of his struggle was found in his poem. I like the idea of just using imagery from a text to find the meaning, it seems so clear cut and perfect (although New Criticism has been disproved to be the best method). I still prefer this method because I read texts and I generally only focus on the text at hand (unless you're one of my favorite author's) so I only focus on the imagery most of the time. The only thing I do not really like about New Criticism is the idea of the "single best interpretation" because I believe that everyone thinks about things differently and not everyone will see the same thing in texts. For example, in A Rose for Emily, many people think Emily killed Homer Baron and many people think she has her problems but she didn't kill him. That's the only part of New Criticism that I don't particularly like, but other than that, it is probably my favorite school of theory.