Modern literary criticism may be classified into four categories to provide a format for instruction which both reduces modern criticism to its essential interests and provides a critical vocabulary which is a mediating vocabulary between modern criticism and literature. These categories are summed up in structural metaphors: Symbolic Form, Organic Form, Archetypal Form, and Deterministic Form. Symbolic Form views literature in terms of images and symbols which are precise correlatives of ideas and emotions and includes such theorists as Poe, Mallarme, Hulme, Yeats, Pound, and the early Eliot. Organic Form is essentially interested in the dynamics of verbal texture as constitutive of meaning. Archetypal Form provides a category for criticism concerned with both the evolution of literary forms from archaic origins and the appearance of contemporary archetypes. Deterministic Form is concerned with the outside determinants of literary form. The most important modes of this approach are biographical and sociological criticism. (Author/WR)