From this idea flows a kind of historical relativism or dispensationalism.
2.
Niebuhr was also concerned with historical relativism.
3.
But historical relativism has its limits.
4.
Brooks vehemently rejected this historical relativism, believing it amounts to " giving up our criteria of good and bad " and thus repudiating " our concept of poetry itself . " Brooks opts instead to offer " universal judgments " of poems and treat them as self-contained entities, able to be interpreted without recourse to historical or biographical information.