Following the path of Arnold and Eliot, the New Critics set out to defend poetry against positivist notions that threatened to render it useless and irrelevant. In Practical Criticism (1929), I. A. Richards crafted a distinction between emotional belief. John Crowe Ransom was in favor of an ontological view of poetry that treated the poem as a concrete universal composed of both a "paraphrasable core" and "lively local detail."