Cleanth Brooks and interpretation

Reading Cleanth Brooks' The Well Wrought Urn, I can begin to see how Brooks conceives of interpretation, and also see this as against a superficial view of what Brooks does.
Take his analysis of Wordsworth's "Intimations" ode. There is a way of reading what Brooks is doing as focusing merely on traditional categories of poetic expression like the symbol, the image, the meter, etc. and unifying them. In other words, the whole analysis of Wordsworth's poem simply proceeds to catalogue these instances of symbolism, imagery, metrical play etc. and then unify them in that process of cataloguing by means of another typical rhetorical category of poetic expression, the most inclusive, theme. The theme of the poem, whatever it may be, will undoubtedly unify all the various structures of meaning that the poem gives us and that we can note one by one.
Now, this superficial view stresses of course the ahistoricality of the New Critical programme that underlies this mode of interpretation. In other words, it is as if the focus on the text as "an independent poetic structure" (124) dooms it (according to this superficial view) to place too much emphasis on the individual elements of a poetic structure, and then unite these elements with an artificial all-encompassing expression or sentiment of some sort that all these elements work to express--this expression being artificial because it is the critics', i.e. Cleanth Brooks'. The historical approach grounds this unity in an objective phenomenon, and it is the refusal of the New Critical programme to submit to objectivity that makes it stress rhetorical categories to an extreme extent while at the same time having no way to unify them other than subjectively, in relating how they speak to the critic.
Countering this allegedly "superficial" view, then, would also involve a challenge to this charge of ahistoricality. But it would mean doing this in the terms of how this superficial view sees the ahistoricality producing a solipsistic unity of the poetic categories that are rigidly applied by the critic to the text. In other words, countering this view does not have to prove that the New Critical approach is open to history and grounds itself in it. A disproval merely contends the inevitability of the solipsitic unity that an analysis of a text in terms of its "independent structure" supposedly produces. In other words, it shows the unity of the poem's structure to be indeed objective. This is what Brooks means when he says that the task of his critical analysis is to "see how ... the poem says" (124-5, my emphasis). The "saying" of the poem is the "objective" contitution of its meaning, or, more precisely, its meaning prior to any "objective" or "subjective" distinction.
If this is true, and Brooks thinks the unity of the poem is in its ability to construct a pre-subjective and pre-objective meaning, it would mean that the focus on the individual elements of the poem such as its symbolism, etc. is not merely what gets unified in this meaning. Rather, these elements are different valences of this meaning, and are already reflections of its unity: they do not need to be unified. It is very obvious that the development of any particular reflection on symbolism in Wordsworth's poem, then, is only another way of expressing this unity of meaning that lies, as it were, beneath and not above the level of the rhetorical figures like symbolism that are delineated.
Let's be a little more concrete and establish this once and for all. In Brooks' analysis of the "Ode," he focuses on a distinction between dark and light images. Now, where a superficial view would say that the instances in which there is focusing on phenomena like this are indeed meaningful articulations of rhetorical structures present in the poem, only unified by the overarching emphasis on paradox that works at the end of the analysis to unify all these structures, according to me the less superficial view says that this focus on the light and the dark only stems from an attempt to get at the "saying" that the poem accomplishes in its even being able to possess a rhetorical structure like this. Read this way, the unifying gesture of specifying a theme does not really unify anything, but rather just brings forth explicitly what is presupposed in any particular analysis of a rhetorical structure along the way. Furthermore, we might note in favor of this view that there is not just one overarching reading that is explicitly put forth only once: indeed, Brooks goes about emphasizing themes all along the way in his analysis of the poem. After a rhetorical structure is brought forth, there is always an elaboration of some way this bringing-forth contributes to a change in emphais in theme, or indeed contributes to a bringing-about of the overarching meaning being presupposed by the analysis itself.
Thinking of what Brooks is doing in these terms might make him more productive: at the very least I think that it is a bit more true to the method he engages in.