Cleanth Brooks - The Language of Paradox guide

Cleanth Brooks, an active member of the New Critical movement, outlines the use of reading poems through paradox as a method of critical interpretation. Paradox in poetry means that tension at the surface of a verse can lead to apparent contradictions and hypocrisies. His seminal essay, "The Language of Paradox," lays out Brooks' argument for the centrality of paradox by demonstrating that paradox is “the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry." The argument is based on the contention that referential language is too vague for the specific message a poet expresses; he must “make up his language as he goes." This, Brooks argues, is because words are mutable and meaning shifts when words are placed in relation to one another.

In the writing of poems, paradox is used as a method by which unlikely comparisons can be drawn and meaning can be extracted from poems both straightforward and enigmatic.

Brooks points to William Wordsworth's poem “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.” He begins by outlining the initial and surface conflict, which is that the speaker is filled with worship, while his female companion does not seem to be. The paradox, discovered by the poem’s end, is that the girl is more full of worship than the speaker precisely because she is always consumed with sympathy for nature and not - as is the speaker - in tune with nature while immersed in it.

In his reading of Wordsworth's poem, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” Brooks contends that the poem offers paradox not in its details, but in the situation which the speaker creates. Though London is a man-made marvel, and in many respects in opposition to nature, the speaker does not view London as a mechanical and artificial landscape but as a landscape comprised entirely of nature. Since London was created by man, and man is a part of nature, London is thus too a part of nature. It is this reason that gives the speaker the opportunity to remark upon the beauty of London as he would a natural phenomenon, and, as Brooks points out, can call the houses “sleeping” rather than “dead,” because they too are vivified with the natural spark of life, granted to them by the men that built them.

Brooks ends his essay with a reading of John Donne’s poem "The Canonization," which uses a paradox as its underlying metaphor. Using a charged religious term to describe the speaker’s physical love as saintly, Donne effectively argues that in rejecting the material world and withdrawing to a world of each other, the two lovers are appropriate candidates for canonization. This seems to parody both love and religion, but in fact it combines them, pairing unlikely circumstances and demonstranting their resulting complex meaning. Brooks points also to secondary paradoxes in the poem: the simultaneous duality and singleness of love, and the double and contradictory meanings of “die” in Metaphysical poetry (used here as both sexual union and literal death). He contends that these several meanings are impossible to convey at the right depth and emotion in any language but that of paradox. A similar paradox is used in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” when Juliet says “For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch and palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss.”

Brooks' contemporaries in the sciences were, in the 40's and 50's, reorganizing university science curricula into codified disciplines. The study of English, however, remained less defined and it became a goal of the New Critical movement to justify literature in an age of science by separating the work from its author and reader (see Wimsatt and Beardsley’s Intentional fallacy and Affective fallacy) and by examining it as a self-sufficient artifact. In Brooks’s use of the paradox as a tool for analysis, however, he develops a logical case as a literary technique with strong emotional affect. His reading of “The Canonization” in “The Language of Paradox,” where paradox becomes central to expressing complicated ideas of sacred and secular love, provides an example of this development.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_%28literature%29