The Language of Paradox by Cleanth Brooks

   Cleanth Brooks is an American teacher and critic. He is a strong proponent of new criticism and focuses on close reading and structural analysis of poetry. His books like Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) are highly influential in establishing new criticism as an academic discipline. New criticism ignores the role of reader’s response, historical background, author’s intention, and moral biases in interpreting literary texts.

This approach considers literary texts as an autotelic entity and looks for an organic whole in the text. This wholeness is achieved by analyzing the relation of various parts to each other. Irony and paradox are two key words in new criticism.  Irony refers to “the obvious warping of a statement by the context”, whereas paradox is the tension at the surface of a verse that can lead to apparent contradictions and hypocrisies. It ‘involves the resolution of the opposites”.

Text

Brooks begins the essay by discussing common prejudices on paradox. He says that paradox is often considered as intellectual than emotional, clever than profound, and rational than divinely irrational. He dismisses these notions and argues that ‘paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry’. He points at the contradictions that are inherent in poetry and states that if those contradictions do not exist, some of the best poetry will not exist today. He illustrates this by citing examples from canonical poems.

Brooks comments that William Wordsworth is a poet who distrusts sophistry and relies on simplicity. Though he will not provide too many examples for paradox, some of his best poems emerge out of paradoxical situations. He quotes from the poem It is a Beauteous Evening and illustrates that the poem is based on paradoxical context. Looking at the evening sky, the poet is filled with worship whereas the girl who walks with him is not at all moved by the sight. The paradox is revealed when the poet says that the girl is deeply devotional because she unconsciously sympathizes with all forms of nature throughout the year whereas the poet’s worship is temporary and sporadic. The self righteous nun like evening sky is contrasted with the innocence of the girl who wears no sign of devotion but is in communion with nature.

 In Wordsworth’s sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge, the poet is surprised to see a man made city-London- is able to wear the beauty of morning. The poet used to look at the city as inanimate and mechanical and this morning vision offers him the glory of the city. This paradoxical situation resolves the tension between the mechanical and the organic, and the poet realizes that the city is also part of nature, lighted by the sun of nature. These testify what Wordsworth has stated in The Preface to Lyrical ballad; ‘to choose incidents and situations from common life’ but to treat them that ‘ordinary things should be preserved to the mind in an unusual aspect’. Paradox is employed to evoke romantic preoccupation with wonder and surprise. Neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope invoke irony, though irony and wonder often happen together. The fusion of irony and wonder is found in the poems of Blake, Coleridge and Gray. Paradox unites the opposites and contradictory through the imagination of the poet.

Paradox springs from the very nature of poetic language. In poetic use, both connotation and denotation gain prominence. The poet has to make up his language as he goes. In scientific use of language, terms are stabilized and frozen in strict denotation. The poet has to work with metaphors to express the subtle nature of human emotion. Poetic language involves continual tilting of the planes, necessary overlapping, discrepancies and contradictions. The nature of poetic language forces poets to be paradoxical. In Wordsworth’s Evening sonnet, the evening is described as “beauteous, calm, free, holy, quiet, breathless”. By placing the adjectives calm and breathless-which suggests excitement that upsets the calm and quiet- together, the poem invokes paradox.

Brooks delves into an in-depth analysis of the poem Canonization by John Donne. According to him, this poem provides a concrete example for extension of the basic metaphor into a paradox. In the poem, profane love is treated equal to divine love. The poet has daringly used religious terms to describe two lovers who have renounced the world and have hermitage in each other’s body. By describing the lovers fit for canonization, the poet has produced an effective parody of Christian sainthood.

The double and contradictory meaning of the word ‘die’ for is another instance of paradox. The lovers are willing to die if they cannot live by love.  Here the poet hints at the double meaning of the word. In 16 and 17 century, the word ‘die’ refers to experience the consummation of the act of love. In that sense, it also means their love is not exhausted by lust. At another instance, the poet stresses on the duality and singleness of love. The lovers are compared to phoenix, which dies to be born. Similarly the lovers have renounced life in order to gain most intense life.  He also quotes Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to emphasize the metaphor of love and pilgrimage to the holy land.

Brooks has offered a detailed analysis of the poem and states that the only way the poet could say what canonization says is by paradox. Donne has maintained love and religion and has effectively portrayed the complexity of the experience. According to Brooks, Donne is obsessed with the problem of unity and resolves the contradictory ideas by employing paradoxes. Imagination, according to Coleridge, brings together the opposites such as sameness with difference, general with concrete, idea with image, individual with representative etc…By quoting Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and Turtle”, he establishes that paradox is the only solution to unite the double/ multiple names of life. He concludes by commenting that the urn in which the ash of the lovers is kept is the poem itself. Like the phoenix it rises from the ashes and we have to be prepared to accept the paradoxes of imagination.