The Language of Paradox by Cleanth Brooks

   Cleanth Brooks  (October 16, 1906 - May 10, 1994) was an influential American literary critic, professor, editor of the Southern Review, (in collaboration with Robert Penn Warren). He was one of the skilled and exemplary practitioners of the New Criticism. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism during the 1920s and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education. His most characteristic book of close readings is, definitely, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947). Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), is another outstanding work that proclaims the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry. His critical works helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing “the interior life of a poem” and propounded the idea of close reading.

  ‘The Language of Paradox’, is the first chapter of Cleanth Brooks’ Well-wrought Urn, (1947) starts with the author’s assertion: ‘...the language of poetry is the language of paradox’. The Paradox is the language of ‘sophistry, hard, bright’ and ‘witty’ and not the language of poetry. ‘Our prejudices force us to regard paradox as intellectual rather than emotional, clever rather than profound, rational rather than divinely irrational’. Brooks further adds that the truth that the poet reiterates in his poem can be deciphered only in terms of paradox. The author’s intention here is to highlight some elements in the nature of poetry, which had been overlooked most of the time. In poems, the paradox is often used as a literary device in which unlikely comparisons can be drawn. The meaning extracted from the poem can be both literal and enigmatic.

  Brooks claims that William Wordsworth’s sonnet, ‘It is a beauteous evening’ is exemplary in this context because the language f paradox is utilized by the poet for direct attack, although the poet concentrated on simplistic expression. In the sonnet, the girl, he narrates becomes an integral part of nature, not an independent individual. Her unconscious sympathy appears to be the unconscious worship, she offers. Brooks points out that the paradox evident in the poem is between the poet’s sporadic and momentary devotion and the girl’s constant devotion. In another poem of Wordsworth, Composed upon Westminster Bridge(1802), the situation happens to be paradoxical. The mechanical, man-made marvel has been incorporated in nature, instead of being criticized as an isolated, artificial creation of man that tainted the immaculate nature. The ‘awed surprise’ of the poet at the mechanical view of urban life, strikes as the contradictory statement because the man-made  London is also included as an aspect of nature.