This presentation is based on Cleanth Brooks's essay "The Language of Paradox,", wherein Cleanth Brooks emphasizes how the language of poetry is different from that of the sciences, claiming that he is interested in our seeing that the paradoxes spring from the very nature of the poet's language: “it is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations. And I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying some sort of frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in hand. I mean that the poet does not use a notation at all--as a scientist may properly be said to do so. The poet, within limits, has to make up his language as he goes.”

1. “The Language of
Paradox” in The
Well Wrought Urn
(1947)
Cleanth Brooks
(1906 – 1994)
Compiled from various web/book resources by
Dilip Barad
dilipbarad@gmail.com

2. Questions
• Write about Cleanth Brooks’s concept of
Paradox and Irony and their importance in
poetry as discussed in his essay “The Language
of Paradox” in The Well Wrought Urn (1947).
• Discuss: “The language of poetry is the
language of paradox” Elucidate with reference
to Cleanth Brooks’s essay The Language of
Paradox.
• Analyze Wordsworth’s Wesminister Bridge and
Donne’s The Canonization with reference to
Cleanth Brooks’s The Language of Paradox.

3. Paradox: What is it?
• In literature, the paradox is a literary device
consisting of the anomalous juxtaposition of
incongruous ideas for the sake of striking
exposition or unexpected insight.
• It functions as a method of literary
composition - and analysis - which involves
examining apparently contradictory
statements and drawing conclusions either to
reconcile them or to explain their presence.

4. Cleanth Books – a New Critic
• 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.

5. Connotations and Denotations
• In this essay ("The Language of Paradox,"),
Cleanth Brooks emphasizes how the language
of poetry is different from that of the sciences,
claiming that he is interested in our seeing
that the paradoxes spring from the very
nature of the poet's language: “it is a
language in which the connotations play as
great a part as the denotations.

6. Wordsworth’s Composed upon Westminster Bridge
EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

7. Wordsworth’s ‘It is a beauteous eve’
• Brooks illustrates from 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.

8. “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,”
IT is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder--everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

9. Wordsworth’s ‘Westminster Bridge’
• 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.

10. • John Donne’s The Canonization
FOR God's sake hold your tongue, and let me
love ;
Or chide my palsy, or my gout ;
My five gray hairs, or ruin'd fortune flout ;
With wealth your state, your mind with arts
improve ;
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his Honour, or his Grace ;
Or the king's real, or his stamp'd face
Contemplate ; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.
Alas ! alas ! who's injured by my love?
What merchant's ships have my sighs
drown'd?
Who says my tears have overflow'd his
ground?
When did my colds a forward spring
remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.
Call's what you will, we are made such by
love ;
Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find th' eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us ; we two being one, are it ;
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse ;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms ;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love ;
And thus invoke us, "You, whom reverend
love
Made one another's hermitage ;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is
rage ;
Who did the whole world's soul contract,
and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes ;
So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize—
Countries, towns, courts beg from above
A pattern of your love."

11. Donne’s Canonization
• 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
demonstrating their resulting complex meaning.

12. Donne’s Canonization
• 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.”

13. Rachana Joshi’s Poem ‘Leaving India’ makes an interesting
reading in language of paradox and use of irony

14. Thus, to conclude, we may say . . .
• In The Language of Paradox (The Well Wrought
Urn) Brooks shows that paradox was so essential
to poetic meaning that paradox was almost
identical to poetry.
• According to fellow New Critic Leroy Searle,
Brooks’ use of paradox emphasized the
indeterminate lines between form and content.
“The form of the poem uniquely embodies its
meaning” and the language of the poem “effects
the reconciliation of opposites or contraries.”

15. Criticism of his viewpoint
• R.S. Crane, in his essay "The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks," argues
strongly against Brooks’ centrality of paradox. For one, Brooks believes
that the very structure of poetry is paradox, and ignores the other
subtleties of imagination and power that poets bring to their poems.
• Brooks simply believed that “’imagination’ reveals itself in the balance
or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.” Brooks, in leaning
on the crutch of paradox, only discusses the truth which poetry can
reveal, and speaks nothing about the pleasure it can give.
• Also, by defining poetry as uniquely having a structure of paradox,
Brooks ignores the power of paradox in everyday conversation and
discourse, including scientific discourse, which Brooks claimed was
opposed to poetry.
• Crane claims that, using Brooks’ definition of poetry, the most powerful
paradoxical poem in modern history is Einstein’s formula E = mc2, which
is a profound paradox in that matter and energy are the same thing.
The argument for the centrality of paradox (and irony) becomes a
reductio ad absurdum and is therefore void (or at least ineffective) for
literary analysis.