IRONY AS PRINCIPLE OF STRUCTURE-- CLEANTH BROOKS

IRONY AS PRINCIPLE OF STRUCTURE--Criticism & Theory

CLEANTH BROOKS

The modern poetic technique can be summed up as the rediscovery of metaphor and the full commitment to metaphor. A poet can deal with the universal only through the particular.

The poet does not first discover an abstract theme and then embellish it with concrete details. On the contrary, he first establishes the details and from there come to the general meaning. The meaning must come from the particulars.

Here it is the tail that wags the dog. It is better to call the tale the tale of the kite. The tail makes the kite fly. Without the tail, the kite will become a piece of paper crazily blown away by the wind.

The tail of the kite negates the kite’s function. It weighs down something made to rise. In the same way the concrete particulars with which the poet loads himself seem to deny the universal he aspires.

The poet wants to say something. He does not say it directly. He says it only through metaphors. There is a risk in using metaphors. He may not be able to say clearly or fully what he wants to say. But the risk has to be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether.

A poem is not a collection of poetic images. The elements of a poem are related to each other not as blossoms juxtaposed in a bouquet, but as the blossoms related to a growing plant. The beauty of the poem is the flowering of the whole plant, and needs the stalk, the leaf and the hidden roots.

The poem is like a drama. In a drama an utterance gets meaning according to the context. Shakespeare’s “Ripeness is all” or ‘never’ repeated five times gets meaning according to the context in which it is uttered.

Sometimes a statement says just the opposite of what it means. This is sarcasm, the most obvious kind of irony. Many of Hardy’s poems reveal irony quite as definite and overt. There are different types of ironies—tragic irony, self-irony, playful, arch, mocking or gentle irony, etc.

Connotations are important in poetry. They enter into the structure of the poem. Any statement made in the poem bears the pressure of the context. Its meaning is modified by the context. In other words, the statements made are to be read as speeches made in a drama. Their relevance, their propriety, their rhetorical force, even their meaning cannot be divorced from the context in which they are imbedded.

Cleanth Brooks takes up Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” to prove the proposition that lines in a poem can be justified in relation to the context. We have to consider whether the lines grow out of the context; whether they acknowledge the pressures of the context; or whether it is ironical or merely glib or sentimental.

è I. A. Richards talks about the “poetry of synthesis”. This is a type of poetry in which what is hostile to the dominant tone is also present. Irony is also the stability of a context in which the internal pressures balance and mutually support each other. The stability is like an arch; the very forces which are calculated to drag the stones to the ground actually provide the principle of support – a principle in which thrust and counter-thrust become the means of stability.

Cleanth Brooks provides examples from Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and Gray’s “Elegy”. He also gives examples from Shakespeare and from Wordsworth.

Concluding the essay Brooks says:

1. Irony can be taken as the acknowledgement of the pressures of a context.
2. Irony is to be found in the poetry of every period and even in simple lyrical poetry.
3. However in the poetry of our own times, irony is revealed mush more strikingly.
4. A great deal of modern poetry uses irony as a special characteristic strategy.

Brooks feels that there are some special reasons for the presence of irony in modern poetry.

1. There is the breakdown of a common symbolism.
2. There is a general scepticism as to universals.
3. There is the depletion and the very corruption of the language itself, by advertising and by the mass-produced art of radio, the moving picture, and pulp fiction.
4. The modern poet has the task of rehabilitating a tired and drained language so that it can convey meanings once more with force and with exactitude. The task of qualifying and modifying the language is perennial, but it is imposed on the modern poet as a special burden.
5. The modern poet is not addressing simple primitives but a public sophisticated by commercial art.

The theme of a genuine poem does not confront us as abstraction. It is not one man’s generalisation from the relevant particulars. “Finding its proper symbol, defined and refined by the participating metaphors, the theme becomes a part of the reality in which we live—an insight, rooted in and growing out of concrete experience, many-sided, three-dimensional. Even  the resistance to generalization has its part in this process—even the drag of the particulars away from the universal—even the tension of the opposing themes—play their parts. The kite properly loaded, tension maintained along the kite string, rises steadily against the thrust of the wind”.

Lecture notes—Dr. S. Sree Kumar