THE LANGUAGE OF PARADOX---Cleanth Brooks

THE LANGUAGE OF PARADOX

Cleanth Brooks

Lecture Notes by Dr. S. Sreekumar

[This is an attempt to analyze Cleanth Brooks’ ‘The Language of Paradox’. It is more of a compilation rather than an original critical commentary and is offered with the sole intention of helping students and research scholars with a quick overview of Brooks’ contribution to English Criticism.]

Cleanth Brooks (1906—1994), an American teacher and critic whose work was important in establishing New Criticism, was born in Murray, Kentucky to a Methodist minister, the Reverend Cleanth Brooks. He was educated at Vanderbilt University and at Tulane University. Brooks was a Rhodes Scholar before he began teaching at Louisiana State University.

From 1935 to 1942, with Charles W. Pipkin and poet and critic Robert Penn Warren, Brooks edited The Southern Review, a journal that advanced New Criticism and published the works of a new generation of Southern writers. Brooks’ critical works include Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Authoritative college texts by Brooks, with others, reinforced the popularity of New Criticism: Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), written with Warren, and Understanding Drama (1945), with Robert Heilman.