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.
Brooks’ later works included Literary Criticism: A Short History
(1957; co-written with William K. Wimsatt); A
Shaping Joy: Studies in the Writer’s Craft (1972); The Language of the American South (1985); Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth Century Poetry
(1991); and several books on William Faulkner, including William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963), William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and
Beyond (1978), William Faulkner:
First Encounters (1983), and Firm
Beliefs of William Faulkner (1987).
[Brooks and New Criticism—see
Appendix]
A SUMMARY
[1800 WORDS]
‘The Language of Paradox’, the first chapter
of Cleanth Brooks’ Well-wrought Urn, begins with the famous statement: ‘...the language of poetry is
the language of paradox’. 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’. The scientist may need freedom from
paradox, but for the poet, truth can be ‘approached’, only through paradox.
Paradoxes in
Wordsworth
Brooks quotes paradoxes from Wordsworth, a poet who
insisted on simplicity and was suspicious of sophistication. He quotes the
sonnet ‘It is a Beauteous Evening’ as an example. The sonnet highlights
a paradoxical situation.
The poet is filled with divine thoughts, unlike the girl. But
her nature is not less divine. She worships more deeply as her mind is filled
with an unconscious sympathy (unconscious worship) for all of Nature. As
Coleridge wrote: He prayeth best, who loveth best/ All things both great and
small.
The
girl is in communion with Nature “all the year.” Her devotion is continual
whereas the poet’s is sporadic and momentary. But the paradox is not finished.
It ‘informs’ the poem. The calm of the evening parallels the trappings of the
nun, visible to everyone, suggesting ‘Pharisaical holiness’ with which the
girl’s careless innocence, ‘a symbol of her continual secret worship’, stands
in contrast.
Then Brooks takes up another sonnet: “Composed upon Westminster
Bridge.” Many readers cannot account for
the poem’s greatness. There is very little ‘nobility’ in the sentiments. The
images are neither graphic nor realistic. The sonnet contains ‘some very flat
writing’ and ‘well-worn comparisons’. Despite these drawbacks, the poem becomes great
because of ‘the paradoxical situation’ from which it is born.
It is a paradox that ‘grimy, feverish’ London can “wear the beauty of the
morning”. Mount Snowden or Mont Blanc can ‘wear beauty by natural right’, but
not London. ‘Man-made London is a part of nature too, is lighted by the Sun of
nature, and lighted to as beautiful effect’. The ‘stale metaphor’ (‘sleeping
houses’) in the last two lines is revitalized because the poet sees the city as
organic, and not mechanical. He thought the houses dead but now realizes that
they were only asleep.
Paradoxes in Neoclassical Poets
The neo-classics also use paradoxes which ‘insist
on irony, rather than wonder’. Brooks quotes from Pope’s "The Essay on
Man”:
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
/ Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err; …
Created half to rise, and half to
fall; /Great Lord of all things, yet a Prey to all; …
Whether a poet is Romantic or Classic
does not matter because poetic language is the language of paradox.
Paradoxes spring from the nature of the poet’s
language in which ‘the connotations play as great a part as the denotations’.
The connotations are not external— ‘some sort of frill or trimming’. ‘I mean
that the poet does not use a notation at all’ — as the scientist does. Science attempts to stabilize and ‘freeze’ terms into ‘strict
denotations’. Poetry tends to destabilize. The terms in poetry modify each
other and also violate their ‘dictionary meanings’.
Why do poets use paradox?
Poets work by analogies. Subtle states of emotions demand different
metaphors for their expression. The metaphors may not be ‘in the same plane or
fit neatly edge to edge’. Conversely, there is a ‘continual tilting of the
planes, necessary overlappings, discrepancies, contradictions’, forcing the
poet into paradoxes.
When ‘apparently simple and straightforward’ poets
are ‘forced into paradoxes’ it will not surprise us to find some poets
deliberately using paradoxes to get ‘a compression and precision otherwise
unobtainable’. It is ‘not a perversion’ but an extension of the normal language
of poetry.
An Example— Donne’s "Canonization”
The ‘basic metaphor’ here is a paradox. ‘The poet
daringly treats profane love as if it were divine love’. The canonization is not that of a pair of
holy anchorites who have renounced the world and the flesh. On the other hand,
it is that of a pair of worldly lovers who found hermitage in each other’s body.
Their renunciation of the world and
elevation to sainthood are cunningly argued.
The poem is a parody modern man fails to
understand, says Brooks. Modern man sees paradox as a cheap trick and not as a
‘serious rhetorical device’. Hence he may believe that Donne does not take
either love or sainthood seriously. Love becomes ‘a sort of mechanical
exercise’ to sharpen wit and sainthood a subject for ‘cynical and bawdy parody’”.
Brooks tries to prove that Donne takes both love
and religion seriously. The lover is absorbed in the world of love.
The torments of love are obvious to him but the world is unaffected by that.
The conflict between the lover’s world and the “real” world runs through the
poem.
In the second and the third stanza the poet
shifts the tone, ‘modulating’ from the initial ‘note of irritation’ into ‘the
quite different tone’ at the end. The opening line of the fourth stanza, ‘Wee can dye by it, if not live by love’,
has ‘tenderness and deliberate resolution’. The lovers are ready to die. They
are dedicated; they are not immature but ‘confident’. The lovers’ renunciation
of the world is similar to the confident resolution of the saint.
Their love
story will not be the subject of a ‘ponderous and stately chronicle’. The
‘pretty rooms’ of sonnets is sufficient for them. The well-wrought urn will
provide ‘a finer memorial’ for the ashes than a ‘pompous and grotesque
monument’— “half-acre tombes”, a phrase that shows the grossness and vulgarity
of the world left behind by the lovers. Their legend, their story, will gain
them canonization. Approved as love’s saints, other lovers will invoke them.
The theme
receives ‘a final complication’ in the last stanza. By rejecting life, the
lovers get ‘the most intense life’. This paradox has been hinted at earlier in
the phoenix metaphor. Here it receives a powerful dramatization. The lovers in
becoming hermits find that they have not lost the world, but have gained the
world in each other, now a more intense, more meaningful world. The lovers
“drive” into each other’s eyes “Countries, Townes,” and “Courtes,” ‘which they
renounced in the first stanza of the poem’.
‘The unworldly lovers thus become the most “worldly” of all’.
The poem
ends on a tone of ‘triumphant achievement’.
‘One of the important elements which work toward our acceptance of the
final paradox is the figure of the phoenix’. The comparison of the lovers to
the phoenix is connected to other comparisons of them to burning tapers and the
eagle and the dove. The phoenix bird burns like the tapers. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries to “die” means to experience the consummation of the
act of love. The lovers after the act are the same. Their love is not exhausted
in mere lust. This is their title to canonization. Their love is like the
phoenix.
The theme of the poem is simple and can be stated
directly—“Love in a cottage is enough”. Donne might have been ‘as forthright as
a later lyricist’: “We’ll build a sweet little nest, somewhere out in the West’
or he might have imitated the metaphysical lyric: “You’re the cream in my
coffee.” Instead, the poem includes and transcends all these observations.
Brooks
writes about the suitability of paradox in this context: ‘I
submit that the only way by which the poet could say what “The Canonization"
says is by paradox. More direct methods may be tempting, but all of them
enfeeble and distort what is to be said’. Without
paradox and ‘its twin concomitants of irony and wonder’, Donne’s poem becomes
‘biological, sociological, and economic’. The lovers in the poem become divine
because of the ‘supernaturalism’ conferred upon them.
Brooks believes that poets have to use paradox to
express many important things. The language of love and religion are mostly
paradoxical. “The Canonization” is an example of the language of love becoming
paradoxical. Similarly, many memorable phrases in religion are paradoxical: “He
who would save his life, must lose it”; “The last shall be first,” etc. Indeed, almost any insight important enough to warrant a great poem ‘apparently
has to be stated in such terms’.
Paradox violates ‘science and common sense; it welds together the
discordant and the contradictory’. Coleridge gives a ‘classic description of
its nature and power’. It “reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of
opposite or discordant qualities: of `sameness, with difference; of
the general, with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual,
with the representative: the sense of novelty and freshness, with old
and familiar objects. . .
This statement with many paradoxes shows that Coleridge could not
describe creative imagination in any other way. In conclusion, Brooks analyses
Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix
and the Turtle’ as it is ‘oddly parallel to the description’ given by
Coleridge:
Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together,
To
themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded
Brooks explains: ‘The nature is single, one, unified. But the name is
double, and today with our multiplication of sciences, it is multiple. If the
poet is to be true to his poetry, he must call it neither two nor one; the
paradox is his only solution’.
Though the name is double, the nature is single. The difficulty of seeing
the double nature as single has intensified since Shakespeare’s day. Brooks
believes that the poets have become ‘timid’ when they faced the problem of
“Single Natures double name,” and hence had ‘funked’ it. ‘A history of poetry
from Dryden’s time to our own might bear as its sub-title “The Half-Hearted
Phoenix.”
Brooks points out that Reason is confused at the union of the
Phoenix and the Turtle. Reason admits its ‘bankruptcy’ and utters the beautiful
Threnody at the end:
Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here
enclos'd, in cinders lie
………………………………………
To this urn let those repair …
The urn to which we are summoned and which holds the ashes of the phoenix
is like the well-wrought urn of Donne’s “Canonization” which holds the
phoenix-lovers’ ashes. It is the poem itself. The lines remind one of Keats’s
Grecian urn, which contained for the poet ‘Truth’ and ‘Beauty’. Shakespeare’s
urn contains “Beautie, Truth, and Raritie.” But ‘all such well-wrought urns
contain the ashes of a Phoenix’.
The phoenix of poetry will not be reborn through measuring and chemical
testing of the ashes. The paradox of imagination is indispensable for that. In
poetry imagination makes things real, a paradoxical situation. But such a
situation is essential for “Beautie, Truth, and Raritie” which otherwise will
remain as cinders. Thus we will get only ashes for all our efforts.
A DETAILED CRITICAL
ANALYSIS
Preface to Well - wrought Urn
In the preface, Cleanth Brooks admits that he has
not considered the historical background of the poems he has discussed. It is
not because he has discounted or failed to take into account literary history.
He has ignored literary history because of a feeling that very little will be
left after referring a poem to its cultural background.
Speaking about the ‘relativistic’ temper of the
times, Brooks comments:
We have had impressed upon us the necessity for
reading a poem in terms of its historical context, and that kind of reading has
been carried on so successfully that some of us have been tempted to feel that it
is the only kind of reading possible. We tend to say that every poem is an
expression of its age; that we must be careful to ask of it only what its own
age asked; that we must judge it only by the canons of its age.
This emphasis on the historical context rejected the
view of art as ‘sub specie aeternitatis’ (as something
universally/eternally true). [‘Sub specie aeternitatis’ is Latin for
"under the aspect of eternity". Spinoza used it as an honorific expression
describing what is universally and eternally true, without any reference to or
dependence upon the temporal portions of reality’].
Brooks points out the difficulties of studying
poetry against the historical background. If studied against the historical
background poetry of the past may become significant as mere ‘cultural
anthropology and poetry of the present may become merely political, or
religious, or moral instrument’. The poets referred to in Well-wrought
Urn thought that their poems will transcend the limitations of
time. They never wrote only for their generation. Brooks quotes the last 3
lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet [65] to prove this point.
Shakespeare
in Sonnet 65 concludes that nothing withstands time's ravages. The hardest
metals and stones, the vast earth and sea — all submit to time "Since
brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, / But sad mortality o'er-sways
their power." "O fearful meditation!" he cries, where can the
young man hide that time won't wreak on him the same "siege of batt'ring
days"?
The
poet is certain that his sonnets will provide the youth immortality — his verse
is the only thing that can withstand time's decay. Returning to the power of
poetry to bestow eternal life, the poet asserts "That in black ink
my love may still shine bright." (From Cliff Notes)
Brooks sums up the preface by stating his aim in the
book. It is to make ‘the closest possible examination of what the poem says
as a poem.’
‘The Language of Paradox’
‘The Language of Paradox’ is the first chapter
of Well-wrought
Urn.
Brooks begins this essay with the famous statement:
‘...the language of poetry is the language of paradox’. [The term ‘paradox’ is
analyzed in Notes 1]
‘Paradox is the language of sophistry, hard, bright, witty’. It is not ‘the
language of the soul’. Nobody is surprised to see a paradox in Chesterton or in
an epigram or a satire. But a paradox is not accepted in poetry. ‘Our
prejudices force us to regard paradox as intellectual rather than emotional,
clever rather than profound, rational rather than divinely irrational’, says
Brooks.
[Comments:
Poetry, for the majority of readers, is connected with emotions rather than
with intellect. Paradox is an intellectual exercise and therefore deemed unfit
for poetry. In this context, we may remember the complaints of many
eighteenth-century critics about the intellectualism in Metaphysical poetry.
Dryden, for example, complained that Donne, ‘…perplexes the minds of the fair
sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts and
entertain them with the softnesses of love’.
Paradoxes in Wordsworth
Paradox is the language ‘appropriate and inevitable’
to poetry. The scientist needs a language free from paradox. But for the poet
truth ‘can be approached, only in terms of paradox’. Brooks quotes an example
for paradox from Wordsworth, a poet who insisted on simplicity and was
suspicious of sophistication. A ‘typical Wordsworth poem is based upon a
paradoxical situation’. The sonnet ‘It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free’
highlights such a situation.
Brooks analyses the paradox thus:
The
poet is filled with worship, unlike the girl beside him. The implication is
that she should respond to the holy time, and become like the evening,
nun-like. But she seems less worshipful than inanimate nature itself. The poet
says that though the girl appears unmoved by solemn thoughts, her nature is not
less divine. The girl worships more deeply than the self-conscious poet because
she is filled with an unconscious sympathy for all of nature, not merely the
grandiose and solemn. Brooks is reminded of Wordsworth’s friend, Coleridge: He
prayeth best, who loveth best/ All things both great and small.
Unconscious
sympathy is unconscious worship. The girl is in communion with nature “all the
year,” and her devotion is continual whereas that of the poet is sporadic and
momentary. But the paradox is not finished. It not only underlies the poem, but
something of the paradox informs the poem. The comparison of the evening to the
nun has more than one dimension. The calm of the evening means “worship,” It
corresponds to the trappings of the nun, visible to everyone. Thus, it suggests
not merely holiness, but, in the total poem, even a hint of Pharisaical
holiness [The Pharisees was a Jewish sect that flourished during the 1st
century B.C. and 1st century A.D. They practiced and advocated strict
observance of external forms and ceremonies of religion or conduct without
regard to the spirit, hence considered self-righteous; hypocritical. Now
‘Pharisee’ is synonymous with ‘crook’, ‘cheat’, ‘fraud’ etc.] with which the
girl’s careless innocence, itself a symbol of her continual secret worship,
stands in contrast. [Direct quotes included].
Then Brooks takes up another sonnet of Wordsworth: “Composed
upon Westminster Bridge.”
Brooks thinks that many readers are
unable to account for the poem’s greatness. The attempt to glorify the sonnet
based on ‘the nobility of sentiment’ or ‘in terms of the brilliance of …
images’ is doomed to failure, argues Brook. There is very little ‘nobility’ in
the sentiments and the images are neither graphic nor realistic. The poet
‘simply huddles’ the details together resulting in a ‘blurred impression’. The
sonnet contains ‘some very flat writing and some well-worn comparisons’.
Despite all these drawbacks, the poem becomes great because of ‘the paradoxical
situation’ out of which it is born.
It is a paradox that ‘grimy,
feverish’ London can “wear the beauty of the morning”. Mount Snowden, Skiddaw,
Mont Blanc — these ‘wear beauty by natural right’, but not London. This is the
point of the ‘awed surprise’ and the ‘shocked exclamation’ brought into the
poem:
Never did sun more
beautifully steep In
his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill
‘Man-made London is a part of nature
too, is lighted by the Sun of nature, and lighted to as beautiful effect’. “The river glideth at his own sweet will .
. .” The river is ‘the most natural thing one can imagine; it has the
elasticity, the curved line of nature itself’. ‘Uncluttered’ by barges, the
river reveals itself as a natural thing ‘not at all disciplined into a rigid
and mechanical pattern’. It is like the daffodils, the mountain
brooks—‘whimsical’ and ‘natural’.
The poem ends with the memorable lines:
‘Dear God! the very
houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty
heart is lying still!’
The ‘stale metaphor’ (‘sleeping
houses’) is revitalized because the poet sees the city as organic, and not
mechanical. He used to consider the houses as dead. But now he realizes that
they are only asleep.
To say they are “asleep” is to say that they are alive, that they
participate in the life of nature’. Similarly, ‘the tired old metaphor which
sees a great city as a pulsating heart of empire becomes revivified’. It is
only when the poet sees the city under the semblance of death that he can see
it as actually alive — quick with the only life which he can accept, the
organic life of "nature.”
In this context, we must remember the
general purpose of Wordsworth in The Lyrical Ballads: “…to choose
incidents and situations from common life” and to treat them so that “ordinary
things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect." Later,
Coleridge made the statement even more explicit:
Mr. Wordsworth . . . was to propose
to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day,
and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s
attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and
the wonders of the world before us . . . ‘Wordsworth, in short, was consciously
attempting to show his audience that the common was really uncommon,
the prosaic was really poetic’.
Thus,
Wordsworth’s exploitation of the paradoxical is made obvious by Coleridge. The
statement also highlights the Romantic ‘preoccupation with wonder’, the
‘revelation which puts the tarnished familiar world in a new light’. Brooks
thinks that this is the ‘raison d’etre’ (most important reason) of most Romantic paradoxes’.
Paradoxes in Neoclassical Poets
The
neo-classic poets also use paradox. Their paradoxes ‘insist on the irony,
rather than the wonder’. Brooks quotes from Pope’s "The Essay on Man”:
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
/ Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err; …
Created half to rise, and half to
fall; /Great Lord of all things, yet a Prey to all; …
The Glory, Jest, and Riddle of the
world!
Pope too was treating the things of
every day, ‘man himself’, and ‘awakening his mind so that he would view himself
in a new and blinding light’. There is ‘the awed wonder’ (of Wordsworth) in Pope as there are traces of irony (of Pope) in Wordsworth. ‘There is, of
course, no reason why they should not occur together, and they do’.
Comments: Pope’s poetry has some Romantic
qualities. Wordsworth’s has neo-classical features. If they occur together, it
is not surprising. Brooks says that ‘paradoxes spring from the very nature of
the poet’s language’. Whether a poet is Romantic or Classic does not seem to
make much difference because the language of poetry used by both is the
language of paradox.
The wonder and irony we associate
with two different schools of poetry merge in the lyrics of Blake and in
Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. In Gray’s “Elegy” the setting is
typically Romantic (‘Wordsworth
“situation”’) ‘with the rural scene and with
peasants contemplated in the light of their “betters.” But … the balance is
heavily tilted in the direction of irony, the revelation an ironic rather than
a startling one’.
Can
storied urn or animated bust / Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour's voice
provoke the silent dust? / Or Flatt’ry sooth the dull cold ear of Death?
Connotations and Denotations [Notes2]
These quoted examples prove that ‘the
paradoxes spring from the very nature of the poet’s language’ in which ‘the
connotations play as great a part as the denotations’. The connotations are not
‘some sort of frill or trimming’. They are not external. ‘I mean that the poet
does not use a notation at all — as the scientist may properly be said to do
so. The poet, within limits, has to make up his language as he goes’.
Comments: The poet does not use notation at
all, says Brooks. Notation means ‘code’. Language is a code that has a fixed
meaning. In that sense, the language of poetry has no notation, no code, no
fixed meaning. Every poet creates his language as he goes on
writing.
Science attempts to stabilize and ‘freeze’
terms into ‘strict denotations’. Poetry tends to destabilize. The terms in
poetry frequently modify each other and also violate their ‘dictionary
meanings’. Eliot calls this the “perpetual slight alteration of language, words
perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations”. Brooks underlines
“perpetual”: ‘It is perpetual; it cannot
be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and controlled’.
As an example, he cites some
adjectives in Wordsworth’s evening sonnet; beauteous,
calm, free, holy, quiet, breathless. ‘The juxtapositions are hardly
startling…the evening is like a nun breathless with adoration’. “Breathless”
suggests ‘tremendous excitement’. Yet the evening ‘is not only quiet but calm’. The particular kinds of calm and
excitement ‘may well occur together’. There is no contradiction. But the poet uses
no single term for this state. ‘Even if he had a polysyllabic technical term,
the term would not provide the solution for his problem. He must work by
contradiction and qualification’.
Why
do poets use paradox?
Brooks feels that there is a reason
in even ‘the most direct and simple poet’ using paradoxes. Poets work by
analogies (similarities, parallels, correlations, comparisons, etc.). Subtle
states of emotions demand different metaphors for their expression. The metaphors
may not be ‘in the same plane or fit neatly edge to edge’. Conversely, there is
a ‘continual tilting of the planes, necessary overlappings, discrepancies,
contradictions’, forcing the poet into paradoxes. The task may be difficult but
it may not defeat a poet. He may achieve a ‘fine precision’ with his
method.
Brooks
quotes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act II, Scene I to prove his
point. Polonius wants to find out what his son (Laertes) is ‘up to in Paris’.
He instructs his man, Reynaldo to go to Paris and discover things by roundabout
means — ‘By indirections find directions out’. [The image is from the game of lawn
bowls where the skilled player makes a distorted bowl that becomes a curve]. This is also the method of art that is never
direct unlike that of science which is always direct.
The
master of the game of bowls can always place the bowl where he wants it.
Difficulties occur only when the game is confused with that of science and ‘the
nature of the appropriate instrument’ is mistaken. Brooks quotes Mr. Stuart
Chase who ‘urged us with a touching naiveté, ‘to take the distortion out of the
bowl — to treat language like notation’.
Finding directions
through indirections is the method adopted by poets when they employ
paradox.
Even
‘apparently simple and straightforward’ poets are ‘forced into paradoxes’
because of the nature of poetic language. So it will not surprise us to find
some poets deliberately using paradoxes to get ‘a compression and precision
otherwise unobtainable’. Though there may be dangers in the method, it is ‘not
a perversion’ but an extension of the normal language of poetry.
A Concrete Example— Donne’s
"Canonization”
The ‘basic metaphor’ of the poem is a
sort of paradox. ‘The poet daringly treats profane love as if it were divine
love’.
The
canonization is not that of a pair of holy anchorites who have renounced the
world and the flesh. The hermitage of each is the other’s body: but they do
renounce the world, and so their title to sainthood is cunningly argued.
The
poem is a ‘parody of Christian sainthood’, a ‘parody of a sort’ modern man
fails to understand, says Brooks. Modern man sees paradox as a cheap trick and
not as a ‘serious rhetorical device’. This creates a problem—Donne does not
take either love or sainthood seriously. Love becomes ‘a sort of mechanical
exercise’ to sharpen wit and sainthood a subject for ‘cynical and bawdy
parody’.
Brooks
attempt is to prove that Donne takes both love and religion seriously and
paradox is his ‘inevitable instrument’. To see this, ‘a closer reading’ of the
poem is necessary.
The First Stanza
‘The
poem opens dramatically on a note of exasperation’. The ‘you’ the speaker
addresses maybe a friend who objects to the speaker’s love affair. The friend
‘represents the practical world which regards love as a silly affectation’. He
also ‘represents the secular world which the lovers have renounced’.
The speaker suggests to his friend
some ‘contemptuous alternatives’ to ‘chide’ his weaknesses. The friend can
admonish him for his ‘palsie’, or his ‘gout’, or his ‘five gray haires’, or
‘ruin’d fortune’. The ‘implications’ are clear:
All right, consider my love as an infirmity, as a disease, if you will,
but confine yourself to my other infirmities, my palsy, my approaching old age,
my ruined fortune. You stand a better chance of curing those; in chiding me for
this one, you are simply wasting your time as well as mine. (2) Why don’t you
pay attention to your own welfare — go on and get wealth and honor for
yourself. What should you care if I do give these up in pursuing my love?
The two main types of ‘secular’ successes are ‘neatly, and
contemptuously epitomized’ in
Or the Kings reall, or his stamped face . . .
The friend can become a courtier and gaze at the King’s real
face or become a businessman and look at the King’s face stamped on coins. But
let him leave the speaker alone.
The second stanza
The lover is absorbed in the world of
love. The conflict between the lover’s world and the “real” world which runs
through the poem dominates the second stanza. The torments of love are obvious
to the lover but the world at large is unaffected by that.
What merchants ships have my sighs drowned?
In the second stanza and in the third
the poet shifts the tone of the poem, ‘modulating from the note of irritation
with which the poem opens into the quite different tone with which it closes’.
The ‘modulation of tone’ is achieved by an analysis of the ‘love metaphor’. The
poet fills the stanza with the conventionalities of the Petrarchan tradition—
‘the wind of lovers’ sighs, the floods of lovers’ tears, etc.’ The friend may
tease the lover with these expressions, but the speaker himself ‘recognizes the
absurdity of the Petrarchan love metaphors’.
The very absurdity of the jargon which lovers are expected to talk makes
for his argument: their love, however absurd it may appear to the world, does
no harm to the world. The practical friend need have no fears: there will still
be wars to fight and lawsuits to argue.
The Third Stanza
The mood of irony is maintained in the third stanza. The
speaker points out the numerous ‘absurdities’ which can be applied to lovers:
Call her one, mee
another flye./ We’ are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die. . . .
The figures of the third stanza are
not the ‘threadbare Petrarchan conventionalities’. They have ‘sharpness and
bite’. The last one, the comparison of the lovers to the phoenix, is fully
serious. We see that the tone has shifted from ‘ironic banter into a defiant
but controlled tenderness’.
The
Fourth Stanza
The opening
line of the stanza,
Wee can dye by it, if
not live by love,
has ‘tenderness and deliberate resolution’. The lovers are
ready to die. They are dedicated; they are not immature but ‘confident’. The
metaphor of the saint is carried forward. The lovers’ renunciation of the world
is similar to the confident resolution of the saint.
The basic metaphor of
the saint, one notices, is being carried on; the lovers in their renunciation
of the world, have something of the confident resolution of the saint.
Brooks reminds us that the word “legend’ in Donne’s time
meant “the life of a saint”.
And if unfit for tombs and hearse / Our
legend be, it will be fit for verse
Their love story will not be the
subject of a ‘ponderous and stately chronicle’. The ‘pretty rooms’ of sonnets
is sufficient for them. The well-wrought urn [the sonnet] will provide ‘a finer memorial’ for
the ashes than a ‘pompous and grotesque monument’, what the speaker calls
“half-acre tombes” [the chronicle]. “Half-acre tombes” is a contemptuous phrase that shows the
grossness and vulgarity of the world left behind by the lovers.
But the figure works further; the pretty sonnets will not merely hold
their ashes as a decent earthly memorial. Their legend, their story, will gain
them [the lovers] canonization; and approved as love’s saints, other lovers
will invoke them.
The
Final Stanza
The theme receives ‘a final complication’ here. By rejecting
life, the lovers get ‘the most intense life’.
This paradox has been hinted at earlier in the phoenix metaphor. Here it
receives a powerful dramatization. The lovers in becoming hermits find that
they have not lost the world, but have gained the world in each other, now a
more intense, more meaningful world. [He finds his world in her, she finds hers
in him]
This world does not come passively to them. It is something
they ‘actively achieve’.
‘They are
like the saint, God’s athlete’ [Notes3]
Who
did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your
eyes
Brooks rightly points out that the image is that of ‘a
violent squeezing as of a powerful hand’. The lovers “drive” into each other’s
eyes “Countries, Townes,” and “Courtes,” ‘which they renounced in the first
stanza of the poem’. ‘The unworldly
lovers thus become the most “worldly” of all’.
The
figure of the phoenix-- The final paradox
The poem ends on a tone of
‘triumphant achievement’. Various ‘earlier elements’ were responsible for the
development of this tone. ‘One of the
important elements which work toward our acceptance of the final paradox is the
figure of the phoenix’.
The comparison of the lovers to the
phoenix is connected to other comparisons of them to burning tapers and the
eagle and the dove. The ‘phoenix comparison gathers up both’. The phoenix bird
burns like the tapers. “Call us what you will,” says the lover and ‘rattles off
in his desperation the first comparisons that occur to him’. The phoenix
comparison seems ‘merely another outlandish one, the most outrageous of all’.
But it is a fantastic one because it describes ‘the lovers best and justifies
their renunciation’ and the poet develops it.
For the phoenix is not two but one, “we two being one, are it”; and it
burns, not like the taper at its own cost, but to live again. Its death is
life: “Wee dye and rise the same . . .”
The poet literally justifies the fantastic assertion. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries to “die” means to experience the consummation of the
act of love. The lovers after the act are the same. Their love is not exhausted
in mere lust. This is their title to canonization. Their love is like the
phoenix.
The meaning of “die” is not juggling, says Brooks. Shakespeare and Dryden
used the term to mean sexual consummation. The word is the ‘pivot’ on the
‘transition’ to the next stanza—
‘We can die by it, if not live by love’. The ‘sexual sub-meaning of “die” does
not contradict’ the other meanings: The poet is saying
“Our death is really a
more intense life”; “We can afford to trade life (the world) for death (love),
for that death is the consummation of life”; “After all, one does not expect to
live by love, one expects, and wants, to die by it.”
But in the
total passage he is also saying:
“Because our love is
not mundane, we can give up the world”; “Because our love is not merely lust,
we can give up the other lusts the lust tor wealth and power”; “because our
love can outlast its consummation, we are a minor miracle, we are love’s
saints.’’
‘This passage with its ironical tenderness and its realism
feeds and supports the brilliant paradox with which the poem closes’.
The Poem as a Well-wrought Urn
The
poet has built within the song a “pretty room’’ which will satisfy the lovers.
The poem becomes a ‘well-wrought urn’ which can hold the lover’s ashes. This
urn is not less magnificent than the ‘half-acre tombs’ of princes. Thus the
poem is an example of the principle it asserts. It is ‘both the assertion and
the realization of the assertion’.
How necessary are the paradoxes?
The
theme of the poem is simple—“Love in a cottage is enough”. The poet might have
stated it directly. Donne might have been ‘as forthright as a later lyricist’
who wrote: “We’ll build a sweet little nest, somewhere out in the West, ‘. /And
let the rest of the world go by.” [Notes4]. Else he might have imitated that ‘more
metaphysical lyric that maintains’: “You’re the cream in my coffee.” [Notes5]. Donne’s poem includes and transcends all these
observations.
Brooks writes about the suitability of paradox in
this context:
I submit that the only way by which the poet could say what “The
Canonization" says is by paradox. More direct methods may be tempting, but
all of them enfeeble and distort what is to be said.
Brooks
believes that ‘many of the important things which the poet has to say have to
be said by means of paradox’. The language of love and the language of religion
are mostly paradoxical. “The Canonization” is a good example of the language of
love becoming paradoxical. Similarly, many memorable phrases in religion are
paradoxical: “He who would save his life, must lose it”; “The last shall be
first,” etc.
Indeed,
almost any insight important enough to warrant a great poem apparently has to
be stated in such terms.
Donne’s poem without its paradoxes
Without paradox and ‘its twin
concomitants [something
that happens with
something else and is connected with it] of irony and wonder’, Donne’s poem becomes ‘biological,
sociological, and economic’. The lovers in the poem become divine because of
the ‘supernaturalism’ ‘the poet confers upon them’. Brooks remembers that the
same thing happens to Shakespeare’s lovers, for ‘Shakespeare uses the basic
metaphor of “The Canonization” in his Romeo
and Juliet’. ‘In their first conversation, the lovers play with the analogy
between the lover and the pilgrim to the Holy Land’.
Juliet says: For saints
have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch
And palm to palm is
holy palmers’ kiss.
If we consider the lovers
‘scientifically’, they may be like Aldous Huxley’s animals, “quietly sweating, palm to palm.”[ Notes6]
Comments: ‘Brooks shows what would happen to
the poet’s pronouncements if they were reduced from their function as literary
symbols to the pure symbols of abstract science’-- William J. Handy [Kant and the Southern New Critics]
Handy points out the difference between the ‘palm to palm’ in Juliet’s
speech and Huxley’s ‘palm to palm’. In Juliet, the expression is used as
literary language [as a ‘poetic symbol’] while in Huxley the expression is
literal (factual). The literary language contributes to ‘a whole formulation of
human experience made possible by the literary meanings furnished by the poet’.
Brooks says:
For us today, Donne’s imagination seems obsessed with the problem of
unity; the sense in which the lovers become one — the sense in which the soul
is united with God.
Very often ‘one type of union becomes
a metaphor for the other’. Both can be considered as ‘instances of, and
metaphors for, the union which the creative imagination itself effects’.
Comments: The metaphor of the two lovers
becoming one is similar to the metaphor of the soul uniting with God—the
‘Jeevatma’ becoming one with the ‘Paramatma’.
This ‘fusion’ is not based on logic.
It violates ‘science and common sense; it welds together the discordant and the
contradictory’. Coleridge gives a ‘classic description of its nature and
power’.
It “reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of
opposite or discordant qualities: of `sameness, with difference; of
the general, with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual,
with the representative: the sense of novelty and freshness, with old
and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than
usual order. . .
This statement of Coleridge contains
many paradoxes (all the underlined phrases are paradoxes). Brooks feels that
Coleridge could not describe creative imagination in any other way.
“The
Phoenix and the Turtle” (Notes
7)
Concluding this chapter, Brooks
analyses Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ which he feels is ‘oddly
parallel to the description’ given above by Coleridge. He quotes the following
as an example:
Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together,
To
themselves yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded
Brooks admits that he knows very
little about the theme of the poem.
Comments: Critics are unanimous in their view
that the poem is the most obscure written by Shakespeare. In 1875, R.W. Emerson
challenged writers and commentators to explicate the poem.
But he believes that the poem is ‘an
instance of that magic power [the power of paradox] which Coleridge sought to describe’.
So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two
distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance
and no space was seen
'Twixt this Turtle and his queen: But
in them it were a wonder.
……………………………
That the selfe was not the same; Single Natures double name. Neither two nor one was called.
Brooks concludes his analysis of the poem thus:
The nature is single, one, unified. But the name is double,
and today with our multiplication of sciences, it is multiple. If the poet is
to be true to his poetry, he must call it neither two nor one; the paradox is
his only solution.
Though the name is double, the nature
is single. The difficulty of seeing the double nature as single has intensified
since Shakespeare’s day. [Eliot
found ‘unification of sensibility’ in the Metaphysical poets and regretted that
a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ has set in the late seventeenth century.] Brooks believes that the poets have
become ‘timid’ when they faced the problem of “Single Natures double name,” and
hence they had ‘funked’ [avoid (something) out of fear] it. ‘A
history of poetry from Dryden’s time to our own might bear as its sub-title
“The Half-Hearted Phoenix.”
Comments: Brooks makes ‘one further
observation’ that takes this chapter to a different level. With a typical
formalist method of analysis, he highlights the features of intertextuality in
three poems belonging to three different periods of English Literature.
Continuing with his analysis of ‘The
Phoenix and the Turtle’, Brooks points out that Reason is ‘in it selfe’
confused at the union of the Phoenix and the Turtle. But Reason admits ‘its own
bankruptcy’.
Love has reason, reason none,
If what parts can so remain.
Reason goes on to utter the beautiful Threnody [a lyrical lament over a victim of the catastrophe
in a tragedy] with which the poem
concludes;
Beauty, truth, and rarity, Grace in all simplicity, Here enclos'd, in cinders lie.
………………………………. Truth may seem but cannot be;
Beauty brag but
'tis not she; Truth and beauty buried be.
To
this urn let those repair That are either true or fair; For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
To this urn let those
repair – ‘repair’ is used in the sense
of ‘going back’, ‘heading for’, ‘leave for’ etc.
Brooks says
that we are ‘summoned’ to the urn:
The urn to which we are
summoned, the urn which holds the ashes of the phoenix, is like the
well-wrought urn of Donne’s “Canonization” which holds the phoenix-lovers’
ashes: it is the poem itself.
The lines remind one of another urn, Keats’s Grecian urn,
which contained for the poet Truth and Beauty. Shakespeare’s urn contains
“Beautie, Truth, and Raritie.” But ‘all such well-wrought urns contain the
ashes of a Phoenix’.
The phoenix rises from
its ashes; or ought to rise; but it will not arise for all our mere sifting and
measuring the ashes, or testing them for their chemical content. We must be
prepared to accept the paradox of the imagination itself; else “Beautie, Truth,
and Raritie” remain enclosed in their cinders and we shall end with essential
cinders, for all our pains.
Comments: The phoenix of poetry will not be
reborn through measuring and chemical testing of the ashes. The paradox of
imagination is indispensable for that. In poetry imagination makes things real,
a paradoxical situation. But such a situation is essential for “Beautie, Truth,
and Raritie”. Otherwise, these three qualities will remain as cinders. Thus we
will get only cinders [ashes] for all our efforts.
In conclusion, let us go through one memorable piece of
criticism by a Canadian scholar, Thomas Dilworth:
Keats, in Dilworth's reading obeys Shakespeare's injunction to
the "true" or "fair" to "repair" to the urn where
Truth and Beauty are interred. In interpreting the meaning of "Truth"
for both poets, the symbolism of the turtle-dove is useful. He represents
fidelity, "being true" in the sense of "being constant". As
Shakespeare – and long tradition – suggest, Truth (as in constancy) and Beauty,
are rarely combined. In his poem, they unite and die. The phoenix is not
reborn. The birds lack offspring and burn to cinders in one blaze. But, if it
is that Elizabethan urn that speaks in Attic guise in Keats's Ode, it proves
that poetry, at least, can be reborn from itself. "The Phoenix and the
Turtle," thanks to Dilworth's reading, helps unlock the cage of Keats's chiasmus:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty…" Perhaps the hidden turtle and
phoenix of the Ode represent a further impossible union – that of the constant
John Keats himself and his beloved Fanny Brawne? [Taken from Carol Rumens’s
‘Poem of the Week’, The Guardian
NOTES
1. Paradox
The term paradox is
from the Greek word paradoxon, which means “contrary to expectations,
existing belief, or perceived opinion.”
A paradox is a seemingly absurd or
self-contradictory statement in logic that, superficially, cannot be true but
also cannot be false. It is a
statement that appears to be self-contradictory or silly, but which may include
a latent truth. It is also used to illustrate an opinion or statement contrary
to accepted traditional ideas.
A paradox is
often used to make a reader think over an idea in an innovative way. For
example, let us look at a paradox made famous by Wordsworth— “The child is father of the man…”This
statement has a seemingly incorrect supposition, but when we look deep into its
meaning, we see the truth. The poet is saying that childhood experiences become
the basis for all adult occurrences. The childhood of a person shapes his life,
and consequently “fathers” or creates a grown-up adult. So, “The child is
father of the man.”
The above
reading may bring out the question, “Why is paradox used when a message can be
conveyed in a straightforward and simple manner?” The answer lies in the nature
and purpose of literature. One function of literature is to make the readers
enjoy reading. Readers enjoy more when they extract the hidden meanings out of
the writing rather than something presented to them in an uncomplicated manner.
Thus, the chief purpose of a paradox is to give pleasure.
Some very
famous paradoxes are given here:
‘Fair is Foul,
Foul is Fair. [Macbeth]
“War is peace. Freedom
is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” ― [1984 George Orwell].
“It was
the best of times,
it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of
foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it
was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of
hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing
before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the
other way…[
A Tale of
Two Cities Charles
Dickens ]
Also, see Paradoxes
of Zeno & Paradox of Russell.
[Indebted to the Internet]
2. Connotation
and Denotation
Connotation is an idea or feeling a word invokes
for a person in addition to its literal or primary meaning. It is a commonly understood cultural or
emotional association. A connotation is frequently described as either positive
or negative, with regard to its pleasing or displeasing emotional connection.
The
word home,
for instance, has a denotation of
“the place (such as a house or apartment) where a person lives,” but it may
additionally have many connotations (such
as “warmth,” “security,” or “childhood”) for some people. Typically,
the word "home" has a positive and warm connotation.
[Indebted to the Internet]
3. God’s athlete
The first Christians saw a connection between the courage and
endurance of the martyrs and the courage and endurance of athletes. In his
second letter to St. Timothy, St. Paul, knowing that his martyrdom was not far
off, compared himself to a boxer and a runner: “I have fought a good fight,” he
said. “I have finished my course.” A few decades later, about the year 110, the
martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote to his fellow bishop St. Polycarp urging
him to act like “an athlete of God [for whom] the prize is immortality and
eternal life.”
St. Sebastian is the patron saint of archers and the Pontifical
Swiss Guards. His feast day is Jan. 20.
4.
The song was written by J. Keirn
Brennan and set to music by Ernest R. Ball
in 1919.
With someone like you a
pal good and true
I'd like to leave it all behind and go and find
A place that's known to God alone just a spot we could call our own
We'll find perfect peace where joys never cease
Somewhere beneath the starry skies
We'll build a sweet little nest somewhere out in the west
And let the rest of the world go by
I'd like to leave it all behind and go and find
A place that's known to God alone just a spot we could call our own
We'll find perfect peace where joys never cease
Somewhere beneath the starry skies
We'll build a sweet little nest somewhere out in the west
And let the rest of the world go by
With someone like you,
And let the rest of the world go by.
And let the rest of the world go by.
Source: LyricFind
Let the Rest of the World Go By lyrics © Warner Chappell Music,
Inc
5. “You’re the cream in my coffee.”
"You're the Cream in My Coffee" is a
popular song published in 1928. The music was written by Ray Henderson, with
lyrics by Buddy G. DeSylva and Lew Brown and appears in their Broadway musical Hold Everything!
You're the cream in my coffee / You're the salt in
my stew You'll always be my necessity / I'd
be lost without you. You're the starch in my collar / You’re the lace in my shoe … You'll
always be my necessity / I’d be lost without you
6. “Quietly sweating, palm to palm.”
The lines are from Aldous Huxley’s poem ‘Frascati's’:
But
when the wearied Band Swoons
to a waltz, I take her hand, And
there we sit, in blissful calm, Quietly sweating palm to palm.
In
this deeply ironic poem, the writer depicts himself as sitting with a girl in
the balcony of an ornate restaurant. They are under its
"bubble-breasted" dome, from which hangs a crystal chandelier that
resembles a frozen waterfall. Below them, the patrons–"human
bears"–are "champing with their gilded teeth." There is the
further irony of an echo of Keats ("What songs? What gongs? What nameless
rites?" which sardonically hints at "What pipes and timbrels? What
wild ecstasy" in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn") and of the interior
of a cathedral. The dome of the restaurant suggests to the poet a nave below,
where, instead of church music or the "unheard" melodies of Keats, a
Negro jazz-band is producing "blasts of Bantu melody." Yet, in the
final irony, this vulgar spot is the poet's "spiritual home," just as
a cathedral might be such for a devout person. Here is the disillusionment of
the post-World War I years, for
from all the noise, confusion, and blaring rag-time, the tragi-comic climax is
only a sensual experience. [Indebted to
the Internet]
7. “The Phoenix and the Turtle”—Shakespeare.
This poem was published in 1601 in an anthology—
"Love's Martyr: Or, Rosalins Complaint"— by Robert Chester. It
contained various poetic exercises about the phoenix and the turtle by some
writers of the day. The phoenix is the legendary bird that is consumed in flame
and is reborn from its ashes. The turtle is the turtledove, emblem of pure
constancy in love. The poem portrays the mystical oneness of the two birds. The
poem has a total of 18 stanzas. The first 13 has 4 lines each and the next 5
has 3 lines each.
APPENDIX
Brooks and New Criticism
Brooks was the central figure of New
Criticism, a movement that emphasized structural and textual analysis—close
reading—over historical or biographical analysis. Brooks advocates “the closest
examination of what the poem says as a poem".
In Understanding Poetry, Brooks and Warren
assert that poetry should be taught as poetry, and the critic should resist
reducing a poem to a simple paraphrase, explicating it through biographical or
historical contexts, and interpreting it didactically. Paraphrase and
biographical and historical background information are useful as a means of
clarifying interpretation, but it should be used as a means to an end.
Brooks took the notion of paraphrase and
developed it further in his classic The
Well Wrought Urn. The book is a polemic against the tendency for critics to
reduce a poem to a single narrative or didactic message. He describes
summative, reductionist reading of poetry with a phrase still popular today:
"The Heresy of Paraphrase". He argued that poetry serves no didactic
purpose because producing some kind of statement would be counter to a poem's
purpose. Brooks argues that "through irony, paradox, ambiguity and other
rhetorical and poetic devices of his or her art, the poet works constantly to
resist any reduction of the poem to a paraphrasable core, favouring the
presentation of conflicting facets of theme and patterns of resolved
stresses".
Reaction to New Criticism
Because New Criticism isolated the text and
excluded historical and biographical contexts, critics argued as early as 1942
that Brooks' approach to criticism was flawed. His reputation suffered in the
1970s and 1980s when criticism of New Criticism increased. Ronald Crane was
particularly hostile to the views of Brooks and the other New Critics. In
"The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks," Crane writes that under
Brooks’ view of a poem's unity being achieved through the irony and paradox of
the opposing forces it contains, the world's most perfect example of such an
ironic poem would be Albert Einstein's equation E=mc2, which equates matter and
energy at a constant rate.
In his later years, Brooks criticized the
poststructuralists for inviting subjectivity and relativism into their
analysis, asserting "each critic played with the text's language unmindful
of aesthetic relevance and formal design". This approach to criticism,
Brooks argued, "denied the authority of the work".
Influence
Understanding
Poetry was an unparalleled success and remains a
classic example of the intellectual and imaginative skills essential for the
understanding of poetry. Further, critics praise Brooks and Warren for teaching
students how to read and interpret poetry.
In an obituary for Brooks, John W. Stevenson
of Converse College notes Brooks "redirect[ed] and revolutionize[d] the
teaching of literature in American colleges and universities". Further,
Stevenson admits Brooks was "the person who brought excitement and passion
to the study of literature" and "whose work...became the model for a
whole profession"
As a testament to Brooks' influence, fellow
critic and former teacher John Crowe Ransom calls Brooks "the most
forceful and influential critic of poetry that we have". Elsewhere, Ransom
has even gone so far as to describe Brooks as a "spell binder".
Dr. S. Sreekumar
Disclaimer
The
critical analysis given above is by no means original. The aim of the post is
to make the students familiar with the critical principles of Brooks. The post
may be used by the students to further their studies of Brooks.
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