The Heresy of paraphrase

     Cleanth Brooks in this essay the “Heresy of Paraphrase” tries to put forward is that any reductionist attempt to transform poetic meaning to a prose statement such as descriptive or thematic interpretative is to do injustice to a poem. It is one's failure to recognize the poem as a poem.

     Brooks distinguishes scientific statement from poetic one and claim that the scientific statement cannot be paraphrasable.

     In a poem, form and content are inseparable, that is why, poem cannot be reduced to a prose. However, Brooks is not completely against the fact that we need some discursive paraphraseable statements to understand in classroom about the meaning or theme of the poem.

     Brooks thinks that a poem is not a scientific proposition. It is a structure of gesture and attitude, it is wrapped in emotions, and it has its own poetic universe constituting its romantic structure. Therefore, poem’s meaning is revealed just like dramatic effect, not like logical abstraction.

     Meaning as dramatic effect is produced by setting its tensions in motion. It is not through logical formula, discourse propositions, and abstraction symbol but through irony, ambiguity and paradox a poem comprises its meaning.

     Irony is created by the gap between what one says and what he/she intend to say. Brooks says that irony is the chief organizing principle that creates structure of a poem.

     Context produces ironic effect upon us. Brooks further says, "Even the meaning of any particular item is modified by the context".

     Brooks classifies two types of irony: verbal and dramatic. Verbal irony appears in words. If we say "your skin is white" for black people it creates verbal irony.

     Dramatic irony is produced through a person who involves in action but does not know what is going on him but the audiences know. For example, the case of king Oedipus in Sophocles Oedipus Rex.

R.P. Blackmur     John Locke is one of the influential English philosophers and is best known for his epistemological and political views.He observes knowledge to have begun with simple sense perceptions and combining these in to complex abstract ideas. A true critic objectively judges the text. He explore the internal properties of the text such as image symbol, irony, paradox, ambiguity, structure etc. and finds out the meaning . Blackmur distinguishes amature critic from professional. Amature critics are not expert. They work not for money but for their interest to pass criticism. Read More...

T.S. Eliot     The essay Tradition and Individual Talent is an attack on certain critical views in Romanticism particularly up on the idea that a poem is primarily an expression of the personality of the poet. Eliot argues that a great poem always asserts and that the poet must develop a sense of the pastness of the past.There is great importance of tradition in the present poem. Read More...

J.C. Ransom    Ransom main idea hare in the essay poetry: A Note on Ontology is to assert the ontological status of poetry. Ransom divides poetry in to two broad groups. One groups that talk about things. Another group that talks about idea. And the third group comes out of blending of these two qualities. Physical poetry, Platonic poetry and Metaphysical are the names for these groups respectively. Read More...

I.A. Richards     Richards shows an interest in the effect of poems on the reader. He tends to locate poem in reders response. The being of the poem seems to exist only in the readers. Poetry is a form of words that organizes our attitudes. Poetry is composed of pseudo statements, therefore it is effective. He talks about the close analysis of a text. Like a new critics, he values irony. He praises the irony and says that it is characteristics of poetry of higher order. In “The Forth Kinds of Meaning”, he talks about functions of language. Basically he points out four types of functions or meaning that the language has to perform. Read More...

Friedrich Von Schiller    Schiller is a German literary theorist and dramatist and a critic of modern civilization. In this essay, he deeply analyzed modern civilization, which emerged from the fountain of enlightenment. He examined culture of European enlightenment and found the tragic and miserable predicament of humanity. According to him, enlightenment emphasis on reason that leads to disastrous condition in which individual psyche becomes dichotomous, further more, he compares civilization of enlightened Europe with primitive Hellenic Greek civilization. Read More...

Whimsatt and Beardsley   Wimsatt and Breadsley have made best-known accusations of fallacy found in literary criticism based on writer’s intention and reader's response. International fallacy is a kind of mistake of deriving meaning of the text in terms of author’s intention, feeling, emotion, attitude, biography and situation. It is the error of interpreting a literary work by reference to evidence according to the intention of the author. Read More...