Cleanth Brooks and "The Heresy of Paraphrase"

Aesthetic Unity

The "well-made" poem

• the poem as an autonomous whole

• the orchestration of all elements in a poem together constitutes meaning; “organic unity”

•According to Brooks, “we must draw a sharp distinction between… a particular item ...and the ‘beauty’ of the poem considered as a whole” (1218)

•“unless one asserts the primacy of the pattern, a poem becomes merely a bouquet of … beautiful items” (1218)

• aesthetic unity
• aesthetic suspension

Aesthetic Suspension

Because of these qualities, Brooks and the New Critics call for a new critical approach to meaning.

• poetry is depersonalized, separate from such things as the author, reader, social context, and everyday language

• meaning cannot be located “in the emotional responses of the reader or in the intentions of the author” (Norton Intro 19)

• poetry contains a persona, “an abstract dramatic character internal to the work” and separate from the author or the reader

• celebrates irony, paradox, and ambiguity in poetry

“if we persist in approaching the poem as primarily a rational statement, we ought not to be surprised if the statement seems to be presented to us always in the ironic mode” (1227)

Brooks makes the bold claim that “most of our difficulties in criticism are rooted in the heresy of paraphrase” (1222).

Brooks and the New Critics

• developed a new mode of textual analysis

• a group of formalists who view the poem as a unified structure, a whole that is separate from its sources and social circumstance

• viewed the literary work is an “autonomous, highly coherent, dramatic artifact (a ‘well-wrought urn’) separate from and above the life of the author, and reader as well as separate from its social context and everyday language” (Norton Introduction p. 3)

• According to New Criticism, “it is a mistake for a reader to paraphrase a work’s content in order to distill its propositional meaning” because “textual paraphrases usually end up being moral or utilitarian statements,” and the New Critics sought to depersonalize poetry (Norton Intro p. 19)

• “seek… a set of ‘organic’ relationships of literary elements (images, symbols, tropes, features of genre and style, settings, and tones), whose overall unity often depends on ambiguity, paradox, or irony” (Norton Intro p. 18)

Poetry and Architecture

• “the essential structure of a poem… resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses” (1223)

• By “structure” Brooks asserts that “one means… something far more internal than the metrical pattern, say, or than the sequence of images,” not “form in the conventional sense in which we think of form as a kind of envelop which ‘contains’ the ‘content’” (1218).

CLEANTH BROOKS & "THE HERESY OF PARAPHRASE"

•On labeled parts of a poem: “such formulations are scaffoldings which we may properly for certain purposes throw about the building: we must not mistake them for the internal and essential structure of the building itself” (1221).

•For example, one cannot find the meaning of a poem rendered in rhythm and imagery alone, because according to Brooks, “even in the simplest poem their mediation is not positive and direct” (1219).

•Upon examination of these elements in the context of the poem as a whole, she will find that the rhythm and imagery in fact “set up tensions with [the rendered meaning], warping and twisting it” (1220).

Re-cap:

•Brooks argues that because a poem is an aesthetic whole and that “the relation between all the elements must surely be an organic one,” the meaning of a poem or the motive of the author cannot be found through the separation of parts or the ranking of these parts (1221)

•“to refer the structure of the poem to what is finally a paraphrase of the poem is to refer it to something outside the poem” (1222).

• it is false to believe that “the poem constitutes a ‘statement’ of some sort, the statement being true or false, and expressed more or less clearly or eloquently or beautifully; for it is from this formula that most of the common heresies about poetry derive” (1219)

• it is important that “we see plainly that the paraphrase is not the real core of meaning which constitutes the essence of the poem” (1219)

• problems in criticism arise when we take “certain remarks which we make about the poem… [to be] the essential core of the poem itself” (1221)

The Experience of Poetry

Against Dualism

• “the poem, if it be a true poem, is a simulacrum of reality… by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience” (1228).

• the poet “giv[es] us an insight which preserves the unity of experience and which, at its higher and more serious levels, triumphs over the apparently contradictory and conflicting elements of experience by unifying them into a new pattern” (1229).

• “For we mistake matters grossly if we take the poem to be playing with opposed extremes, only to point the golden mean in a doctrine which, at the end, will correct the falsehood of extremes” (1220)

• the function of a well-made poem is not to group the like with the like, but to “unite the like with the unlike” (1218)