A classic, of course. The ideas have been so thoroughly assimilated that they may seem elementary and even banal. But it's important to re-read occasionally and reflect not only their novelty at the time they were first propounded, but also the dangers of taking good, decent, sane thoughts and, by pushing them too hard and too far, transforming them into lunacy. ( )

I rather enjoyed reading through this 1947 book, which is relatively free of exogenous literary theory. Brooks takes one work from each of ten significant poets from Shakespeare and John Donne to Tennyson and Yeats, and presents an interesting essay on it, taking account of imagery, metaphor, and symbolism. ( )

This book is proof that literary criticism once had a point. A long, long time ago.

My undergraduate advisor was writing a doctoral dissertation designed to show how modern criticism (called then, in the 1950s, and called still, the New Criticism) grew out of a rediscovery and renewed appreciation of the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England. I don’t think he ever completed the dissertation, but he attempted to prepare me for graduate school by urging me, practically requiring me, to specialize in that area within my major. As I recall, I took eight courses in the English Renaissance (six of which he taught himself) and none in the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth century, either British or American. In one of these courses, he focused, of course, on John Donne. Thinking to do me a favor, when he assigned each of us a Donne poem to explicate, he choose “The Canonization” for me. Of course, I was totally unprepared for its subtlety of language or complexity of structure. Naive young country boy that I was, I didn’t even know that “to die” in Elizabethan language, referred to the experience of sexual orgasm.

So to one neutrall thing both sexes fit,
Wee dye and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

Wee can dye by it, if not live by love . . . .

To help me overcome the handicap of my simplicity, he had me begin my study by reading the first chapter in The Well Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks (Harcourt, Brace, 1947), one of the classic documents of the New Criticism. This chapter, entitled “The Language of Paradox,” of course, introduces the book as a whole and illustrates the thesis that will be developed through the succeeding ten chapters, culminating in “The Heresy of Paraphrase.”

From paraphrase to paradox: that was the direction to which the New Critics pointed. Brooks simply gives detailed demonstrations of the paradoxical nature of genuine poetry, before he sets his readers straight as to the error of their critical ways in his diatribe against “paraphrase,” or conventional commentary on literary classics.

To Brooks, the New Critical method is required by the nature of authentic poetry. His conviction appears first in statements that are almost adages:

. . . paradoxes spring from the very nature of the poet’s language: it is a language in which connotations play as great a part as the denotations.

The poet, within limits, has to make up his language as he goes.

He must work by contradiction and qualification.

The method of art can, I believe, never be direct—is always indirect.

“The Canonization,” of course, serves as the ideal prototype of such a authentic “paradoxical” poem. The poem begins with “ironic banter,” proceeds with almost a parody of “threadbare Petrarchan conventionalities,” and then settles into the complex metaphors, the more serious tone, and the linguistic ambiguities of the last three stanzas. The lovers die, and thus live; they two are one; the sacrifice of self in sexual “dying” is saintly. Instead of “tombes and hearse,” lovers will be memorialized in verse:

And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes;
As well a well wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes . . . .

And so the poem not only illustrates Brooks’ thesis; it also provides his controlling image, dominant metaphor, and the title of his book: the sonnet, or small poem, as a well wrought urn. His analysis of the metaphorical language and underlying irony of this poem leads him to his statement of the primal unity of poetry: it is itself an example of what it suggests as its theme. “The poem must not mean but be.” Or as Brooks summarizes,

"The poem [i.e., “The Canonization”] is an instance of the doctrine which it asserts: it is both the assertion and the realization of its assertion. The poet has actually before our eyes built within the song the ‘pretty room’ with which he says the lovers can be content. The poem itself is the well wrought urn which can hold the lovers’ ashes and which will not suffer in comparison with the prince’s ‘half-acre tomb.’" [p17]

The emphasis, of course, is on the phrase “well wrought.” For the language of the poem suggests level upon level upon level of meaning. With the metaphor of sainthood, the union of the lovers (their dying into one another’s life) becomes a metaphor for the union of the saint and God, and this union furthermore can be seen as the union achieved through the creative imagination, what Coleridge called “the reconciliation of opposites.” Or as Brooks himself says, “that fusion . . . welds together the discordant and the contradictory.” Genuine poetry, therefore, will be inherently paradoxical; it must always unify apparent opposites, incorporate ambiguities, celebrate rather than resolve complexity. It cannot be direct; it must be oblique.

Poetry, you see, just gained its uniqueness as a form of discourse, completely separate from scientific discourse in which clarity and directness are prerequisites. It just found its soul. (It also just lost its readership, but that’s another story—one that the New Critics were sure their teaching would obviate. Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry, they felt certain, would produce a whole generation of sophisticated readers, readers who would not only understand paradox, but even demand it. And so it proved to do, but in the Academy, not among the populace.)

The bulk of Brooks’ Well Wrought Urn goes on to explore the underlying irony in poems definitely NOT associated with the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals; for example, Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Wordsworth’s Intimations ode, Keats “Grecian Urn,” and even Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears.” Genuine poetry is genuinely paradoxical. So the simplicity of the paraphrase, and of conventional literary criticism, must be abandoned. To use Robert Penn Warren’s metaphor, the poetic image must be refined by the fires of irony.

"In other words, the poet wishes to indicate that his vision has been earned, that it can survive reference to the complexities and contradictions of experience. . . . If the poet, then, must perforce dramatize the oneness of the experience, even though paying tribute to its diversity, then his use of paradox and ambiguity is seen as necessary. He is not simply trying to spice up, with a superficially exciting or mystifying rhetoric, the old stale stockpot . . . . He is rather giving us an insight which preserves the unity of experience and which . . . triumphs over the apparently contradictory and conflicting elements of experience by unifying them into a new pattern." [pp212, 213-14]

The close textual analysis of the literary critic, therefore, as demonstrated by the exegeses in this book, must not restate the meaning of the poem but examine the methods by which the poet achieves the experience of oneness in the “new pattern” of the poem.

The sublime must be oblique. So be it. I didn’t argue with that. I simply dropped out of graduate school after a year and resorted to teaching—my life’s work. Almost immediately I discovered that, for me, sublimity ranged farther afield than John Donne and T. S. Eliot, than irony and ambiguity. It was there waiting to be found in the works of John Keats and William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and eventually even in the “egotistical sublime” of William Wordsworth (though that took a while!). But, of course, I never forgot the lessons of the “well wrought urn” nor resorted to the “heresy of paraphrase” ever again. No serious student of literature could. The New Critics are no longer new, nor do they any longer reign supreme. Post-structuralism and deconstruction have seen to that. But much of what they said underlies much of what everyone says now.

I chose to put my emphasis on the “experience” of the poem, its vision, as it, indeed, reflects the “conflicting elements of experience.” Hence, my well-wrought urns have been Blake’s “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison,” Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Robert Frost’s “Design,” Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” Thom Gunn's "Black Jackets," Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Marianne Moore’s “Poetry,” Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" and, yes, the Simplon Pass passage and other parts of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Occasionally, I reread Donne’s “Canonization.” But not often. ( )

Contents Include: commentaries on Donne's "The Canonization"; Shakespeare's "Macbeth"; Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso"; Herrick's "Corinna's going a-Maying"; Pope's "The Rape of the Lock"; Gray's "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard"; Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"; Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears"; Yeats's "Among School Children"