Paradox

 Paradox is a technique used in poetry writing to make improbable parallels and to glean meaning from both clear and ambiguous lyrics.

William Wordsworth's poem "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free" is cited by Brooks. He starts by laying forth the primary and immediate contradiction, which is that the speaker is enamoured with worship but his female partner does not appear to be. By the poem's conclusion, it is shown that the girl is paradoxically more worshipful than the speaker because she is constantly overcome with pity for nature and isn't, unlike the speaker, in tune with nature while surrounded by it.

According to Brooks, who has read Wordsworth's poetry "Composed upon Westminster Bridge," the poem's paradox lies not in its specific features but rather in the circumstance that the speaker conjures. The speaker does not see London as a mechanical and artificial landscape, but rather as a place composed wholly of nature, despite the fact that it is a man-made marvel and in many ways in contradiction to nature. London belongs to nature since it was made by humans, and humans are a part of nature. Because the houses are also given a natural spark of life by the men who built them, as Brooks points out, the speaker is able to describe London's beauty as if it were a natural phenomenon and can therefore refer to the buildings as "sleeping" rather than "dead."

With a reading of John Donne's poem "The Canonization," which employs a paradox as its underlying metaphor, Brooks concludes his article. Donne persuasively argues that the two lovers are deserving of canonization because they rejected the material world and withdrew to a world of each other. He does this by using a charged theological term to define the speaker's physical love as saintly. This appears to mock both love and religion, but it actually integrates the two, matching improbable events and illuminating the profound significance they have as a result. The simultaneous duality and singleness of love, as well as the dual and incongruous connotations of "die" in metaphysical poetry (used here as both sexual union and literal death), are two further secondary paradoxes that Brooks draws attention to in the poem. According to him, there is only one language that can express these various meanings with the appropriate depth and emotion, and that is the language of paradox. In Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," Juliet uses a similar paradox when she says, "For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmer's kiss."

In the 1940s and 1950s, scientists who were Brooks' contemporaries started reorganising university scientific courses into established specialities. The purpose of the New Critical movement was to justify literature in the age of science by distancing the work from its author and audience and studying it as a self-sufficient artefact. The study of English, however, remained less clearly defined. However, Brooks builds a logical argument for the paradox as a literary device with a potent emotional impact in his analysis of it. This evolution may be seen in his interpretation of "The Canonization" in "The Language of Paradox," where paradox serves as a vehicle for complex concepts of sacred and secular love.