REEMA KAMAL KHAN PRINCIPLES of LITERARY CRITICISM MA-FINAL ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT Q- What is the Heresy of Paraphrase as depicted by Cleanth

Brooks in the well Wrought Urn? Answer- Cleanth Brooks in his book The Well Wrought Urn focuses on understanding poetry in the light of New Criticism. He isolated literary criticism by analyzing the text alone while ignoring the history, social, political and cultural issues and debates. As he states in the beginning of the book the critic should always begin by making the closest examination of what the poem says as a poem . Brooks intends to make the analysis of poetry a scientific process with analytical and factual findings. In the chapter titled Heresy of Paraphrase Brooks states that poetry should not be read to deduct a meaning or message or purpose. He says this is akin to making a paraphrase of the poem which amounts to heresy. Brooks believes that poetry cannot be turned into prose. To express his objective he has chosen or as he states was given ten poems by ten different writers to analyze in the light of his theory. This he says were not selected on any common theme or particular style, however while analysis continued various similarities emerged. He calls them poems close to the central stream of tradition . This similarity is not in terms of content or subject matter but rather on the basis of structure. By structure Brooks means: a structure of meanings, evaluations and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes and meanings. A structure is not the conventional form of a poem. It is a pattern of meanings and evaluations which incorporate all items in a poem. There is primacy of pattern that is; there is beautiful or ugly, attractive or repulsive present in a poem. Further Brooks gives the example of Pope s Rape of the Lock saying that the structure of this poem is not the conventional heroic couplet or a mock epic. As the definition of structure above states the poem is an amalgamation of interpretations and evaluations. Another common mistake which propagates heresy is ascribing that a poem constitutes of a statement . He calls it a dilemma when the critic has to judge the poem by its political or philosophical content or in terms of its form. It is because of this dilemma that good critical analysis refrains to paraphrase a poem. It is pivotal to establish that paraphrase is not the real core of meaning which constitutes the

essence of the poem. For examples he states that Belinda in Rape of the Lock can be termed as a goddess or a brainless chit both of the statements can be equally corroborated and substantiated. According to Brooks the prose sense of the poem is not a rack on which the stuff of the poem is hung; it does not represent the inner structure or the essential structure or the real structure of the poem. In other words turning a poem into prose form to attain its meaning, purpose, effect and emotions is not correct. Sometimes it could alternate the meaning or purpose of the poet so much that it deviates from the original idea completely. A reason that Brooks gives for this is that an artist does not first intuit his idea of poem and then decipher the appropriate medium to write it in. It is rather through his medium that he intuits the object. This he terms is the process of composing a poem. Another example is of Eliot s The Waste Land . It is a poem which could very well reflect a prose as well. It has no rhyme scheme, meter or feet. Yet it is termed as one of the greatest modern poem of our times. The reason is that Eliot was a playwright, literary critic and a poet, so how does one switch off being a dramatist and turn on the philosopher button or a poet s for that particular writing. Therefore what Brooks says makes a lot of sense, we need to broaden the horizon of poetry analysis and refrain from paraphrasing or interpreting each word according to the dictionary. One of the dire consequences of paraphrasing is that we risk of doing violence to the internal order of the poem. Sometimes there are no logical coherences in a poem; sometimes it is random thoughts of the poet, while many times it is vice versa. It is a fact that a poet is continuously remaking language . As Eliot has put it poet s task is to dislocate language into meaning. Therefore Brooks analyses poems in a very scientific and analytical manner which gives a them a complete new dimension. For example in the very end of this chapter he says that both Wordsworth s Intimations Ode and Keats s Ode on a Grecian Urn are parables. He says that poem is a simulacrum of reality it is the unity of experience that the poet has gone through and reprinted on paper. In conclusion we may say that Brooks has taken I.A. Richards Practical Criticism and turned it into his own. He has retorted against historical and biographical information about the writer and his age and tried to focus on the structure of the poem.

References: 1-Brooks, Cleanth : Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry www.amazon.com 2-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanth_Brooks
3-www.rlwclarke.net/courses/.../08BBrooks,TheHeresyofParaphrase.pd...