Q1.

We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well-wrought urn becomes, The greatest ashes, as
half-acre tombs," Explain the paradox of these lines.

In The Language of Paradox, Brooks says that title of the poem The Canonization by John Donne
itself is a paradox. That is the underlying metaphor of the poem. Donne treats the theme of love in
his poem but the title suggests a saintly thing. When we have a close reading of the poem, we realize
the theme of love is treated as sainthood. Donne compares lovers renounce the world as saints do;
and renounce the bodies as saints do; lovers do for the sake of love and saints do for the sake of
God. Brooks tries to prove that Donne takes both love and religion seriously. The lover is
absorbed in the world of love. The torments of love are obvious to him but the world is unaffected
by that. The conflict between the lover’s world and the real world run through the poem.

They are dedicated, they are not immature but confident. The lovers renunciation of the world
similar to the confident resolution of the saint. Their love story will not be the subject of a tea time
talk. The ‘’pretty rooms’’ of sonnets is sufficient for them. The well-wrought urn will provide ‘’a finer
memorial’’ for the ashes than a ‘’pompous and grotesque monument’’ ,’’half-acre tombs’’, a
phrase that shows the grossness and vulgarity of the world left behind by the lovers. Their
legend, their story, will gain them canonization. Approved as lover’s saints, other lovers will invoke
them. By rejecting life, the lovers get ‘’the most intense life’’. This paradox has been hinted at
earlier in the phoenix metaphor, which revolves around the fact that their love will fight through
everything and will rise and reborn from the ash . Here it receives a powerful dramatization. The
lovers in becoming hermits find that they have not lost the world, but have gained the world in each
other, now a more intense, more meaningful world. The poem ends on a tone of ‘’triumphant
achievement’’, The comparison of the lovers to the phoenix is connected to other comparisons of
them to burning tapers and the eagle and the dove. The phoenix bird burns like the tapers. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to die means to experience the consummation of the act of
love. The lovers after the act are the same. Their love is not exhausted in mere lust. This is their title
to canonization. Their love is like the phoenix. In addition the cocoon of their love is the resting
place , an urn, where they can lay their troubles outside from which they have fought for their love
and can appreciate their saintly love for each other .

Q2. How does Wordsworth explore paradoxes according to Brooks?

Paradox in poetry means that surface tensions in poetry can lead to seeming contradictions and
hypocrisy. His influential essay, The Language of Paradox, presents Brooks' argument for the
centrality of paradox by demonstrating that paradox is "a proper and inevitable language for
poetry."

Brooks cites William Wordsworth's poem, "It is a lovely evening, calm and free," as an example. He
begins by sketching out the outline The speaker is filled with worship, while his female companion
does not appear to be. This is the initial and surface level conflict.

The girl is more full of worship than the speaker precisely because she is always consumed with
continuous everlasting sympathy/empathy for nature, as opposed to the speaker, who becomes
tune with nature sporadically and temporarily, only while immersed in it. The girl is in communion
with Nature “all the year.” Her devotion is continual whereas the poet’s is sporadic and momentary.
But the paradox is not finished. It ‘informs’ the poem. The calm of the evening parallels the trappings
of the nun, visible to everyone, suggesting ‘Pharisaic holiness’ with which the girl’s careless
innocence, ‘a symbol of her continual secret worship’, stands in contrast.
According to Brooks, who closely examined Wordsworth's poetry "Composed upon Westminster
Bridge," the paradox in the poem lies not in its specifics but rather in the setting the speaker creates.
The speaker does not see London as a mechanical and artificial landscape, but rather as a place
made up entirely 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. The speaker is able to comment on London's beauty as he would a natural
phenomenon for this reason, and as Brooks points out, he can refer to the houses as "sleeping"
rather than "dead" because they too are gifted with the natural beauty.

Preface to Lyrical Ballads" to emphasise Wordsworth's preoccupation with paradox in order to

Q3."It is a positive unity, not a negative; it represents not a residue but an achieved harmony."
Explain this statement.

The positive account of what a poem is or does, according to Brooks, reveals that the essential
structure of a poem is quite different from the rational or logical structure of the statement. A
poem's structure can be compared to architecture, painting, ballet, or a musical composition, in
which a specific pattern of resolutions, balance, and harmony are developed through a specific
pattern in these activities. The poem's unity represents the balance of various forces. The poem
reaches its conclusion when the various tensions are resolved and harmoniously blended.

A poet, like a scientist, cannot dissect his experiences, distinguish one part from another, or classify
the various parts. Finally, the poet's duty is to write about and emphasise the unity of experience,
despite its diversity. He not only embellishes a poem with a superficial and perplexing rhetoric, but
he also imparts insight that preserves the unity of experience. In the poem's most serious moments,
experience triumphs over All of these characteristics, when combined in a poem, cannot be
paraphrased and used simply.

A poet, like a scientist, cannot dissect his experiences, distinguish one part from another, or classify
the various parts. Finally, the poet's duty is to write about and dramatise the unity of experience,
despite its diversity. He not only embellishes a poem with a superficial and perplexing rhetoric, but
he also imparts insight that preserves the unity of experience. At its most serious, experience
dominates over the seemingly contradictory and conflicting elements of experience, unifying them
into a new pattern .

As examined by Brooks the unity is achieved by a dramatic process, not a logical; it represents
equilibrium of forces, not a formula. It is proven as a dramatic conclusion, by its ability to resolve the
conflicts that have been accepted as the drama's oneness. This process of unity and coherence could
be applied to poems that have a limited logical as well as poetic unity. Brooks distinguishes between
an object and the overall beauty of the poem. The beauty of a poem is found in the pattern that can
be integrated within it to make the poem appear appealing or repulsive. He emphasises form and
content in the poem, which cannot be considered separately. To write a poem, the poet may employ
a variety of his expertise, including ambiguity, paradox, irony, complex of attitudes, metaphor,
drama, ironic shock and wonder, and the assertion of the union of opposites. All of these
characteristics, when combined in a poem, cannot be paraphrased and used plainly.

Q4. Is paraphrasing the real core of meaning which constitutes the essence of the poem? Explain
your stance.

Paraphrase, a restatement of a text passage or work giving the meaning in another form. In other
words, saying the same thing a different way, paraphrasing is an approach that we run into
sometimes in literature for a simplified version of explanation or rather a more modern tone . for
instance, the explanation of Shakespeare’s play. The tool of paraphrasing makes it easy to
understand the gist, however we might displace the core essence of the original text Regarding the
situation literary critic Clint Brooks raised this same issue in his landmark essay the heresy of
paraphrase.

According to the collection of essays entitled the well-wrought urn in it Brooks traces the English
poetic tradition in ten essays that span from the early Elizabethan era to the modern era subjecting
each of the poems to a close reading and analysis to determine the qualities that make them so
timeless and exceptional in the final and eleventh chapter entitled the heresy of paraphrase Brooks
ties all ten essays together in an effort to identify the commonality between the poems and
therefore what makes good poetry so good this is where our original discussion of paraphrase
becomes important in the essay Brooks comes to the conclusion that the defining characteristic of
the good poem is not its content but rather its form . It's important to distinguish here for a moment
between content and form, content represents the paraphrase herbal elements of the poem what it
is about in the simplest sense if we expand this idea. as Brooks implies, we could say that Hamlet is
about a young Danish prince who returns home to avenge his father's death at his uncle's hands this
would be the content of Hamlet what about the form. form for Brooks doesn't represent as it is
sometimes used the formal devices that are used in the work such as metaphor rhyme or structure
rather form for Brooks is the organic whole of the work in another essay he goes so far as to say that
form is meaning to explain the concept better. To elaborate we turn to the same comparison that
Brooks makes in his essay that of a poem or a work of literature to a piece of music, in music each
note is contextualized by the whole to emphasise it, once a song is established to be in a specific key
any note to play that isn't part of the key is going to sound dissent. however, the same notes played
within the context of the key they belong in will harmonize musically as a whole. Brooks arrange
good literature works on the same terms much like music each word, metaphor, character or other
characteristic of a work is contextualized by the rest of the work where it all harmonizes with itself
and as a whole. An expression like Hamlet's to be or not to be carries tremendous weight in the
context of Hamlet's existential meditations on death and the events he's experienced up until the
point in the play where these words are uttered and those words go on to affect things that occur in
the rest of the play. However, into a different context where it doesn't belong it would run the risk of
falling flat as such good literature becomes invulnerable to paraphrase by attempting to transmit a
works supposed message without the full context it was meant to reside in, we’re losing what
Brooks calls the unity of the work and reducing it to a lifeless paraphrase. In Brooks words when we
ask the question what does this poem say the only correct answer is this poem says what this poem
says ,this isn't to say there's no value in analysis or criticism of a literary work in fact Brooks himself
admits this especially considering that he's just devoted three hundred odd pages to the analysis of
ten different poems his point is rather that the goal of analysis should not be to convert the work
into some other more palatable form rather it should be to deepen the meaning of the text without
losing sight of its centrality in essence just as a verbal description of the intricacies of a symphony
can help us to appreciate it on a far deeper level without replacing the experience of hearing it .An
analysis of a literary work can do the same it cannot however replace the experience of reading the
work ourselves ,also there is nothing wrong in fishing a vocabulary that's more familiar or easier to
understand. For us paraphrases however are just tools designs to help us better appreciate the
astounding intricacies and depths of good literature not replace them.