ABSTRACT
Emb?ssy in London. In addition to those already mentioned, his publications include Literary Criticism: a short history (New York, 1957), written in collaboration with W. K. Wimsatt, and William Faulkner: the Yoknapatawpha Country (1963). CROSS REFERENCES: 9. 1. A. Richards
12. William Empson 18. John Crowe Ransom 20. Paul Valery
COMMENTARY: Lee T. Lemon, The Partial Critics (1965), pp. 139-50. R. S. Crane, 'The critical monism of Cleanth Brooks', in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1957)
Few of us are prepared to accept the statement that the language of poetry is the language of paradox. Paradox is the language of sophistry, hard, bright, witty; it is hardly the language of the soul. We are willing to allow that paradox is a permissible weapon which a Chesterton may on occasion exploit. We may permit it in epigram, a special subvariety of poetry; and in satire, which though useful, we are hardly willing to allow to be poetry at all. Our prejudices force us to regard paradox as intellectual rather than emotional, clever rather than profound, rational rather than divinely irrational.
