Brooks, ''Irony as a Principle of Structure''

Future Students Beware for I Now Hold the Ace in the Deck!

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AngelaPalumbo/2009/02/from_irony_as_a_principle.html

"(The Petrarchan lover, for example, as Shakespeare well knew, frequently found a beautiful and cruel mistress)" (Brookes 87).

Irony is an automatic response

"'What is the meaning of 'Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can'? It can mean: Since my own hands are bloody, I have no right to condemn the rest. It can mean: I know that man can love justice, even though his hands are bloody, for there is blood on mine...'" (Brooks 91). Click here!

“On the contrary, he [the poet] must establish the detail, must abide by the details, and through his realization of the details attain to whatever general meaning he can attain…For here it is the tail that wags the dog.”
-From Cleanth Brooks’s “Irony as a Principle of Structure” in Donald Keesey’s Contexts for Criticism, page 84-85 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/EricaGearhart/2009/02/understanding_formalist_critic.html

the DRAMA
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/BethanyMerryman/2009/02/there-are-no-small-roles.html

It is Ironic

“Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks not saying it at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threaten to take us out of poetry all together” (Brooks 85).
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JennaMiller/2009/02/it-is-ironic.html

“A Tired and Drained Language”
“The modern poet has the task of rehabilitating a tired and drained language so that it can convey meanings once more with force and with exactitude” (Brooks 90).
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/GretaCarroll/2009/02/a_tired_and_drained_language.html

Make sure you water the plant when I'm gone.http://blogs.setonhill.edu/EllenEinsporn/2009/02/make_sure_you_water_the_plant.html

sorry, link didn't work. Here it is again:
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/EllenEinsporn/2009/02/make_sure_you_water_the_plant.html

"The beauty of the poem is the flowering of the whole plant, and needs the stalk, the leaf, and the hidden roots" (Brooks 85).

"Poetry must carry us beyond the abstract creed into the very matrix out of which, and from which our creeds are abstracted."

"...the elements of a poem are related to each other, not as blossoms juxtaposed in a bouquet, but as the blossoms are related to the other parts of a growing plant.