In literature, the paradox is an anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas for the sake of striking exposition or unexpected insight.
It functions as a method of literary composition and analysis that involves examining apparently contradictory statements and drawing conclusions either to reconcile them or to explain their presence.
Brooks ends his essay with a reading of John Donne's poem The Canonization, which uses a paradox as its underlying metaphor.
This seems to parody both love and religion, but in fact it combines them, pairing unlikely circumstances and demonstrating their resulting complex meaning.
Brooks points also to secondary paradoxes in the poem: the simultaneous duality and singleness of love, and the double and contradictory meanings of "die" in Metaphysical poetry (used here as both sexual union and literal death).
In Brooks's use of the paradox as a tool for analysis, however, he develops a logical case as a literary technique with strong emotional effect.
Irony for Brooks is "the obvious warping of a statement by the context"[6] whereas paradox is later glossed as a special kind of qualification that "involves the resolution of opposites.
For one, Brooks believes that the very structure of poetry is paradox, and ignores the other subtleties of imagination and power that poets bring to their poems.
"[7] Brooks, in leaning on the crutch of paradox, only discusses the truth poetry can reveal, and speaks nothing about the pleasure it can give.
The argument for the centrality of paradox (and irony) becomes a reductio ad absurdum and is therefore void (or at least ineffective) for literary analysis.