The Canonization

New Critic Cleanth Brooks used the poem, along with Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man" and William Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802", to illustrate his argument for paradox as central to poetry.

[1] In critic Clay Hunt's view, the entire poem gives "a new twist to one of the most worn conventions of Elizabethan love poetry" by expanding "the lover–saint conceit to full and precise definition", a comparison that is "seriously meant".

Cleanth Brooks argues that the phoenix, which means rebirth, is a particularly apt analogy, since it combines the imagery of birds and of burning candles, and adequately expresses the power of love to preserve, though passion consumes.

In his collection of critical essays, The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks writes that a poet "must work by contradiction and qualification," and that paradox "is an extension of the normal language of poetry, not a perversion of it".

According to Brooks, there are superficially many ways to read "The Canonization," but the most likely interpretation is that despite his witty tone and extravagant metaphors, Donne's speaker takes both love and religion seriously.

The paradox is Donne's "inevitable instrument", allowing him with "dignity" and "precision" to express the idea that love may be all that is necessary for life.

[4] Guillory also writes that "the truth of the paradoxes in question", here the biblical quotations Brooks uses to support his claim that the language of religion is full of paradox, "beg[s] to be read otherwise", with literary implications in keeping with Brooks's agenda for a "resurgent literary culture".

[3] To Culler, however, this self-referentiality reveals "an uncanny neatness that generates paradox, a self-reference that ultimately brings out the inability of any discourse to account for itself", as well as the "failure" of being and doing to "coincide".