Cleanth Brooks identifies the heresy of paraphrase in the eponymous chapter from The Well Wrought Urn, a work of the New Criticism.
The meaning of the poem is embodied in its sensual aspects of the arrangement, sound, and rhythm of the words, which are not translateable (an argument also made by Benedetto Croce).
He compared a poem to a drama, which draws meaning from how it enacts ambiguity, irony, and paradox.
[4] Multiple proponents of New Criticism supported the idea that poetry cannot be paraphrased or translated without losing essential meaning.
Among the critics who agreed with the heresy of paraphrase were Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, William Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, Murrey Krieger, and I.A.