A daring statement which unites seemingly contradictory words but which on closer examination proves to have unexpected meaning and truth (”The longest way round is the shortest way home”; “Life is death and death is life”). The structure of p. is similar to the oxymoron (q.v.), which unites two contradictory concepts into a third (”heavy lightness”), a favorite strategy of Petrarchism (q.v.). Ps. are esp. suited to an expression of the unspeakable in religion, mysticism, and poetry. First discussed in its formal elements in Stoic philosophy and cl. rhet., the p. became more widely used after Sebastian Frank ( 280 Paradoxa from the Holy Scriptures, 1534) and has always retained an appeal for the Christian mode of expression, as in Luther and Pascal. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Kierkegaard considered God’s becoming man the greatest p. for human existence.
The most famous literary example of sustained p. is the Praise of Folly by Erasmus (1511). In the baroque (q.v.) period, p. became a central figure; it is particularly important in metaphysical poetry (q.v.), esp. the poetry and prose of Donne, who makes frequent use of p. and paradoxical lang. in the Paradoxes and Problems and Songs and Sonets (1633, 1635). The p. is manifest in the lit. of the 17th and 18th cs. in its antithetical verbal structure rather than as argument. Diderot in his late dialogue Le Paradoxe sur le comédien (1778)—on the art of acting but with far-reaching implications for poetry—holds that an actor should not feel the passion he expresses but should transcend direct imitation and rise to the conception of an intellectual model. Everything in him should become a controlled work of art, and the emotional state should be left to the spectator. In the romantic period, Schlegel ( Fragments, 1797) called the p. a basic form of human experience and linked it closely with poetry and irony (q.v.). De Quincey in his Autobiographical Sketches (1834-53) argued that the p. is a vital element in poetry reflecting the paradoxical nature of the world which poetry imitates. Nietzsche made p. a key term of human experience and of his own literary expression. In the lit. of the 20th c., p. often fuses with the absurd, which can be interpreted as an intensified expression of the p.
The term p. is widely employed in 20th-c. crit., esp. in the work of the New Criticism (q.v.). Cleanth Brooks discusses it in The Well Wrought Urn (1947, esp. ch. 1) as a form of indirection which is distinctively characteristic of poetic lang. and structure. As his example, Wordsworth (”Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”), illustrates, Brooks does not use p. in the strict antithetical sense but gives it an unusually broad range by showing that good poems are written from insights that enlarge or startlingly modify our commonplace conceptions and understandings, esp. those residing in overly simplistic distinctions; this “disruptive” function of poetic lang. is precisely what Brooks calls paradoxical. Since the degree of paradoxical disruption is an index of poetic meaning, p. and poetry assume a very close affinity with one another. Subsequently, this New Critical emphasis on p. was taken up in deconstruction (q.v.). Paul de Man argued that the insistence by the New Critics on the unity, harmony, and identity of a poetic work was irreconcilable with their insistence on irony, p., and ambiguity—or rather, that the insistence on unity was the “blindness” of the New Criticism, whereas the insistence on irony and p. was its “insight.” Theory thus establishes a close relationship between p. and irony.
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