How Does Brooks Use Metaphors In Intentional Fallacy

It is undeniable that these two articles, “Intentional Fallacy” written by Wimsatt/ Beardsley and “Irony as a Principle of Structure” written by Brooks, address two very different topics in order to discuss how they view the overall goals of New Criticism, but it also has to be understood that their topics culminate to several cohesive points. The first point being that a work should be closely read in order to understand the work itself not the context surrounding it, or in other words, understanding that we should disregard what the author intended but rather focus on what was actually achieved. Branching off of this first point, NC believes that a work should be able to stand alone and not rely on external historical/cultural materials,
He must use metaphors, which is the idea that Brooks discusses as his second requirement. Although Brooks poses the question “why doesn’t he (the author) say it directly and forthrightly… through his metaphors he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks not saying it at all,” he answers his own question by saying that had an author said it directly, it risks taking us out of the genre of poetry altogether and into a less complicated form (1044a). However, Brooks adds a caveat (the third requirement) to his own point about the necessity of using metaphors to go from the particular to the universal, “the elements of a poem are related to each other, not as blossoms are juxtaposed in a bouquet, but as blossoms are related to other growing parts of a plant” (1044a). This means that while you do use metaphors, they can’t be just a bunch of random things thrown together. In order to culminate to the universal, they must relate to each other and build into a bigger point; they must have an organic
However, he takes this point further by stating “what indeed would be a statement wholly devoid of an ironic potential—a statement that did not show any qualification of the context,” meaning that without having the possibility of irony, the context doesn’t matter (1045a). Without worrying about context you could qualify the poem as full of pure denotations, which is quite literally the opposite of poetry because it’s supposed to be filled with connotations. Connotations are what make a poem a poem. In fact irony “is not only an acknowledgement of the pressures of context. Invulnerability to irony is the stability of a context in which the internal pressures balance and mutually support each other” (1046a). In essence this is saying that any great work of literature is already including or accounts for the potential of what an audience might point out in the