The Heresy of Paraphrase

Origin

Cleanth Brooks identifies the heresy of paraphrase in the eponymous chapter from The Well Wrought Urn, a work of the New Criticism.

Folklore

An oft-repeated story illustrating the heresy of paraphrase is that T.S. Eliot was once asked the meaning of a line from his poem Ash Wednesday. Instead of paraphrasing his own poetry, he repeated the line.

Reception

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. Richards. Yvor Winters and Stanley Cavell participated in this debate during the 20th century.

In his analysis of the heresy of paraphrase, Ernie Lepore concluded that some aspects of poetry, like its form and sound, are not possible to paraphrase. He noted that there is some consensus that translations of poems must sacrifice literal meaning or sensual effect, or some combination of both, when translated. He put forth the idea of a simple refutation to the heresy of paraphrase: that it is possible to introduce a new expression that means exactly the same thing as the expression being paraphrased. The reason the simple refutation does not work is because there is a distinction between expressions and "their vehicles of articulation."

Writing in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Alex Neill argues that poems can be paraphrased. The meaning of a poem is often at least partially contained in the "thoughts it articulates," which can be paraphrased. Metaphors can be paraphrased, and implicit meaning in a poem can be made explicit. Even if there are aspects of a poem that are not paraphrasable, such as sound and form, no one expects a paraphrase to contain a poem's exact meaning. However, a paraphrase cannot replicate the same beauty as the poem it is based on.

References

Works cited

References

1. (1947). "The Well Wrough Urn". Harcourt Brace.
2. (2012). "The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics". Princeton University Press.
3. (20 May 2024). "Aesthetics - Perception, Beauty, Art". Britannica.
4. (2009). "The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics". Oxford University Press.