Close-reading is a form of literary analysis that gained popularity under the New Critics of the 1930s and 40s.

Close reading a form of critical formalism concerned with the text alone by paying attention to conceits, paradoxes within verbal arrangements, and structure seizes the very words, patterns, and ambiguities to interpret the meaning of a text. According to Brook, a New Critic, Paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry. Write a coherent critical essay showing the effects of paradoxes though contradictory in revealing the meaning of John Donnes poem Canonization. On the surface, a paradox is a statement that seems to be self-contradictory or oxymoronic, but for many critics, the best kind of poetry is paradoxical. Be it a verbal paradox such as in die / rise, peace / rage or a paradox of situation in a way that how could a lover drowned in sensuality and physicality be compared to a saint the most spiritual being; it is an apparent contradiction which nevertheless is true and cannot be resolved. The contradiction has a chocking value on the reader and carries a big part of the meaning. According to Brook, paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry. It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently, the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox. In one of his essays, he analyzes John Donnes Canonization as a good example of paradox in poetry in revealing its meaning. At first, the title and the content imply a central paradox since the title suggests the canonization of a saint while the content suggests sexuality. The answer is that paradox solves the problem. One type of sainthood is that of love. Sexuality would not contradict with sainthood but leads to it. Love makes them saints in a sense that they can both unite physically and spiritually. The speaker asks his addressee to be quiet, and let him love. If the addressee cannot hold his tongue, the speaker tells him to criticize him for other shortcomings (other than his tendency to love): his palsy, his gout, his "five grey hairs," or his ruined fortune. He admonishes the addressee to look to his own mind and his own wealth and to think of his position and copy the other nobles ("Observe his Honor, or his Grace, / or the King's real, or his stamped face / Contemplate.") The speaker does not care what the addressee says or does, as long as he lets him love. The speaker has turned his back to all materialistic things and worldly concerns in life; he has in fact renounced the world of such concerns, just such as a Saint does. The 1st stanza shows the 1st side of a conceit that is to be a saint. There is an exhibition of courtly love conventions by way of ridiculing them by cynical attitude achieved through exaggeration. The speaker asks rhetorically, "Who's injured by my love?" He says that his sighs have not drowned ships, his tears have not flooded land, his colds have not chilled spring, and the heat of his veins has not added to the list of those killed by the plague. Soldiers still find wars and lawyers still find litigious men, regardless of the emotions of the speaker and his lover. The speaker tells his addressee to "Call us what you will," for it is love that makes them so. He says that the addressee can "Call her one, me another fly," and that they are also like candles ("tapers") [far fetched conceits], which burn by feeding upon their own selves ("and at our own cost die") and in both cases we are attracted to each other just as a fly, is attracted by lights. We die and rise the same. In each other, the lovers find the eagle and the dove [ far

fetched conceit] for in each of them there is the eagle and the dove. When one is on strong passion and desire and upon consummation becomes a dove [Love when not consumed is a strong passion and rage and when consumed it is like a dove and peace paradox], and together ("we two being one") they illuminate the riddle of the phoenix [far fetched conceits], for they die and rise the same [ paradox]," just as the phoenix does-though unlike the phoenix, it is love that slays and resurrects them. Just like the phoenix the two lovers fall in the heat of their passion, and they are mingled together to seem as one body, so there are no different sexes but neutral. Any passion rise to a climax (love making) after which it starts to cool down (die is a pun for sexual orgasm) then becomes stable. After the consumption of love, passion is reborn once again (rise). This love shows that they are holy and they make miracles. The lover drowned in sensuality is compared to a saint the most spiritual being [far fetched conceit]. He says that they can die by love if they are not able to live by it, and if their legend is not fit "for tombs and hearse," it will be fit for poetry, and "We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms." A well-wrought urn does as much justice to a dead man's ashes as does a gigantic tomb; and by the same token, the poems about the speaker and his lover will cause them to be "canonized," admitted to the sainthood of love. The speaker doesnt mind about the destiny of his body, but he minds about his love. He doesnt care of having half-acre tombs, but if their bodies are burned and the ashes put in a vase, this will fit them too. Ashes of saints are only preserved. All those who hear their story will invoke the lovers, saying that countries, towns and courts "beg from above / A pattern of your love!" In this way they become canonized for love, because they are rising from the dead (miracle) being the model for perfect love. Saints are supposed to turn their backs for any material delight and this is what happens to him in the first stanza that puts him in the common qualities of saints. This is an emersion in the absolute physicality and sexuality. They both live in one elses body. Love has made their bodies a hermitage of one another (paradox). How could they speak of such a holy place for sexual acts? This is an example of paradox when it is utmost sexual; it becomes spiritual. To make a lover describe the act of love with this sensuality to a saint is then a far-fetched conceit where the two terms of the comparison are yoked by violence. This is to make themselves self sufficient in the knowledge of the world that everything in the world is to be found in each of them for they are each the world. You are the whole world that shrinks in your eyes and image. The eyes are the mirror that reflects the whole world with their shape and are like spies that reject the world to see all that they desire [mirror that reflects & spies that hides constitute a paradox]. Ask God to give the lovers a model of our love so that others may love as we did for we are saints now. The innumerable paradoxes in Donnes Canonization between physical and spiritual love did not contradict but presented another dimension of one another. However, the paradox between the lovers world and the outside world created the tension that led to the climax in the poem. Moreover, such literary critical analysis the close reading of the general structure of the poem as adopted by the New Critics is an efficient technique to reveal its meaning.