Like the "new criticism", Brooks hopes to turn literary criticism into an "applied science" so that he can criticize poetry rigorously, accurately and meticulously. On the one hand, he thinks that poetry is not mysterious and unsolvable, and it is an objective object that can be read and analyzed. On the other hand, Brooks believes that poetry is not only the product of the poet and his social history and culture, but also the source of its significance. The appeal of a work should come from the poem itself. Therefore, the author analyzes the sanctification of Dunn, Milton's happy man-thoughtful man, Gray's Mourning at the Grave, Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality, Keats's Ode to the Ancient Greek Urn and so on. And found that there are many similarities: meaning. Of course, the structure here is not a fixed pattern or form of poetry, but a "structure of meaning, evaluation and interpretation", which is the principle of overall unity to balance and coordinate the emotion, attitude and meaning of poetry. Brooks' ontological study of the "structure" of poetry also conforms to the "organic holism" he has always emphasized. Therefore, the analysis of poetry must not be divorced from the context of poetry itself, that is, the whole text. However, if we want to explore the structure of poetry, we must resort to such things as paradox, irony and metaphor.
In fact, in Brooks' early works, the function of metaphor has been repeatedly explained, but in The Exquisite Urn, the function of metaphor is further amplified and added to the structure of poetry. So the essence of poetry is metaphor, and metaphor is analogy rather than logic in the final analysis. In addition, metaphor becomes an attitude imperceptibly, which can not only represent the relationship between vehicle and metaphor, but also express the overall structure of poetry. In addition, Brooks' concept of irony is similar to the concepts in Irony-A Structural Principle and Irony and Irony Poetry, both of which are related to the poetic context, that is, the actual meaning is different from the structural principle of literal meaning of language.
The most important thing in this book is "paradox". Brooks defined in the first chapter "The Language of Paradox": "The language of poetry is the language of paradox." In his view, scientific language rejects paradox, so it has the characteristics of clarity, abstraction and stability, while "the poet is a person who constantly explores the potential of language", so poetic language is concrete, imaginative and even conflicting and destructive. Paradox is a language that seems absurd, but actually tells the truth. Poets will oppose the daily meaning of language in their creation, so that "words constantly modify each other and then violate their meanings in the dictionary", thus producing poetry in the collision and confrontation of poetic words. In this regard, it is clumsy to ask "what does poetry really convey", because poetry not only conveys a certain meaning, on the contrary, any good poem will reject those attempts to interpret it.
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