You can't literally understand what it really wants to express, but in fact its original intention is just the opposite of what it can literally understand, so you usually need to understand its intention from the context and context. This is a common social explanation, but it has different classical meanings in 19 and the 20th century or even earlier. Irony means that one thing refers to another, sometimes even irony.
Irony was originally a role in Greek drama, that is, pretending ignorance. He said a stupid thing in front of his clever opponent, but it was proved to be correct in the end, forcing him to give up. Socrates, Tessa of ancient Greece, played this role in Plato's dialogues, mocking smart people who are self-righteous.
Irony shows a contradictory semantic state: it adopts the expression of innuendo and transfer. It began in ancient Greece, and then developed continuously, and gradually became a rhetorical method in rhetoric.
Irony feature
The most striking feature of irony is that the actual connotation of a sentence contradicts its superficial meaning. From the perspective of poetry, as Richards said, irony comes from the balance of opposites, that is, aspects that usually conflict with each other, repel each other and offset each other, and are combined into a balanced state in poetry. This poetic feature of irony is ultimately accomplished by the role of context.
Irony in poetry is first and foremost a language skill. From the perspective of using language skills, irony can be divided into exaggerated narrative, irony, poetic theory and so on.
In the text interpretation of poetry, there is also irony formed at the theme level: that is, the complex theme meaning of this paper has two or more complementary expressions of opposites, forming a strong irony.
Baidu Encyclopedia-Irony