3. From Cleanth Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase" (1947)

The conventional terms are much worse than inadequate: they are positively misleading in their implication that the poem constitutes a "statement" of some sort, the statement being true or false, and expressed more or less clearly or eloquently or beautifully; for it is from this formula that most of the common heresies about poetry derive. (p. 962)

For the imagery and the rhythm are not merely the instruments by which this fancied core-of-meaning-which-can-be-expressed-in-a-paraphrase is directly rendered. Even in the simplest poem their mediation is not positive and direct. Indeed, whatever statement we may seize upon as incorporating the "meaning" of the poem, immediately the imagery and the rhythm seem to set up tensions with it, warping and twisting it, qualifiying and revising it. (p. 962)

The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the rational or logical structure of the "statement" which we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations developed through a temporal scheme.
       Or to move still closer to poetry, the structure of a poem resembles that of a play. . . . (pp. 964-65)

If the structure of poetry is a structure of the order described, that fact may explain (if not justify) the frequency with which I have had to have recourse . . . to terms like irony and paradox. . . . irony is the most general term that we have for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context. . . . Morever, irony is our most general term for indicating that recognition of incongruities--which, again, perfaces all poetry to a degree far beyond what our conventional criticism has been heretofore willing to allow. (pp. 966-67)

4. John Crowe Ransom, from The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), pp. 298-303:

What sort of liberties does the poet take with a discourse when he sets it to meter? And what sort of discourse is prepared to permit those liberties?

An argument which admits of alteration in order that it may receive a meter must be partly indeterminate. The argument cannot be maintained exactly as determined by its own laws, for it is going to be un-determined by the meter.

Conversely, a metrical form must be partly indeterminate if it proposes to embody an argument. It is useless to try to determine it closely in advance, for the argument will un-determine it. . . .

I offer a graph, which will be of course an oversimplification, to show the parts which meaning and meter play in the act of composition.

DM stands for determinate meaning, or such of the intended meaning as succeeds in being adhered to; it may be fairly represented by the logical paraphrase of the poem. IM stands for indeterminate meaning, or that part of the final meaning which took shape not according to its own logical necessity but under metrical compulsion; it may be represented by the poem's residue of meaning which does not go into the logical paraphrase. DS stands for the determinate sound-structure, or the meter; and IS stands for whatever phonetic character the sounds have assumed which is in no relation to the meter. . . .

For the sake of the pictorial image, I assume the final poem to be the body of language lying between the intersecting arcs at the center; the one arc (on the left) representing the extreme liberties which meaning has taken with meter, and the other arc (on the right) representing the extreme liberties which meter has taken with meaning. . . .

[Poetry] is a discourse which does not bother too much about the perfection of its logic; and does bother a great deal, as if it were life and death, about the positive quality of that indeterminate thing which creeps in by the back door of metrical necessity. I suggest the closest possible study of IM, the indeterminate meaning.