We may enumerate several distinct senses in which, for Brooks, poetry is "dramatic" rather than propositional. (1) Poems communicate to the reader not directly but through the agency of a dramatic persona engaged in responding to a situation, whose speeches are arranged so as to be "in character" rather than objectively true. (2) Poetry is not organized according to the model of logical exposition but seeks to dramatize prelogical, associative states of consciousness…. (3) "Any 'statement' made in the poem bears the pressure of the context and has its meaning modified by the context." Therefore, "poems never contain abstract statements." Just as any single character in a drama interacts with other characters and the setting and is influenced by them, so any statement in a lyric interacts with its verbal context and its modified accordingly. Philosophical generalizations must be read "as if they were speeches in a drama," expressing a partial viewpoint which is not to be identified with the assertion of the poem as a whole. The poem as a whole is a "little drama," whose structure of ironically counterpoised and conflicting attitudes resembles the conflict-filled structure of drama. (pp. 88-9)

If Brooks were merely arguing that poetry characteristically implies its meanings through the play of dramatic juxtapositions rather than relying on overt generalizations, it would not be difficult to follow his point. It might be objected that such a view is more applicable to a certain kind of poetry than to all poetry, but his theory would nevertheless be clear: poetry asserts ideas, but it does so through implication and indirection rather than explicitly. Although Brooks at times appears to be saying only this, he often goes much farther by suggesting that it is improper to talk of poetry as asserting or implying any statement whatsoever. The ambiguities in his theory become particularly evident in his treatment of the so-called "heresy of paraphrase." (p. 89)

Brooks presumably means to say that … paraphrased ideas are in the poem in some sense, but that when we paraphrase them we reduce to a set of abstractions what are actually, in the poem itself, complex dramatic actions—experience embodied rather than ideas about experience…. In such formulations, Brooks seeks to credit poetry with an intellectual substance while averting the reductive implications of equating poetic meaning wholly with a set of stated ideas. But instead of solving the problem by seeing poetry as both a means of "testing" and "stating" ideas, Brooks indulges in the characteristic either/or of antipropositional theory, counterposing assertion and dramatization as irreconcilables. No one would deny that poetry "tests" ideas or that it deals with the way human beings "may come to terms with" ideas. But the rhetorical strategy in which "testing" and "coming to terms with" line up in opposition to "stating" and "generalizing'" introduces a specious and unneccessary antithesis. Ideas, unlike physical substances, are not inert; to "test" an idea is to become committed to some intellectual point of view which emerges from the test. Of course, Brooks has in mind the dialectical qualification and ironic counterthrusts typical of the poetry he most admires, but he forgets that qualifications and revisions do not negate ideas but rather make them more subtle and complex.

Because he assigns "statement" to the nonpoetic pole of his antithesis, Brooks cannot finally make clear the connection between a critical paraphrase of a poem and the poem's meaning. In fact, it is unclear how there can be any connection if Brooks's assumptions are granted. The dramatic essence of the poem would seem to elude rational formulation entirely, so that no paraphrase could be anything but arbitrary and imposed. One paraphrase would then be as good as any other. (pp. 91-2)

I admit to uneasiness in making these criticisms, since Brooks is manifestly not an advocate of impressionism, and the view that one critical formulation is as good as any other would be repugnant to him. Often he appears to be objecting only to the schoolmarmish reduction of poetry to prettified prose statement, surely a legitimate objection. But there are tendencies in his thinking which force him toward a position which he himself would regard as untenable. As in Richards, the uncertain and ambiguous status of the paraphrasable "scaffolding" is symptomatic of a deeper problem, an inability to determine the function of intellectual content in poetry. Brooks does not wish to banish ideas from poetry and on the contrary often speaks as if the problem of poetic meaning derives from the fact that poetry asserts so many ideas rather than none at all. But having denied that poetry asserts anything, and having argued that the paraphrase takes us outside the poem, Brooks is left with no means of accounting for poetry's intellectual substance. It is as if the reader were left standing on a scaffolding with the building nowhere in sight.

This inability to account for the place of ideas in poetry seriously compromises Brooks's well-intentioned advocacy of the cognitive claims of poetry…. Evidently Brooks is reluctant to dismiss considerations of intellectual and cognitive belief, but his conviction of the fallacy of assuming a propositional content in poetry makes it difficult for him to justify claiming for himself the kind of cognitive theory which he recognizes to be a needed corrective to emotivism.

The consequence of Brooks's denial that poetry makes assertions is that he is forced to seek an intrinsic or contextual criterion by which poetry can be judged, a criterion which will not force the critic to go "outside the poem." His most notable approach to such a criterion is represented in his "principle of dramatic propriety," according to which the statements made in a poem, "including those which appear to be philosophical generalizations—are to be read as if they were speeches in a drama. Their relevance, their propriety, their rhetorical force, even their meaning, cannot be divorced from the context in which they are embedded…. Brooks adds that the principle of dramatic propriety "is the only one legitimately to be invoked in any case." By adopting this principle rather than one which holds the poem responsible for the empirical truth or falsity of its statements, we "insure our dealing with the problem of truth at the level on which it is really relevant to literature, for we have "waived the question of the scientific or philosophic truth of the lines." (pp. 92-5)

Brooks vacillates over the question of coherence and correspondence, and in fact such vacillation reappears in all of Brooks's disscussions of poetic criteria, poetic truth, and the problem of belief. On the one hand, Brooks disqualifies "abstract philosophical yardsticks," which encourage critics to go "outside the poem" to judge it. On the other hand, borrowing his terms from Eliot, Brooks says that a good poem is one whose unity is "coherent," "mature," and "founded on the facts of experience," although he is careful to reject Eliot's implication that these qualities are to be sought in some implied propositional content. Brooks attempts to make Eliot's case "stronger still by frankly developing the principle of dramatic propriety suggested by his statement and by refraining from attempting to extract any proposition from the poem at all." This he proposes to achieve by regarding as acceptable "any poem whose unifying attitude is one which really achieves unity ('coherence'), but which unifies, not by ignoring but by taking into account the complexities and apparent contradictions of the situation concerned ('mature' and 'founded on the facts of experience')." Brooks claims that he has followed the principle of dramatic propriety here and thus obviated any need to go outside the organization of the poem, but it is scarcely possible to take these claims seriously. Clearly, to the degree that one judges poetry according to whether it is mature and founded on the facts of experience one is judging it no longer merely as speech in a drama but as a kind of commentary, and the criteria of judgment cannot be called intrinsic. Brooks's refusal to recognize this fact frequently leads him to make baffling assertions…. (pp. 95-6)

Much of Brooks's confusion appears to be a consequence of his gratuitous separation between "abstract philosophical yardsticks" and "the facts of experience," a separation which … is traceable to the Bergsonian assumptions about abstract ideas…. What is a critic's sense of the facts of experience, after all, if it is not his "philosophy"? Brooks appears to think he can circumvent the need for abstract philosophical criteria by appealing to down-to-earth-sounding qualities like depth, maturity, and tough-mindedness, when, of course, he merely introduces his own preferred set of abstract yardsticks…. (p. 97)

But here it might reasonably be objected that Brooks's difficulties stem primarily from excessive eagerness to relate the poem directly to the world of human values and knowledge, and that he would have strengthened his position had he remained faithful to his principle of dramatic propriety and his analogy between a poem and a speech in a drama. In other words, Brooks's vulnerability lies not, as I have been arguing, in his refusal to grant assertion to poetry but rather in his appeal to criteria like maturity, tough-mindeness, and the facts of experience, which covertly presuppose that poems do assert. If Brooks had rested his case on the contextualist or "structuralist" principle of dramatic propriety, he would have avoided the confusions and inconsistencies for which he has been taken to task here. (pp. 97-8)