[A Rhetoric of Irony] is a good book. It quotes a number of long examples, arguing from them in detail "how we manage to share ironies and why we often do not," with mild discouragement for current follies on the subject; and the literary judgments (as apart from philosophical or historical ones) seem to me right every time…. I found it all the more extraordinary that what I had long thought "irony" to mean does not get mentioned at all.

The basic situation for the trope of irony, without which it would not have been invented, involves three people. There is a speaker, "A," an understanding hearer, "B," and a censor who can be outwitted, a stupid tyrant, "C." A successful use of the pure form is not very frequent, because people in the position of "C" aren't such fools as you think. However, it is even more satisfactory when "C," though he knows what is going on, dare not complain—because the effect would be a ridiculous confession, or because the only available penalty would appear so excessive as to make him unpopular….

Or the ironist may be taking a balanced view, trying to be friends with both sides, "B" and "C"; but even so one of them can be picked out as holding the more official or straight-faced belief, and the literal meaning will support that one. If this condition did not hold, there would be no impulse to use the form. I warmly agree with Professor Booth that the term "irony" gets applied much too loosely, so that it has become almost useless. His conception of "stable irony" is a good approach to what we need—he calls ironies "stable or fixed, in the sense that once a reconstruction of meaning has been made, the reader is not then invited to undermine it with further demolitions and reconstructions." But "stable irony" is not nearly so easy to recognize as the basic situation.

This basic situation, although rare, is immediately striking, perhaps because our minds accept it as archetypal. (p. 37)

It is only misleading, I think, to say that Shakespeare intended irony in the sonnet beginning "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." He claims rather loudly to be telling the flat truth; why must we think he is doing something else? Professor Booth finds him engaged in a literary quarrel, jeering at other poets whose style, or rather whose metaphors, he finds "unreal."… But a fuss of this kind would be unlike him …; and Shakespeare goes on using these metaphors himself without worry, at any rate in plays. On the other hand, his feelings about this particular woman, as becomes almost gruesomely clear in later sonnets, are painfully mixed. He does not admire or respect her but has an unappeasable craving for her, and her fascination is not to be explained away as merely "physical." So in this case the exalted language of love poetry would be unreal, though he will not deny that she is "rare."

To suppose an irony is a distraction here, because the poet is struggling to make a plain report. On the other hand, the caption on a poster for a Relief Fund …, "Ignore the Hungry and they'll go away" …, is a plain case of "implied quotation"—what they say, the bad people who won't contribute; and there is no hint of unwilling obedience to a censor, so it is not irony. That is why it feels so flat—surely it would be very ineffective propaganda. The "Warning to Children" of Robert Graves is a metaphysical poem, giving the children a direct insight into the fascinating or horrifying mystery of the world; it is not even a dramatic irony, as there is no suggestion that the grownups understand the world any better than they. Professor Booth extracts an idea that "the ironic Truth" is amused as the children "walk into the eternal trap."… The poem does not threaten, and I think this bogeyman insinuation comes up because Professor Booth feels that his own picture of the world has been made to seem inadequate.

His reactions to non-Christian religious implications in literature often feel to me strained. The poem "Hap" by Thomas Hardy … is classed as a "stable irony," and "everyone would call the poem ironic, I suppose." Professor Booth used to feel that the poem was a case of "whimpering," but does not now. But "Hap" is meant to tell a plain truth. Hardy says that he would prefer to believe in God, who must plainly be evil if actual, because then he could defy God, heroically; but he now realizes that all his bad luck has come to him by sheer chance, not as the work of an evil intelligence. The poet's "assertion about the irony of existence" (says Professor Booth) is "as unquestioned (rhetorically speaking) as if he were preaching a non-ironic message on behalf of belief in Jehovah." Thus the Professor insinuates, for well-brought-up students I suppose, that any expression of disbelief in Jehovah is always inherently ironic. And yet there is a lot of documentation to prove that Hardy really meant it.

This sonnet is very badly written, so badly that it cannot be admired at all, except for a kind of hammered-out sincerity. And I would agree that the feelings of Hardy were painfully mixed, so that he could not help continuing to hate God, and to blame God for all cases of bad luck, even after the relief of learning that God did not exist. When told that many readers thought he believed in his "Spirit Ironical," a devil who arranges to trip us up, he was piteously eager to rebuff the accusation. By giving the characters in his novels such improbably bad luck, he explained, he was only warning the reader to prepare for bad luck, as lawyers and businessmen are expected to do. So the words of the sonnet are not ironical at all, and when Professor Booth read them as "whimpering" he was misled by a false expectation. (pp. 37-8)

The last chapter is about "infinite instabilities," such as the belief that the whole universe is inherently absurd, and I take it that these are presumed to be expressed by irony. Professor Booth writes with an attractive admiration for the work of Samuel Beckett, while finding absurd almost everything that critics find to say in his praise. Beckett seems to express almost total negation, or at least to say that no writing has any value, and yet he does it "often with great comic power and always with poignancy."… He cannot be giving a courageously truthful picture of his own mental condition; he maintains "a productive and obviously exhilarating verbal life while cashing checks and resisting the debilitating effects of world fame."…

It strikes me that all this, though generously meant, gives a rather debunking impression; and surely the meanings, so far as they are ironical, are something less than exalted. Efforts to express the mystery of the world have usually involved contradictions, but not all contradictions are ironies, and the homely grumbling of the underdog is bound to seem an odd instrument for so high a purpose. By this last chapter the book completes its trajectory, like a rocket; and yet almost at the cost of giving in to the opponents. Besides, when Beckett is writing well in the manner described I do not get the feeling of irony. I think that the definition of it needs to be narrowed. (p. 38)

The generalization or blurring of the idea of Irony, which is now almost established, allows a literary critic to reinterpret any standard author so as to fit his own ethos and opinions; the procedure seems to have no limit, other than what the readers will bear. (p. 39)