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A truism in post-modern criticism holds that the world, and hence literature, is composed of binary oppo sites. But binary opposition is no new discovery. The healing power of balance between oppo sites can be traced to ancient times and the discordia Concors, often called concordia discourse, the little war of opposed qualities which can result in harmony. In Discordia Concors: The Wit of Metaphysical Poetry, Melissa Wanamaker traces the concept to Greek and Roman writers such as Horace and Virgil and finds it basic to the thinking of British metaphysical poets. Wanamaker discusses two approaches to discordia Concors in her study of seventeenth-century poetry. The first pattern she describes as "unity in multiplicity," a blending of oppo sites from which harmony emerges. The second she calls "a violent yoking of two opposites that logically contradict each other" (5) and connects to metaphysical wit in Donne and other poets.
The concept of discordia Concors, specifically Wanamaker' s first-mentioned version, lasted well into the eighteenth century. Bernard Man devili e includes a passage in "The Grumbling Hive" section of Fable of 'the Bees (17 '14) that demonstrates his acquaintance with it. Of Alexander Pope, Wasserman writes that discordia Concors or "the active harmonizing of differences, . . . permeates almost all of Pope's writings and is probably more central to his thought than the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being" (103). Indeed, Pope's juxtapositions of reason and passion, virtue and vice, nature and art, and selflove and social love in Essay on Man are direct adaptations of the discordia Concors. "Two Principles in human nature reign," writes Pope in Epistle Two of Essay on Man; "Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain./. . . On life's vast ocean diversely we sail, /Reason the card, but Passion is the gale" (5S-54, 10708). The principle would seem to apply also to Swift's juxtaposition of Yahoos and Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels. Later in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson defined discordia Concors (which he calls concordia discors) in his biography of Cowley in Lives of the Poets as "a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike" (200), a definition that agrees with the second description quoted from Wanamaker.
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