Paradox (literature)
Paradox, however, is essential to the structure and being of the poem. In "The Well Wrought Urn" Brooks shows that paradox was so essential to poetic meaning that paradox was almost identical to poetry. According to literary theorist Leroy Searle, Brooks' use of paradox emphasized the indeterminate lines between form and content. "The form of the poem uniquely embodies its meaning," and the language of the poem "affects the reconciliation of opposites or contraries." While irony functions within the poem, paradox often refers to the meaning and structure of the poem and is thus inclusive of irony. This existence of opposites or contraries and the reconciliation thereof is poetry and the meaning of the poem.
Epimenides paradox
If we assume the statement is false and that Epimenides is lying about all Cretans being liars, then there must exist at least one Cretan who is honest. This does not lead to contradiction since it is not required that this Cretan be Epimenides. This means that Epimenides can say the false statement that all Cretans are liars while knowing at least one honest Cretan and lying about this particular Cretan. Hence, from the assumption that the statement is false, it does not follow that the statement is true. So we can avoid a paradox as seeing the statement "all Cretans are liars" as a false statement, which is made by a lying Cretan, Epimenides. The mistake made by Thomas Fowler (and many other people) above is to think that the negation of "all Cretans are liars" is "all Cretans are honest" (a paradox) when in fact the negation is "there exists a Cretan who is honest", or "not all Cretans are liars". The Epimenides paradox can be slightly modified as to not allow the kind of solution described above, as it was in the first paradox of Eubulides but instead leading to a non-avoidable self-contradiction. Paradoxical versions of the Epimenides problem are closely related to a class of more difficult logical problems, including the liar paradox, Socratic paradox, and the Burali-Forti paradox, all of which have self-reference in common with Epimenides. Indeed, the Epimenides paradox is usually classified as a variation on the liar paradox, and sometimes the two are not distinguished. The study of self-reference led to important developments in logic and mathematics in the twentieth century.