New Criticism was accused by critics of having a contradictory nature. Brooks writes, on the one hand, "the resistance which any good poem sets up against all attempts to paraphrase it" (qtd. in Leitch 2001) is the result of the poet manipulating and warping language to create new meaning. On the other hand, he admonishes the unity and harmony in a poem's aesthetics. These seemingly contradictory forces in a poem create tension and paradoxical irony according to Brooks, but critics questioned whether irony leads to a poem's unity or undermines it (Leitch 2001). Poststructuralists in particular saw a poem's resistance and warped language as competing with its harmony and balance that Brooks celebrates (Leitch 2001).