Oxymoron

An oxymoron is a stylistic figure that combines in a single image logically incompatible, mutually contradictory concepts: "a living corpse," "hot snow," "resounding silence," "sweet torment." The Greek name means "wittily foolish." The collision of opposite meanings generates a new, paradoxical sense that vividly conveys the complexity, contradictoriness or extreme tension of an experience. The oxymoron is especially productive in lyric for expressing ambivalent feelings, and in the titles of works, where it immediately creates intellectual tension. Unlike antithesis, which opposes concepts across different members of a sentence, the oxymoron compresses a contradiction into a single phrase. It is a refined means of the paradoxical imagery of poetic speech.