Poetics and Ruminations

A Well As Deep As the World

For Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound

 

"It is not now as it was then,"

it is broken and far off,

"but it is like a sea on ebb,"

like the sound of someone being tortured

"and only pools here and there"

at the end of a long corridor

"left among the rocks."

 

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, 2004; originally published in Innerspring Quarterly, I:2, Fall 1971. 

The Agonism and the Existentity of Wallace Stevens

 

         In his earliest poems Stevens appeared to be one of the fallenangels.  Unable to believe in God and religion, he would substitute for them a language system — poetry — and a corresponding system of aesthetics.  As the poet wrote in the first line of his poem "The Snow Man," from Harmonium, his first book, "One must have a mind of winter," of existential objectivity, so that one might enjoy whatever there was in life to enjoy — primarily the life of the mind itself without falling victim to wish or romantic despair.

         However, the life of the mind is an abstract life.  In order to write about these abstractions, Stevens had not only to invent a set of "objective correlatives," to use T. S. Eliot's term, but to construct many of his sentences in "abstract," or, to use Donald Davie's term, "musical" syntax.  Each abstraction must be made concrete by means of metaphor: the abstract subject or "tenor" of the metaphor would be equated with an object in the physical world, and this object would become the "vehicle" that carried the burden of the symbolic equation.  Meaning would rise out of an understanding of this symbology, out of an understanding of what each object stood for and how it operated in the context of its environment of other objective correlatives.

         By these means Stevens could build what seemed to be a solid world, but behind this world would stand the "real" world of the mind which the poet inhabited.  In the early poems the objects Stevens chose to represent his ideas were often tropical or subtropical, as in "Sunday Morning" from Harmonium or "The Idea of Order at Key West" from his second collection, Ideas of Order.  As a result, Stevens appeared to be some sort of romantic, Polynesian Prince of Delights, but his intention was to be the exact opposite of "romantic" — existential.

         It was Stevens' contention that there is no meaning in existence beyond whatever meaning the artificer — the individual "creator" with a small c — imposed upon the chaos of the physical universe. In the beginning was the Word, but the Word was not with God, whom Man had created; rather, it was with man who is the creator of all words, including the name of God.  The order of reality is the order of words as they are arranged by the mind of the artificer.  Stevens' "system" posited art as the substitute for religion, which had been discredited as a plausible alternative in the objective, scientific 20th century: The name of God had lost its meaning; therefore, God no longer existed.  Other names must be invented if one were going to survive chaos, for nothing exists for human beings unless it can benamed.

         Generally speaking, as Stevens grew older, in his poems he traveled farther north, both psychically and metaphorically, till at last the landscapes of his poetry became relatively austere.  He was simplifying his objective correlatives, developing that "mind of winter" that was stoic rather than romantic.  He was reducing to essentials the dogmas of his substitute for religion.  An examination of Stevens' later poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," from The Auroras of Autumn, may serve to illustrate.

         In "Section I" of the poem Stevens begins on the level of the commonplace, the factual, where objects are of paramount importance. "The eye's plain version is a thing apart, / The vulgate of experience."  "Of what is this house composed if not of the sun, /... / Words, lines, not meanings, not communications."  The world of facts is gigantic and nothing more than itself; it has nothing to communicate beyond its solidity.  A second giant is needed to kill the giant of physical reality:

 

Dark things without a double, after all,

Unless a second giant kill the first —

A recent imagining of reality,

                  * * *

A larger poem for a larger audience.

 

         Stevens has stated his theme: Reality and imagination must meet to produce a greater insight.  In the last stanza of this section the poet maintains that by means of this insight or "larger poem," each datum loses its individuality and achieves unity; becomes, as it were, "A mythological form... / A great bosom, beard, and being, alive with age."

         In "Section II" the author picks up the topic of "houses" from stanza two of "Section I" where "house" equaled the earth, and from stanza three of that same section where "houses" equaled mundane objects.  Here, in this second section, "houses" amounts to a town or, by extension, the world composed of little worlds.  Stevens asks himself — or perhaps the reader — to think about the idea of humanity existing in these houses.  Soon, "we cannot tell apart / The idea and the bearer-being of the idea."  No longer individuals thinking individual thoughts, people are merely particles of data in the greater mass of humanity, with which the speaker of the poem can identify only in the abstract.

         "Section III" is a sort of invocation.  The poet asks that the will to holiness be considered next to holiness; that the desire for love be next to love.  This is more secure than love itself, for love, when possessed, becomes the possessor, thus blinding the lover to the fact that he or she is in reality alone, living merely with an illusion rather than in the totality of the mind.  The poet would rather be immersed in reality than bound emotionally to illusion. In "Section IV" "The plainness of things is savagery."  Stevens continues the argument of III.  The metaphor of seasonal change is introduced to stand symbolically for naked fact (winter), new beginnings in imagination (summer), and new descriptions that will be pursued later in the poem.  This section ends with the statement that "this cold... / seems like a sheen of heat romanticized."

         "Section V" grows out of the preceding section:

 

                  Inescapable romance, inescapable choice

                  Of dreams, disillusion as the last illusion,

                  Reality as a thing seen by the mind,

 

                  Not that which is but that which is apprehended...."

 

Romance is inescapable.  Imagination makes "Everything as unreal as real can be, / In the exquisite eye."  It is inevitable that this should happen, for "The Self, the chrysalis of all men, / Became divided....  One part / Held fast tenaciously in common earth / And one... / Searched out such majesty as it could find."  We are separated from the One, and from Others, by the lock of ego.

         In "Section VI" Stevens wrote,

 

                  Reality is the beginning not the end,

                  Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,

 

it is only the unglossed day of the world in which we live.  It needs shaping and broidering.  There are other elements: Reality "is the infant A standing on infant legs, / Not twisted, stooping, polymathic Z."

         For some, A is enough; for others, perhaps the absolute dreamers who deny reality, there is Z.  The disciples of A and Z will interpret life according to their various persuasions; they will be "The immaculate interpreters of life. / But that's the difference: in the end and the way / To the end.  Alpha continues to begin. / Omega is refreshed at every end."

         Thus, "Section VII" continues the argument, though the basic facts remain the same, they are eternally re-embellished — never twice the same way — and made new by the imagination.  The possessors of imagination are not poor:

 

                  In the presence of such chapels and such school,

                  The impoverished architects appear to be

                  Much richer, more fecund, sportive and alive.

 

         The central argument in "Section VIII" is that the lover, or the poet, before creating his "larger poem for a larger audience" must cool his love for simple reality before he can hope to create something new and alive, containing the essence of ultimate reality, which is the fusion of fact and fiction.

 

                  Our breath is like a desperate element

                  That we must calm, the origin of a mother tongue,...

                                      * * *

                  The cry that contains its converse in itself.

 

         In "Section IX"

 

                  We keep coming back and coming back

                  To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns

                  That fall upon it out of the wind.

 

What we seek is the poem "of pure reality, untouched / By trope or deviation, straight to the word, / ... / Transfixing by being purely what it is, / ...We seek nothing beyond reality."  Rather, everything that reality encompasses, including its "spirit," "not merely the visible, / The solid, but the movable, the moment."

         "Section X" is a return to and restatement of "Section I," but "Section IX" is particularly obscure.  Although its literal meaning may not be capable of being glossed, it seems to be a play on Stevens' idea that imagination must begin with reality; however, the reality of which he speaks here is "The brilliancy at the central of the earth," or an essential, not a factual, reality.  The poet's terminology and thought patterns are confusing, probably because he is once again using abstract (or, as Donald Davie calls it, "musical") syntax, the order of words in Stevens' sentences following the form of the thought in his mind, but "without defining that thought." (Davie, )  This passage may be the first obvious place where Stevens' system's breakdown becomes reflected in the language he uses — one cannot write "A larger poem for a larger audience" if the audience is excluded from participation in the pet's argument, if the reader is not given landmarks in the landscape of the poet's mind.

         For some time in this poem Stevens has been digressing, talking around the issue he raised in the first section, which had to do with the creation of this "larger poem."  Now, in "Section XII," he returns to his original subject abruptly, unless there is something in the preceding passage that he intended to lead into the idea that

 

                  The poem is the cry of its occasion,

                  Part of the res itself and not about it.

 

         A poem, then, is not the mirror of reality, it is reality itself, or its essence.  The poet speaks the poem as it is,

 

                  Not as it was: part of the reverberation

                  Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues

                  Are like newspapers blown by the wind.  He speaks

 

                  By sight and insight as they are.  There is no

                  Tomorrow for him.  The wind will have passed by,

                  The statues will have gone back to being things about.

 

        In other words, the purpose of the poet is to capture the reality of the moment, without romance, "said words of the world [being] the life of the world."

         The clue to "Section XIII" lies probably in Stevens' meaning of "ephebe."  An ephebos or ephebus was, in ancient Greece, a youth who had recently become a citizen.  Assuming that this is what Stevens meant, and taking a hint from "Section XII," we might draw the conclusion that the poet, who may be said to be always young and fresh in his viewpoint, newly born with each day, is eternally just becoming a citizen of the world; thus,

 

                  He skips the journalism of subjects, seeks out

                  The perquisites of sanctity, enjoys

 

                  A strong mind in a weak neighborhood and is

                  A serious man without the serious,

                  Inactive in his singular respect.

 

"He is neither priest nor proctor," he is an observer and recorder.  "It is a fresh spiritual that he defines."  He is after the "essential integrity of reality," not photographic journalism, which is mere description and representation of externals, like statues in daylight.  When merged with night and the wind of romance, statues become something other than themselves.

         "Sections "XIV" and "XV" go together.  Satire is unusual in Stevens' work; as a form its intent is to convince by means of derision.  Whom is Stevens trying to convince, himself or an audience?  In either case, somebody seems to need convincing, and if that is so, the viewpoint to be demolished must be unusually strong.

         To this point Stevens has been pointing an admonishing finger at the dry Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven who sits listening to the rain and seeking "God in the object itself, without much choice," just as the eucalyptus worships simple water.

         It is possible to assume, from line 8, "Section XIV," that Professor Eucalyptus is an academic poet whose verse derives from nothing more than

 

                  ...a choice of the commodious adjective

                  for what he sees, it comes in the end to that:

 

                  The description that makes [the rain] divinity, still speech

                  As it touches the point of reverberation — not grim

                  Reality but reality grimly seen

 

                  And spoken in paradisal parlance new

                  And in any case never grim, the human grim

                  That is part of the indifference of the eye

 

                  Indifferent to what it sees.  The tink-tonk

                  Of the rain in the spout is not a substitute.

 

         The rest of the section is variations on this same theme. "Section XVI" begins with the statement that time never duplicates; the present is unique.  In the second stanza Stevens reiterates and embellishes this idea, noting that, though the present  composed of ancient elements, they are new in their total effect.

         The third and fourth stanzas are descriptive.  Stevens picks up several aspects of nature — the sea, the horizon, the wind, the night — all of them undeniably "ancient," and he illustrates his point by weaving them into a new and melodious series of verbal juxtapositions, contrasting terms like "Oklahoman" and "Italian," "horizon" and "masculine."  In the last two stanzas he continues his

         description in this manner and injects the conception that death is poverty; conversely, life is wealth — "this should be tragedy's most moving face."

         In "Section XVII" Stevens notes that life almost attains comedy, but not quite.  The essence of life is seriousness.  The way in which nature manifests itself "is the mirror of the high serious."  Then, more fanciful description is inserted.  The section ends with an explicit statement, returning to the theme introduced in the preceding section:

 

                  These fitful sayings are, also, of tragedy:

                  The serious reflection is composed

                  Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace.

 

        Which brings the poem back to its original fulcrum.

 

         "Section XVIII" is another opaque portion of the poem.  What the poet seems to be saying is that experience and perception are necessary, but virtually worthless as a representation of reality if the imaginative element is lacking.

         Stevens returns, in "Section XIX," to the consideration of the historical past.  His thesis is that, at any given period, "there was always one," likely a poet, "who was the axis of his time"; that is, one who captured the essence of the epoch in which he lived, who "chants in the dark / A text that is an answer, although obscure." It may be assumed, I believe, that if Stevens were to nominate someone of the Modernist period to that office, it would be himself, not T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound.

         The maker of "reality" sits in "Section XX" and in his room in Hartford (rather than New Haven, London, or Philadelphia).  He sits thinking, becoming a part of the entity of reality itself.

 

                                                He may evade

                  Even his own will and in his nakedness

                  Inhabit the hypnosis of that sphere.

 

        Stevens thinks twice in "Section XXI":

 

                  But he may not.  He may not evade his will,

                  Nor the wills of other men; and he cannot evade

                  The will of necessity, the will of wills —

 

         The first stanza of this section evolves from the last stanza of "Section XX."  It is fairly explicit.  The rest of "XXI" is obscure, however.  It is perhaps an attempt to define by analogy the essence of reality which is, of course, indefinable, though it may perhaps be glossed.  But the effort fails.  Stevens returns to Professor Eucalyptus who, in "Section XXII," sounds like the embodiment of wish-fulfillment: "'The search / For reality is as momentous as / The search for God.'"  Perhaps Emerson, or Pound, or Eliot is being made to see the light at last.  "It is the philosopher's search / For an interior made exterior / And the poet's search for the same exterior made / Interior."  This search consists of a recreation of truth using elemental things, such as "original cold" and "original earliness," which refer obliquely back to "Section XVI."

         "Section XXIII" continues to explore the theme of the preceding section.  The sun and daylight are illumination, bodiless, yet making apparent the individuality of objects.  This is half of reality. Night, then, is the submerging of separate things in a single thing; "everything come together as one."  It is the other, tenuous, half of reality.

         The poet in "Section XXIV" specifically identifies and describes the rainstorm throughout which, we must remember, Professor Eucalyptus, potential poet, has been sitting in his room.  It is sometime during the summer.  "It took all day to quieten the sky / And then to fill its emptiness again, / So that all the edge of afternoon, not over, / Before the thought of evening had occurred /.../ There was a clearing."  The scene is set for Professor Eucalyptus' transmogrification.

         In "Section XXV" the dry poet is on his balcony.  At this point,

 

                  Life fixed him, wandering on the stair of glass,

                  With its attentive eyes.  And, as he stood,

                  On his balcony, outsensing distances,

 

                  There were looks that caught him out of empty air.

 

         Then the poet speaks, in French for some Symbolist reason, "C'est toujours la vie qui me regarde" — it is always life who looks at me.  "Nothing about [life] every stayed the same, / Except this hidalgo and his eye and tune, / The shawl across one shoulder and the hat."  Stevens thus reiterates that, though life is to outward appearances the same as ever; is wearing the same old garb and playing the same old tune to remind the poet that it is, indeed, life that sits regarding him in a New Haven room; nevertheless, life translates the common idiom, simply by its presence, into "a rumpling of blazons."  "What was real [is] turned into something most unreal."

         "In isolated moments — isolations / Were false.  The hidalgo was permanent, abstract, / A hatching that stared and demanded an answering look."  Life is a continuous force that transcends and unifies the isolated ingredients observable in the commonplace.

         "Section XXVI" is a description of the scene after the storm,  and of the emotions felt by Eucalyptus as he contemplates new vistas. It is a specific scene, not an invented one, though Stevens' description is couched in imaginative terms.  He mentions the Sound, meaning Long Island Sound, which New Haven overlooks.

         "Section XXVII" puts words into the mouth of a scholar.  It is not clear if the scholar is the poet himself with a new awareness of reality, or if the poet is simply remembering the scholar's statements.  At any rate, the theme of the duality, but essential unity, of the real is stated in positive terms at last.  Stevens lists the ingredients and techniques to be used in the poet's "larger poem for a larger audience."

         Stevens in "Section XXVIII" makes statements similar to those in the preceding section.  If he had been relying on logical argument,  the preceding section or, at most, this one ought to have been the end of the poem.  But Stevens does not rely on logic.  He would rather rely upon seasonal change to point up symbolically his thesis that a continual renewal of the world is created by the synthesis of fact and imagination.

         Thus winter, in "Section XXIX," stands for the bare beginning again; unadorned fact.  Spring and summer are a continual redefinition through redescription of fact: They are the seasons of the imagination.  Although Stevens uses the same basic foundation time and again, the adjectives of his description are never the same:

 

                  The countrymen were changed and each constant thing.

                  Their dark-colored words had redescribed the citrons.

 

Autumn in "Section XXX" is a return to nakedness, nondescription.  Winter is the fact itself stripped clean, ready for another beginning.

         Stevens wraps up his argument in "Section XXXI," as if it can be considered an argument rather than an impressive massing of sounds and images, syntactical sleights of mind and ideational fens that tend to overwhelm the reader.  Even so, we are forced to agreement in the final stanza:

 

                  It is not in the premise that reality

                  Is a solid.  It may be a shade that traverses

                  A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

 

Stevens needs to be no more explicit than this, for what he finishes with refers to other details in the poem whose meanings are somewhat clearer, though such an ending might seem meiotic rather than climactic.

         Stevens would have a large impact upon both the poetry and the critical theory of the post-Modernist world.  Mark C. Taylor opened his article, "Descartes, Nietzsche, and the Search for the Unsayable," with a Stevens quotation.  "Few lines have more effectively caught the chill of modernity," Taylor said, than the conclusion of Wallace Stevens' poem "The Snow Man": "For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

         Later in his essay Taylor introduced the subject of "deconstructionism," a critical theory that engulfed academe in the 1980s and which "calls into question the possibility of securely establishing the meaning or range of meanings of any human construction, including any text."  But this system of the French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida merely caused academics to fall into the same trap in which Stevens found himself, for if no text means anything, then neither do the critical texts written to discuss the literary texts.  It is the dead end of the "mind of winter": Nothing means anything except to the solo soul caught in his or her existential abyss.  But Stevens also had a positive effect on literature, for his practice did not necessarily follow his theories, and the "abstract syntax" of Stevens poems influenced, first, the poetry of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and the New York School of poetry and then, more recently, the so-called "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" poets of the 1980s, though most of them do not acknowledge the debt.

 

WORKS CITED

 

Norman Friedman, E. E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1960.

Donald Davie, Articulate Energy, New York: Macmillan, 1958.

Lyn Hejinian, The Guard, n.p., 1983.

Archibald MacLeish, Collected Poems, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952.

Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950.

——, Collected Poems, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954.

——, Harmonium, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.

——, Ideas of Order, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935.

——, Opus Posthumous, New York: Alfrad A. Knopf, 1957.

Mark C. Taylor, "Descartes, Nietzsche, and the Search for the Unsayable," New York Times Book Review, February 1, 1987.

Lewis Turco, The New Book Of Forms, Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986.

——, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986.

 

From Concerning Poetry, vi:1, Spring 1973, © all rights reserved 2009 by Lewis Turco

La Famiglia / The Family: Memoirs and Poems

Barnes & Noble 

OCTOBER 2009

This book of memoirs and poems is available from all booksellers:

Bordighera Press

John D. Calandra Italian-American Institute

Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean

Queens College/CUNY

25 West 43^rd Street, 17^th Floor

New York NY 10036

 

VIA Folios 57

ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1

LOC Control No. 2009905032

Trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00

 

 

From the cover:

Lewis Putnam Turco is the author of some fifty volumes in the genres of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including books, chapbooks and monographs. The most recent of these include The Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories, published in 2008, and in 2009 Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697, a history of the period when science began to displace religion in the western world and of the settlement of Colonial America where his mother’s family, the Putnams, were deeply involved, on both sides of the issue, in the great Salem witchcraft craze of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692.

It is as a poet, however, that Lewis Turco has primarily been known. His First Poems appeared in 1960 as a selection of the Book Club for Poetry. The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004 — the latter sobriquet being an anagram pseudonym under which Lewis Turco has published most of his traditionally formal poems — appeared in 2004. Three years later, in 2007, Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, a gathering of his non-traditionally written poems, was published. 

Founder of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1962 and of the creative writing program at the State University of New York College at Oswego in 1968, Turco’s first book of criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, won the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1986, and his A Book of Fears: Poems, with Italian translations by Joseph Alessia, won the first annual Bordighera Bi-Lingual Poetry Prize in 1998.  In 1999 he received the John Ciardi Award for lifetime achievement in poetry sponsored by the periodical Italian Americana and the National Italian American Foundation.

Author of “the poet’s bible,” The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, a seminal work — currently in its third edition — in the development of the Neo-Formalist movement in the U. S., in 2008 Lewis Turco received the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award given by the West Chester University Poetry Conference. In 2000 he received an honorary degree from Ashland University in Ohio, and this year he received a second honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Maine at Fort Kent.

The Background of Hip-Hop

 

Podics is a "folk meter," and it is often found in anonymously written nursery rhymes, ballads, madsongs and, more recently in “rap” or hip-hop. Stephen Henderson in his book Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973 — for a discussion of all Henderson’s terms, see the chapter titled “Black Poetry” in Lewis Turco’s Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, Arkansas, 1986), discussing what he calls “virtuoso free-rhyming,” says in effect that these lines typify a Black tradition:

 

I don’t want nothin’ old but some gold;

I don’t want nothin’ black but a Cadillac!

 

I can’t eat a bite, I can’t sleep at night,

‘Cause the woman I love don’t treat me right.

 

They call me Rap the dicker the ass kicker

The cherry picker and city slicker the titty licker.

 

However, The Arabic qasida  is a form dating from prehistoric times, and its essence is improvisation. The technique as it is described in Preminger’s Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965) is a model for the composition of poetry in many ancient societies, including that of the English:

Only by considering how poetry is composed in Arabic can the evolution of the qasidah be reconstructed. In its simplest form, verse is composed extempore, sung to some traditional tune, in one bait at a time; it is then taken up by the company, sung to rhythmical movement and hand clapping. Until the poet warms to his work he casts about among the many traditional themes in his conscious and subconscious memory — which doubtless explains the qasidah sequence and the recurrent clichés of both classical and colloquial versification, for in Arabia mere originality for its own sake is not sought. When visited by Inspiration — which the Arabs conceive as supernatural, a species of demon — the poet now turns to the theme he wishes to treat.

Furthermore, many English language poets such as John Skelton in the early Renaissance, the 19th-century Scots poet Robert Burns, and such twentieth-century poets as John Crowe Ransom, Vachel Lindsay, Ralph Hodgson and Theodore Roethke have used the accentual prosody called “podics” successfully. Podics uses rhyme, but it does not regularly alternate stressed and unstressed syllables.  Podics is a holdover, in folk poetry, of Anglo-Saxon prosody. 

After Geoffrey Chaucer, his contemporary John Gower, and other fourteenth-century poets combined the Norman French syllabic system with the native English strong stress prosody, thus inventing accentual-syllabic prosody, the common folk, including the balladeers of the Scottish-English border, continued to hear the ancient alliterative stich (line) and echoic devices, so they continued to write using the old prosody, but they added true rhyme and stanza forms, which they adopted from the Norman French after year 1066.  Many nursery rhymes and lullabies are nothing more than two rhyming stichs (a distich) of Anglo-Saxon prosody:

The cock's on the midden · a-blowing his horn;

The bull's in the barn · a-threshing of corn;

The maids in the meadow · are making of hay;

The ducks in the river · are swimming away.

Dipodic verse merely breaks the full four-beat stichs into half-lines (hemistichs), but they don’t have to be printed that way because the central caesura already does that:

The cock's on the midden

a-blowing his horn;

The bull's in the barn

a-threshing of corn;

The maids in the meadow

are making of hay;

The ducks in the river

are swimming away.

Here is an excerpt from the hip-hop performer Tupac Shakur’s “Panther Power” from his album titled The Lost Tapes — in the first four lines the caesurae (mid-line pauses) and stressed syllables have been inserted as above:

 

As real as it seems · the American Dream

Ain't nothing but another · calculated scheme

To get us locked up · shot up back in chains

To deny us of the future · rob our names.

Kept my history of mystery but now I see

The American Dream wasn't meant for me

Cause lady liberty is a hypocrite she lied to me

Promised me freedom, education, equality

Never gave me nothing but slavery

And now look at how dangerous you made me

Calling me a mad man cause I'm strong and bold

With this dump full of knowledge of the lies you told

Promise me emancipation indispute nation

All you gave my people was our patience

Fathers of our country never cared for me

They kept my answer shackled up in slavery

And Uncle Sam never did a dam thing for me

Except lie about the facts in my history

So now I'm sitting hear mad cause I'm unemployed

But the government's glad cause they enjoyed

When my people are down so they can screw us around

Time to change the government now panther power

“Tumbling verse,” which is insistently rhymed dipodic couplets, was the creation of the sixteenth-century poet John Skelton who made lines of the hemistichs and rhymed them insistently.  We have come to call this system Skeltonics in his honor.  As in hip-hop, there is no set point at which the rhymes may change, and every now and again a tripod (three-beat line) may be thrown in to thicken the brew.

         The "head" of the title of the following poem is a skull, a "Memento Mori" or remembrance of the shortness of life that was kept on the table of a monk or a priest like Skelton. The title continues into an epigraph. The last line of this poem was originally in French: "mirrez vous y," which is rendered here in English:

UPON A DEAD MAN'S HEAD

that was sent to him from an honorable gentlewoman for a token, Skelton, Laureate, devised this ghostly meditation in English, covenable, in sentence, commendable, lamentable, lacrimable, profitable for the soul.

Your ugly token

My mind hath broken

From worldly lust,

For I have discussed

We are but dust,

And die we must.

It is general

To be mortal.

I have well espied

No man may him hide

From Death hollow-eyed,

With sinews withered,

With bones shivered,

With his worm-eaten maw

And his ghastly jaw

Gaping aside —

Neither flesh nor fell.

Then, by my counsel,

Look that ye spell

Well this gospel:

For whereso we dwell

Death will us quell

And with us mell.

For all our pampered paunches

There may be no franchise

Nor worldly bliss

Redeem us from this.

Our days be dated

To be checkmated

With draughts of death

Stopping our breath —

Our eyes sinking,

Our bodies stinking,

Our gums grinning,

Our souls burning.

To whom, then, shall we sue

For to have rescue,

But to sweet Jesu

On us then for to rue?

O goodly Child

Of Mary mild,

Then be our shield

That we be not exiled

To the dread dale

Of bootless bale,

Nor to the lake

Of fiends black.                                             

But grant us grace

To see thy Face,

And to purchase

Thine heavenly place,

And thy palace

Full of solace

Above the sky

That is so high,

Eternally

To behold and see

The Trinity!

Amen.

Mirror you thus.

John Skelton (modern vversion by Wesli Court) from The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, © 2000.

PROLOGUE

(from Odds Bodkin’s Strange Thrusts and Ravels)

         Sirs, my name is Odds,

of hods a worshiper, of clods

descended, an eater of pods —

my surname Bodkin,

of bad stock and odd kin

offsprung; can nod, can

grin, do odd jobs, japes,

queer faces, apes,

may jingle and rime

when the mood moves and the time

is promiscuous.  Sirs, I'm

harmless, a happy man,

rimer, chimer — none sublimer

in my fashion, no climber

I, I suit my station, pan

my branch for glitter and,

sirs, though there be not much

gold forthcoming, such

is my lot — I am content,

I bend as I am bent.

 

         But I have eyes, damme,

sires and Mesdames, eyes

to see what shall pass, arise,

what grubs, grovels, flies,

becomes, is, shall be, dies —

I have a nose

for good verse, bad prose,

a breast that sighs,

fingers to scratch,

two ears that nigh match, a tongue

to tell and a good lung

with a loud breath

to back the telling.  Death

shall still me, it may

be, but I shall stay

till I've said all I have to say,

and then it will not matter

how the sickle may tatter

my rags, rum, and marrow.  Flatter

I shall lie, but not lie to flatter.

 

         For I purpose to tell,

if it takes an ell

of foolscap, a fathomless well

of ink and one hell

of a heap of gall,

of my fellow rimers: all

their foibles and fables, small

honors and tall tales

told in school and out,

of the fleshless and the stout —

poor fish all: sucker, trout,

flounder, eel, grouper; bales

of pickled herring — of these

and many another: anchovies

in tins, oiled and boiled,

soiled, moiled, foiled, roiled,

salted and spoiled,

anemones, clams

served up in stuffings, chopped,

garnishing hams, Spams....  Stopped

be thy jaw, Odds!

Ye gods, how you do yaw!  Cods

and codpieces!  Get on with it —

swallow or spit!

 

Wesli Court

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Star Cloud Press.

The Lost Song of James Wright

         James Wright, Robert Bly's major convert to “deep imagism” after James Dickey, was born in Ohio in 1927.  He attended Kenyon College in his native state, where he took his bachelor's degree.  Subsequently he took an M. A. and a Ph. D. at the University of Washington in Seattle where two of his teachers were the poets Stanley Kunitz and, in particular, Theodore Roethke. He later held academic positions at the University of Minnesota, Macalaster College, and finally at Hunter College in New York City where he died of cancer in 1980.

         Wright's first book, The Green Wall, was published in the Yale Series  of Younger Poets in 1957.  It contained poems that identified their writer as having one of the purest lyrical ears among the so-called “academic poets” of the post-Modern period.  "A Song for the Middle of the Night" is an example — it began with an epigraph: "By way of explaining to my son the following curse by Eustace Deschamps: 'Happy is he who has no children; for babies bring  nothing but crying and stench.'"

 

Now first of all he means the night

You beat the crib and cried

And brought me spinning out of bed

To powder your backside.

I rolled your buttocks over

And I could not complain:

Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,

Back to sleep again.

 

         The prosody of this octet stanza is accentual-syllabic verse, the meter is iambic tetrameter in the odd-lines, trimeter in the even; the rhyme scheme is, in the first stanza, abcbDeFE the odd lines do not rhyme, and the capital letters indicate lines that will be repeated in the second stanza.  In effect, then, the eight lines are made up of  two  quatrains of  common measure, but because three of the last four lines are refrains, Wright really had invented a nonce-form.  In the second stanza the rhymes of the first half change, but the second half do not hijiDeFE:

 

Now second of all he means the day

You dabbled out of doors

And dragged a dead cat Billy-be-damned

Across the kitchen floors.

I rolled your buttocks over

And made you sing for pain:

Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,

Back to sleep again.

 

         In the third stanza Wright abandoned the refrain line that had appeared as line five in the preceding two stanzas, but the reader will not perhaps catch it, because the new line ends with shoulder, which consonates with "over" — klmldeFE:

 

But third of all my father once

Laid me across his knee

And solved the trouble when he beat

The yowling out of me.

He rocked me on his shoulder

When razor straps were vain:

Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,

Back to sleep again.

 

         The last stanza abandons even the consonance of line five, so that there are as many unrhymed as rhymed lines, yet little of the lyricism of the poem has been lost:

 

So roll upon your belly, boy,

And bother being cursed.

You turn the household upside down,

But you are not the first.

Deschamps the poet blubbered too,

For all his fool disdain:

Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,

Back to sleep again.

 

         The poem partakes of the nursery rhyme and the drinking song, at the same time that it is a didactic poem with an argument and a point. It retains the reader's interest with its sound as it simultaneously builds a parallel series of narrative incidents with which one can empathize.  Is the  poem "sincere"?  Perhaps one may provide an answer by asking another question: Can the reader recognize himself or herself in  the poem?  No great change had taken place by the time Wright's second book, Saint Judas, was published two years later, in 1959.  Most of the poems were still those of a formalist, though there was perhaps a bit more loosening detectable.

         Henry Taylor wrote that "Wright's well-known shift in style was a necessity, a survival tactic. Saint Judas is a splendid book, but it contains considerable evidence of Wright's growing impatience with the style in which most  of it is written.  Moreover, the shift seems to have been more stylistic than thematic.  I do not deny the new subtlety of perception, the new sensitivity, in Wright's later work, but I am suspicious of claims that the shift was a cataclysmic transformation of the whole man."

At Kenyon College John Crowe Ransom had been Wright’s undergraduate teacher. Ransom was a member of the so-called “Fugitive poets,” a group of writers that took its name from the title of the magazine they had edited and published in at Vanderbilt University. By the time that Dave Smith asked Wright, "How do you now value Ransom's poetry?"  Ransom had abandoned writing poetry and become strictly a formalist “New Critic”; Wright replied, "His poetry, as the years go by, seems to me to be finer than I had realized.  I always liked it.  Ransom is in slightly bad odor right now, partly because he writes the so-called square poem: you can glance at  his  poems on the page and see that they scan.  If you look a little closer, unless you happen to be as tone-deaf as some of our reviewers apparently are — I don't say that in malice, I say it as a kind of curiosity, you can hear that his poems rhyme.  Furthermore, Ransom plainly shows in his poems that he is willing to let his conscious intelligence operate in the poems and this is very much out of fashion.  It's ridiculous that it should be out of fashion.  It is part of the terribly self-flattering, self-indulging anarchic spirit of our times, the spirit of confusion."

         Five years earlier than the Smith interview Norman Friedman, himself an Aristotelian New Critic, wrote, "James Wright's Collected Poems [1971]  contains most of The Green Wall,  and all of Saint Judas, The Branch Will Not Break [1963], and Shall We Gather at the River [1968], plus some translations and 33 new poems.  This impressive volume, although it covers a poetic career of only 14 years, reveals a genuine experimenter, a poet who can, like Yeats, consciously transform himself.  Thus we can speak already of Wright's rich and formal poems of the first two books; the spare and 'deep image' work of Branch; and the loose and pain-filled later poems.  For these stages also reveal a strange and tragic curve of emotional development: Wright's concern for human suffering, which was never absent from his earlier work, and which seemed to have been temporarily balanced by the bright joy of so much of Branch, now reappears as an obsession without let or hindrance or (often) control in an avalanche of anguish and despair in River and 'New Poems.'"

         Smith also asked Wright about the one course in poetry writing he had taken with Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington.  Wright said that "A course with Roethke was a course in very, very detailed and strenuous critical reading.  Here was an assignment: he wanted us to go to the library and find ten or maybe even twenty iambic trimeter lines that had a caesura after the first syllable.  He made us do that."  A bit later Wright said, "So, we knew Roethke was a very fine man, an intelligent and learned man, and when he asked us to do something we would do it.  He was not trying to violate our psyches or something."

         A book that Friedman didn't mention was one titled The Lion's Tail and Eyes: Poems Written Out of Laziness and  Silence (1962), a  committee effort by Wright, William Duffy and Robert Bly, but Wright denied that Bly had exercised any undue influence upon him.  Smith asked Wright, "How do you feel about your early poems?" to which Wright replied, "I  haven't read them for a while.  About three years ago I sat down and read my whole Collected Poems.  Some of them I couldn't remember having written and some of them I didn't understand.  It is true that I wrote to my publisher after Saint Judas and said I don't know what I am going to do after this but it will be completely different.  This comment, and also Robert Bly's essay on my work, has given rise to some sort of assumption that I calculated that I was going to be born again or something, that I would become a completely different person.  I think that this is nonsense.  There was a good essay by Mark Strand...regarding changes in poetry.  He used my work as an example and he said the only difference, really, was that I don't rhyme so often now.  I don't think that a person can change very quickly or easily."

         Wright's demurrer to the contrary notwithstanding, there was a great difference in style between the poet's second solo book and his third, The Branch Will Not Break, which was clearly "deep image" poetry,  though not nearly as self-conscious and sentimental as the work of Bly.  It was more sinewy as well, leaner and clearer. Wright emphasized the shift in his style by publishing as the opening pair in Collected Poems, first,  "The Quest," written in the earlier lyrical style, and then, "Sitting in a Small Screenhouse on a Summer Morning."  It is interesting to compare the opening stanzas of the two poems.  Here is the opening of the first:

 

In pasture where the leaf and wood

Were lorn of all delicious apple,

And underfoot a long and supple

Bough leaned down to dip in mud,

I came before the dark to stare

At a gray nest blown in a swirl,

As in the arm of a dead girl

Crippled and torn and laid out bare.

 

And here is the opening of the second poem:

 

Ten more miles, it is South Dakota.

Somehow, the roads there turn blue,

When no one walks down them.

One more night of walking, and I could have become

A horse, a blue horse, dancing

Down a road alone.

 

         The second poem is quite different from the first in tone, in style,  in level of diction.  The tone is cool and objectifying, not elegiac; the style is the new "plainstyle" that was being developed by poets in the Northwest including William Stafford, Richard Hugo and David Wagoner (see essays on all three elsewhere in this blog); the level of diction is colloquial rather than literary.  The second poem relies on the sensory level primarily, not upon the sonic.  The first poem develops an idea in formal, logical order, makes its point; the second abandons the denotations of words and makes the most of connotations and associations, leaping from one image to another, in the manner of the  haiku.  Both poems are well written, beautifully paced, clearly the work of a wordsmith. The second poem's images are the type of the "deep" image, the effect surreal: "It is so still now, I hear the horse / Clear his nostrils. / He has crept out of the green places behind me. / Patient and affectionate, he reads over my shoulder / These words I have written."  The poem shows that,  no  matter what the theory, no matter how far out or unfounded it may be, in the hands of someone who can truly write, it will work.  Bly could not make his theory work as well as Wright could.

         After his third solo book Wright's style continued to change, becoming more jagged and expressive of personal suffering.  This third phase of Wright's career that Friedman identified, "The emotional — and sometimes artistic — descent, however, is dizzying as we come to Shall We Gather at the River and the 'New Poems'" section of Collected Poems Friedman wrote. "For unrelieved wretchedness, these pieces must be unmatched in  contemporary [mid=twentieth century] poetry, and suggest that Wright is returning, after the brief high of Branch, to some old and fundamental unresolved despair.  Whether these poems were premonitory or only an expression of a mid-life crisis it is impossible to say, but some of them, such as ‘At the Grave,’ [from the 1974 Two  Citizens], were maelstroms of despair.”

         "I believe the grave James referred to," the poet's wife Anne wrote to Lewis Turco in a letter dated July 29, 1989, "was that of his English teacher at Kenyon, Philip Timberlake.  He has several poems dedicated, in this manner, to Mr. Timberlake.  Needless to say, it has many other meanings too, but James loved Philip Timberlake, who took such a great interest in James when he was a student and was so supportive and such an intellectual force in James' life."

 

All I am doing is walking here alone.

I am not among the English poets.

I am not even going to be among

The English poets after my death.

You loved them the best.

And you liked me, fine.  It is still raining

This morning, this November morning.

And I am not even standing at your grave.

I am fiddling with a notebook in New York,

Wondering about Ohio where now at this moment

A leaf hangs on a locust thorn shredding

Its form into the rain.

John Keats, coughing his lungs out,

John Clare, crazy,

And Geoffrey Chaucer the only one.

And Edward Thomas, who got killed, the only

Soldier in this century who was sane.

If these lines get published, I will hear

From some God damned deaf moron who knows

Everything.  The dead are nothing.

And he will be right.

The living giggle in the dark all night,

And the dead are nothing.

 

         This is confessional poetry as melancholy as that of Anne Sexton, as manic as that of Sylvia Plath.  "I agree," Anne Wright wrote in her letter, "that 'At the  Grave' is both melancholy and manic." James Wright's last book, To a Blossoming Pear Tree, was published in 1978; he died of cancer of the esophagus two years later.

Poetics: The Conspiracy of Silence

         In the teaching of poetry at all levels there is a tacit conspiracy of silence regarding the most basic elements of the genre. This silence about the structure of poetry, which is the fundamental concern of the poet, proceeds from pure ignorance of the subject.

         In secondary school students are confounded by teachers who have been trained to believe there are only two ways to write poetry; namely, in accentual-syllabic, usually rhymed, verse, or in "free verse," which none seem to be able to define.  Although poets have been writing poems in a thousand different ways for centuries, no teacher seems capable   of explaining simply what is to be seen on the page.  As a result, teachers try to jam everything into metrics, and when it can't be done, both teachers and students know something is wrong, but they don't know what.  So the teachers pretend everything is all right and call the exceptions "free verse" or "sprung rhythm" or something equally undescriptive.  At this point students turn off their minds on the subject and go to college.

         In college they meet professors who also do not know the different prosodies of poetry, for no one has ever taught them, either. Item: While conversing with Dr. Wesley Sweetser about the British poet Ralph Hodgson, I discovered that this "expert" on Hodgson knew nothing about the prosody called podics.  He had never even heard of the term.  It happens that podics is the prosody in which Hodgson wrote; it is also the prosody of nursery rhymes and folk ballads.

         Item: while conversing with two other colleagues, Dr. Barbara Hardy, a Shakespeare scholar, and Dr. Rand Bishop, an African literature specialist, I was reluctantly informed by both that neither had been taught how to scan a poem and could not handle scansion, even of blank verse, which was the metric of Shakespeare.  The reason for this situation seemed to be that no one had ever told them that the purpose of scansion is to discern the running rhythm of the poem, with the variations all good poets use in the line, not to try to force each line into a regular beat — few poets are interested in monotonous regularity.

         In college students meet professors such as these — professors who are scholars or critics, generally speaking.  For them how the poem was built by the poet is of little value — they are interested in more esoteric things. It's as though a group of freshmen were taken out into the desert on a guided tour.  They come to a beautiful palace called "Poetry," which is built high in the air on four marble pillars. When they arrive, the guide calls out, and someone lets down a golden ladder.  The students climb up to the palace and are met by a professor who immediately ushers them into a chaotic hall called "The Deconstructionist Throne Room" where everything shifts and wavers before them, where sounds do not settle into meaningful syntax and everything is relative to everything else. When they have finished there, the students visit the Feminist Wing for a time, with its loveseats and ornate couches spotted among the iron maidens containing the impaled males of the human race.  Then they enter the Marxist Parlor to look at the working class murals on the walls, and when they are tired they rest in the Reader Response Suite, full of intuitive starlight and the Muzak of Personal Opinion played through loudspeakers. When they are rested, they exit through the Post-Structuralist Funhouse where everything again loses its sense in a welter of meaningless word games. When at last the students leave, it is night.  They climb down the golden ladder and are led blindly away — no one has shone a torch upon the marble pillars that support this marvel in the air.

         If someone had struck a light at the right time, the pupils would have seen signs on the four pillars: "The Typographical Pilaster," "The Sonic Pilaster," "The Sensory Pilaster," "The Ideational Pilaster."  If one had examined these pillars closely, he would have discovered how the magnificent Palace of Poetry was supported in the heavens by simple stone — the work of the craftsman. Instead, the students clamber back into the bus, traverse the desert, and, when they reach the first oasis, they are given transfer tickets in the form of diplomas.  They scatter on various conveyances to the four corners of the world, become teachers themselves, some of them, and teach what they have been taught to others who may eventually make the same journey which is in a circle intellectually, if not in any other way.  The cycle of ignorance is self-perpetuating.  In this case, however, ignorance is not bliss — it is uneasy, and this is the reason for the agreement to be silent, for only if no one admits he or she is confused will anyone be found, like the king in the fable, to be standing before his class and his profession stark naked.

         I admire my three colleagues for having the courage, finally, to admit they knew nothing about poetics and for submitting themselves to a crash course I delivered on a desktop that cursorily covered a few basic elements of scansion and prosodics. These are the essentials: 1)  In every word of the English language of two or more syllables, at least one syllable will take a stress.  If one cannot at first hear the stressing, then one may consult a pronouncing dictionary.  2)  Important single-syllable words, particularlyverbs and nouns, generally take strong stresses.  3)  Unimportant single-syllable words in the sentence, such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns (except demonstrative pronouns) do not take strong stresses, though they may take secondary stresses throughpromotion or demotion, depending on their position in the sentence or the line of verse. 4)  In any series of three unstressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through promotion and will stand in place of a stressed syllable.  5)  In any series of three stressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through demotion and will stand in place of an unstressed syllable. 6)  An accent may be forced upon a syllable through rhetorical stress, by underlining, italicizing, boldfacing, or otherwise artificially heightening it, as has just now been done.

         But such first-aid is not enough by any means.  Someone, somewhere, must break the treadmill and strike off on the highway the poets themselves walk.

From The Andover Review, i:2, Fall 1974.

An Analysis of Emerson's Poem "The Titmouse"

The Titmouse

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

  You shall not be overbold

When you deal with arctic cold,

As late I found my lukewarm blood

Chilled wading in the snow-choked wood.

How should I fight? my foeman fine         —  5

Has million arms to one of mine:

East, west, for aid I looked in vain,

East, west, north, south, are his domain.

Miles off, three dangerous miles, is home;

Must borrow his winds who there would come.         —10

Up and away for life! be fleet!—

The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,

Sings in my ears, my hands are stones,

Curdles the blood to the marble bones,

Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense,         —15

And hems in life with narrowing fence.

Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,—

The punctual stars will vigil keep,—

Embalmed by purifying cold;

The winds shall sing their dead-march old,         —20

The snow is no ignoble shroud,

The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.

 

  Softly, — but this way fate was pointing,

'T was coming fast to such anointing,

When piped a tiny voice hard by,         —25

Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,

Chic-chic-a-dee-de! saucy note

Out of sound heart and merry throat,

As if it said, 'Good day, good sir!

Fine afternoon, old passenger!         —30

Happy to meet you in these places,

Where January brings few faces.'

 

  This poet, though he live apart,

Moved by his hospitable heart,

Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort,         —35

To do the honors of his court,

As fits a feathered lord of land;

Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hand,

Hopped on the bough, then, darting low,

Prints his small impress on the snow,         —40

Shows feats of his gymnastic play,

Head downward, clinging to the spray.

 

  Here was this atom in full breath,

Hurling defiance at vast death;

This scrap of valor just for play         —45

Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray,

As if to shame my weak behavior;

I greeted loud my little savior,

'You pet! what dost here? and what for?

In these woods, thy small Labrador,         —50

At this pinch, wee San Salvador!

What fire burns in that little chest

So frolic, stout and self-possest?

Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine;

Ashes and jet all hues outshine.         —55

Why are not diamonds black and gray,

To ape thy dare-devil array

And I affirm, the spacious North

Exists to draw thy virtue forth.

I think no virtue goes with size;         —60

The reason of all cowardice

Is, that men are overgrown,

And, to be valiant, must come down

To the titmouse dimension.'

 

  'T is good will makes intelligence,         —65

And I began to catch the sense

Of my bird's song: 'Live out of doors

In the great woods, on prairie floors.

I dine in the sun; when he sinks in the sea,

I too have a hole in a hollow tree;         —70

And I like less when Summer beats

With stifling beams on these retreats,

Than noontide twilights which snow makes

With tempest of the blinding flakes.

For well the soul, if stout within,         —75

Can arm impregnably the skin;

And polar frost my frame defied,

Made of the air that blows outside.'

 

  With glad remembrance of my debt,

I homeward turn; farewell, my pet!         —80

When here again thy pilgrim comes,

He shall bring store of seeds and crumbs.

Doubt not, so long as earth has bread,

Thou first and foremost shalt be fed;

The Providence that is most large         —85

Takes hearts like thine in special charge,

Helps who for their own need are strong,

And the sky doats on cheerful song.

Henceforth I prize thy wiry chant

O'er all that mass and minster vaunt;         —90

For men mis-hear thy call in Spring,

As 't would accost some frivolous wing,

Crying out of the hazel copse, Phe-be!

And, in winter, Chic-a-dee-dee!

I think old Caesar must have heard         —95

In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,

And, echoed in some frosty wold,

Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.

And I will write our annals new,

And thank thee for a better clew,         —100

I, who dreamed not when I came here

To find the antidote of fear,

Now hear thee say in Roman key,

Paean! Veni, vidi, vici.         —104

 

 

ANALYSIS OF EMERSON’S “THE TITMOUSE”

 

Regarding the title of this poem: Emerson is certainly talking about the black-capped chickadee, not the somewhat larger tufted titmouse. His description of the bird’s call in line 27 is clearly that of the chickadee: “Chic-chic-a-dee-de!” and not the “peter-peter-peter” of the titmouse. I listened to both songs in my copy of Donald Kroodsma’s The Backyard Birdsong Guide, and there is no mistaking the difference. Furthermore, Emerson’s description of the bird’s behavior in line 38 is that of the fearless, almost tame chickadee, not the much more skittish titmouse, as my long experience of bird feeding attests. In line 55 Emerson describes his little bird as displaying “Ashes and jet,” but the only black part of a titmouse is its beak, whereas the chickadee has a jet-black cap and a black bib on its throat, a stripe, in fact, such as that Emerson says he will wear, in line 54, in emulation of his heroic little friend.

In the last strophe things get even more confusing, for Emerson says, in lines 93-94, that during the summer his bird says “Phe-be!” rather than “Chic-a-dee-dee.” The eastern phoebe sings that song, not the chickadee nor the titmouse, and the coloring of the phoebe is nothing like that of either of the other birds in any season. Emerson may have been a lover of Nature, but if this poem is any indication, he was by no means a careful observer of nature. It is, nevertheless, a very good poem that certainly ought to have been titled “The Chickadee.”

The typographical level of “The Titmouse” shows that it is written in verse, not prose mode, and that it is strophic, not stanzaic. All lines begin with initial capitals and are justified left except the first line of each strophe which is slightly indented, as though it were the beginning of a prose paragraph. The first strophe is 22 lines long; the second and third, 10 each; the fourth strophe, like the first, is 22 lines long — to this point the poem would appear to be stanzaic, showing an ABBA arrangement, but the fifth strophe is 14 lines in length, and the poem ends with a strophe of 26 lines. It is, therefore, 104 total lines in length.

Sonically, “The Titmouse” is written in normative accentual-syllabic prosody true-rhymed in iambic tetrameter couplets primarily, but on one occasion there is triplet rhyme (lines 62, 63, & 64), and on another, quintet rhyme (lines 47-51). Sometimes, as in the latter case, the true rhyme modulates into consonance, and although most lines end in rising iambic rhythms, here and there one will find a falling ending, with feminine rhyme (lines 23 & 24, 47 & 48) or light rhyme (63 & 64) — lines 62, 63 & 64 are all, actually, consonances rather than true rhymes.

         This poem is quite interesting in its sonic effects: on many occasions, if not most, the rhymes are ordinary, even trite — in the first six lines there are four trite rhymes: bold / cold, fine / mine, but in between these couplets there is another that consonates and sight-rhymes rather than true-rhymes, blood / wood, and all four of the first lines show consonantal echo, for they end in dee sounds. Emerson signals that he is going to be various in his sonic devices, though his rhyming will be fairly simple for the most part.

         There is much counterpoint — many metrical variations — in these iambic tetrameter couplets, even in the initial lines, for the first couplet is written in fact in “rocking meter”: the first and second lines metrically read, ´x´x´x´ / ´x´x´x´; thus, they appear to begin with trochees and to end with tailless trochees: ´x |´x |´x |´(x) / x |´x |´x |´(x). If the whole poem were written like this, as is Longfellow’s “The Ropewalk,” one would be unable to say whether it were written in headless iambic lines, or tailless trochaic lines and it would have to be described as “rocking meter.” However, if one looks at the rest of “The Titmouse,” the poem, beginning with the third line, is clearly written in iambic tetrameter meter: x´| x´| x´| x´, and the first two lines must therefore begin with headless iambs: (x)´| x´| x ´| x.

         Even line four, though, has variation in it, for there is a spondee substitution in the first foot, a promotion of the unstressed fourth syllable, and a demotion of the normally stressed seventh syllable: “Chilled wading in the snow-choked wood.” Substitutions continue in the fifth line where a trochee is substituted in the first foot, there is a medial caesura (at the question mark), and there is alliteration (effs) just as one would expect to find in a stich of Anglo-Saxon prosody: “How should I fight? My foeman fine….” Truly, this is sophisticated sound which, in my opinion, outweighs the easy rhymes of much of the poem.

         Line three is the first normative iambic tetrameter line to appear, and line six is the second, but line seven begins with a spondee substitution, and there is not only repetition in the first two syllables of the eighth line, but Emerson managed to overstress the first four syllables both rhetorically (with punctuation) and with normally stressed single-syllable nouns (East, west, north, south), so that it is not even predominantly iambic. If I were to analyze the sonic level of the entire poem this essay would stretch out interminably, but I believe that what I have pointed out without even leaving strophe one the reader will be able to see and appreciate throughout the rest of “The Titmouse.” The poem is a nonce ode celebrating the event of the speaker’s meeting in the woods with a chickadee.

         The poem begins with descriptions: “You shall not be overbold,” “arctic cold,” “lukewarm blood,” “snow-choked wood,” all within the first four lines, but in the fifth line the rhetorical trope personification is introduced where Emerson’s alliterative “foeman fine,” winter, is described as having “million arms to one of mine.” Winter is the lord of a “domain” into which the speaker has intruded, and Emerson reminds himself that he who would go into the woods must make move like the wind if he wishes to rescue himself from “the frost-king” who “sings in my ears.”

         At this point the poet introduces simile: “my hands are stones,” his blood “curdles” like milk, he has “marble bones.” A cliché is borrowed from the language of love and inserted, for the wind “Tugs at the heart-strings,” then it “numbs the sense, / And hems in life with narrowing fence.” This mixed simile becomes even more entangled in images brought in from left field (so to speak) when the narrator contemplates surrendering to cold and winter:

 

         “Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep, —

         The punctual stars will vigil keep, —

         Embalmed by purifying cold;

         The winds shall sing their dead-march old,

         The snow is no ignoble shroud,

         The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.”

 

To my ear this passage invokes memories of William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” though I wouldn’t go so far as to remark that it is a literary reference.

         The sensory level gets not much more sophisticated than this, though the narrator engages in an anthropomorphic conversation with the chickadee / titmouse which becomes a symbol for nonchalant bravery in the face of chill adversity.  The bird lives in the hollow of a tree, its “sylvan fort,” where it does “the honors of his court / As fits a feathered lord of land.” So winter is the overlord of the landscape, and apparently the bird is a vassal of this sovereign.

         In strophe four the bird is portrayed as a tiny knight “Hurling defiance at vast death.” It is a “scrap of valor” which insouciantly defies winter dressed in “waistcoat gray, / As if to shame my weak behavior.” What can someone like the narrator do with such an example other than suck it up and carry on?

         In strophe five the subject of the poem, bravery, achieves its theme: “One must be brave in order to survive adversity,” or words to that effect. Strophe six sees the narrator saying goodbye to his stout little “scrap of valor” and promising to return with sustenance soon. The poem ends with an allusion to Caesar: a formal expression of approval of the example the chickadee has provided; the “paean” expressed in Latin: “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

         The atmosphere of the poem is initially threatening, but this modulates into what amounts to admiration for the little bird’s fearlessness and a resolve to emulate its behavior, so the mood by the end of the poem is distinctly upbeat. The viewpoint of the poem is narrative: Emerson is telling the story of a walk he took in the winter woods where he discovered that he was in a degree of jeopardy for having walked too far in weather that was too bitter. He began to experience trepidation at his situation when he met the “titmouse” who showed him that his behavior and fear were not befitting of a warrior of life, and he is grateful “To find the antidote of fear” in a tiny “scrap of valor” in the winter woods.

         The syntax of the poem is also narrative, the level of diction is relatively high because Emerson wrote the poem in the standard poetic diction and style of the Romantic period, but it is not overwritten given its era.

         The major genre is that of the narrative, but because Emerson emphasized sonic devices so much, the poem is lyric, the poem must be described as a lyric narrative, and the minor genre of the poem is didactics because it teaches a lesson, that one must face up to adversity and attempt to overcome it.

         The sonic level is primary in “The Titmouse,” and it is well done for the most part, though Emerson’s penchant for trite rhymes is apparent at many points. So is his interest in alliteration, though, and other sonic devices such as consonance. The sensory level is not high, however, and the poet is quite careless about mixing his metaphors. Overall, though, “The Titmouse” is clearly one of Emerson’s finer and most readable poems.

Failed Fathers

 

On a theme by, and with apologies to, Greg Pape. 

By January of 1955, when my ship, the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CVA12), pulled into San Diego and I was reunited with my Buffalo babysitter, Cousin Josie, she had already been married and divorced twice. She was then (and ever after) a single mother. Since she was only eleven years or so older than I was and a Navy veteran of the Second World War to boot, she had clearly been pretty busy since the last time I’d seen her.

Josie told me that the first of her two husbands had been a lush, and the second had been a mama’s boy. I don’t remember the name of number one, if I ever knew it, but number two was Higgins, and he gave his monicker to his little daughter, Georgette.

I never met either of Josie’s husbands, and I know nothing of what happened to them subsequent to their divorces. Georgette — “Gigi,” that is —  has never spoken to me about her father, and every now and then I wonder what became of him.

                  Where do all the failed fathers

         go?  To Albuquerque?  Cleveland?

         After the slow slide down the drain,

         where do they go?  After the last

lay-off, the class reunion where they're shown

 

                  kissing the matronly Queen

         of the Prom, where do they go.  Where

         do they go, these old young men, these

         paunchy guys with the eyes that squint

into the lens at the family picnic,

 

                  the fishing expedition

         near the falls, the baseball game where

         they played second?  After the fights,

         the money fights, the brief affair,

after the spree and the morning after,

 

                  where do the failed fathers go?

         Is there a bar where they gather,

         is there a bus they all take,

         is there a line at the Bureau

where they talk over their sons and daughters,

 

                  their Old Ladies turning cold,

         the postmen they caught spending time

         drinking coffee in their kitchens?

         Is there a motel in Cleveland

full of fathers playing poker,

 

                  smoking cigarettes, squinting

         at their hands, drinking beer?  Is there,

         down in Albuquerque, some street

         full of walk-up rooms full of dreams

of mowing lawns, of paneling basements,

 

                  propping children on their bikes,

         walking down the aisles of markets

         pushing shopping carts?  Of course, we

         know what happens to our mothers,

but where oh where do the failed fathers go?

The poem was originally published in La Fusta, Spring-Fall 1979, and collected in The Shifting Web: New and Selected Poems, 1989, and Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 2007. Both poem and essay will appear in La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, Bordighera, 2009.

 

REMARKS

Lewis,

I am a keen reader of your marvelous “Poetics and Rumination. The "Failed Fathers" image is a strong archetype for sons of all world cultures, lovely, strong but with sad melancholic mood. 

 Here is my elegy to my father:

 

  Somenèri desembrìn, el vàr nànca

  mèzz quattrin... proverbio di contadini

  brianzoli che mio padre, a ogni bianca

  gelata invernale sopra i vicini

 

  campi arati, amava citare. Manca

  ormai da tantissimi anni, ma i pini

  che ha piantato riaprono la mia banca

  dei ricordi: vedo amici, bambini

 

  come me che ammirano lui potare

  le viti nell’orto, vedo la mano

  sua con un arnese a punta interrare

  

  semi di legumi e zucchine e piano

  annaffiarli, semplici gesti e pare

  davvero presente e così lontano.

 

Is it possible to buy A Book of Fears with italian translation, here in Italy? Bordighera is a very nice sea city on the italian west riviera, very close to the border of France and Cote d'Azur. Nothing to do with Bordighera Press?

Brian

Thank you, Brian, for your remarks, but especially for your poem.

Yes, you ought to be able to purchase copies of any of my books in Italy on-line from Amazon.com and other booksellers, or directly from the publisher:

Bordighera Publishers

John D. Calandria Italian-American Inst.

Queens College/CUNY

25 West 43^rd Street, 17^th Floor

New York NY 10036

No, aside from the name, there is no connection between the city and the Press.

 

Lewis

Lew,

Believe it or not, I have that same picture of "Little Josie. "Josie sent it to my mother many years ago — and mom kept it in an old box, tied with a faded ribbon, which box contained a mountain of sepia-colored  pictures of long-forgotten members of someone's family.  This was part of my mother's legacy to me ... photos of people I never knew. Why do I keep them?  Beats me. Maybe it's that part of me that likes to feel connected to the past.

As to your poem ... It is very beautiful in its honesty and at the same time wrenching and ugly — You've touched on a subject that surely touches the very soul of many women and children — for me it resonates of a time I have tried to forget. But let me play Devil's Advocate for a moment — perhaps many of these lost husbands and fathers left for good reason. Who knows?  Maybe their wives drove them away ... maybe their kids were thankless jerks ... maybe they never had the opportunity to realize a life's dream ... what I'm saying is, we can't bundle them up and tie them with a common cord ... every man has his own story ... wow, sorry I went on so ... and there you go again, stirring things up — and for that I thank you. 

Ann

 

No, Ann,

You don't have that very same picture, because YOU SENT IT TO ME and now I have it. I think you're losing it, girl.

And the poem doesn't blame anyone for anything. It just wonders what happens to all the fathers.

 Lew

 

Oh, gee, I forgot! Okay, okay, no need to get all cranky ... if I'm losing it kiddo, I have lots and lots of company!  Wouldn't it be great if they invented a GPS for memory? Then we'd never "lose it."

Now as to the poem ... how can you say the poem "doesn't blame anyone for anything"?  The mere mention of calling them "failed fathers" — taking "the slow slide down the drain" all smack of blame of some kind.  I think the perception of this poem depends on the reader's father and what their relationship was with him....  It's the word "failed" that troubles me. However, I still think it's beautiful, and very poignant.

Ann

 

You're right, "failed" is loaded, but it's also descriptive. They have, in fact, failed as fathers, even if you're sympathetic. Ask the kids who may still love them. The women have failed too. I know. My daughter is on her third marriage. Her husband is on his second. Everyone involved in a broken marriage blames himself or herself for the failure, especially the kids. My mother alienated my brother and me because she was always threatening divorce. My brother asked our father once how he could stay married to our mother. He replied, "If I can live with her, I can live with anyone." He had all our admiration.

Lew

 

And so it goes.... I guess I'm a graduate of  "The Rev. Luigi Turco's School of Abidance." My husband Ray took that slow slide down the drain of alcoholism, and my boys to this day ask "why didn't you leave him, Mom?" My answer is always the same — "and what would have become of us as a family unit?"  Having no further education other than a College Prep Course in 4 yrs of H.S., how could I support three kids and myself, pay a mortgage and all the other "stuff" that comes with raising a family?  Had I thrown him out, I doubt that I could have depended on him for support; he, no doubt, would have wound up in your "Cleveland or Albuquerque."  At least with his presence, such as it was, and his ability to continue at his job (albeit uncertain at times) there was a flow of income which allowed us to live a relatively comfortable life. Not normal, but comfortable. And so it was a trade-off ... comfort at all cost,  or peace of mind but poor. I chose comfort, thinking at the time that that would be better for the kids ... boy, was I ever wrong.  The result of that decision was catastrophic in terms of mental health.

But had I left Ray, and he did the slip-slide into alcoholic Gehenna, and was found dead in some dreadful place, I would never have forgiven myself for allowing the father of my children to completely destroy himself ... oddly enough, he did that anyway right before my eyes ... ironic, isn't it?

I'm guessing there's more dysfunction in today's families than there's not.  Remember the movie "The Stepford Wives"?  Nothing was what it seemed. I can vouch for at least 2 or 3 families just on my street that put up that front ... my mother had a Sicilian saying, ""Qui leggere di quelle libre"? — Who reads in those books ... Wow, what stories they could tell.

I remember my mother telling me that Zia Vita's husband was a member of the "Failed Fathers" group.  Didn't Sal, Sarah and Josie do a search into the archives of the State of New York looking for their father and what his ultimate fate was?

Who needs soaps?  Tune in....

A.

 

         I read your moving fathers poem and  then forwarded the link on to our kids. Steve's wife Sydney said it reminded her of her "lousy father." It occurred to me that Sydney and Gigi both had fathers who were seldom or never involved in their lives. And, of course, Aunt Josie's father was awful, from what I've heard!I love that picture of her. She was my favorite aunt, always spirited and unpredictable. This time when I looked at it I could see my  dad and my Uncle Sal even more clearly than usual.

         Just so I know—why did you capitalize  "Old Ladies"?

 

         It's miserably hot here these days!

Ginger and  Jim

 

The picture came from Ann. I have it on my table here in my study.

Why did I capitalize "Old Ladies"? Who knows? Maybe it was a sign of respect. I think maybe, though, when a man says, "My Old Lady" I hear it in caps.

August has been hot here, too, but before that it was cold and rainy, the coldest and rainiest on record. Today feels like fall.

Lew

 

 

Karl Shapiro, the Fly on the Wall

         A native Baltimorean, Karl Shapiro was educated at the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins, and the Enoch Pratt Library School in Baltimore before America entered the Second World War.  Shapiro's first book, Poems, was published in 1935.  He served in the U.S. Army from 1941 to 1945. During the next ten years Shapiro wrote four other books, two of which were particularly well-received: V-Letter and Other Poems (1944) and Essay on Rime (1945), both formalist volumes.

 

         Like other members of his poetic generation, Shapiro was of two minds, literarily speaking — he grew up during the Modernist revolution reading and admiring the great experimental poets of his day, but in the high school and college classrooms he read the traditional British and American poets and was trained in their methods. Shapiro was a stranger neither to formal craft nor prosodic experiment. Shapiro's Essay on Rime, in fact, was a study and consideration of the traditional approaches to poetry, the entire volume itself being written in verse rather than in prose mode.  Not until 1958 and his Poems of a Jew did Shapiro write another book that achieved an equal success.

 

         During the 1960s some of the formalist poets were persuaded to the new view of the "Beats" and the Black Mountain poets that formalism was no longer relevant to the times, which were becoming oriented to social activism and reform.  Karl Shapiro was one of the first of the formalists to adopt the new stance.  He gave a lecture in the early 1960s at various universities, including the Fenn College (now Cleveland State University) Poetry Center of Cleveland, that resurrected the theories of the 19th-century British satirical novelist Thomas Love Peacock to the effect that mankind ought to have outgrown poetry which was no more than the nursery rhymes of an infant society.  Shapiro said that if poetry was that which was "lost in translation," then he wanted his work to sound as much like translations as possible, for he wanted no part of rhymes and meters and such linguistic tinkletoys any longer.

 

         Shapiro joined the Beats, also, in making the connection between formal poetry and the "military-industrial complex"  — a term coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s — when he wrote in College English, the issue of October 1964, "An overnight collapse of the stanza might be as dangerous as the abolition of the Army.  Poets still need close-order drill and the barracks mentality.  It's too bad that they do.  Novelists don't nor does any other kind of artist I know of.  But poets are still the hostages of convention."  Kenneth Rexroth, granddaddy of the Beat Generation, had been saying exactly the same thing for years.

 

         This was not the same Shapiro to be found in An Essay on Rime nor even in Trial of a Poet.  In his volume of prose poems The Bourgeois Poet (1964), Shapiro tried to out-Beat Allen Ginsberg.  By the time White-Haired Lover appeared in 1968, however, Shapiro had done another about-face and was writing sonnets again, at least part-time, just as Peacock — despite his haranguing on the subject of formal poetry — had sneaked sonnets into his novels.

 

         To read through Karl Shapiro's Collected Poems 1940-1978 is to ride a roller-coaster through the literary fashions of the times, during all of which Shapiro was an academic teaching at various universities — in particular the University of Nebraska from 1956 to 1966 and, beginning in 1968, the University of California at Davis — and editing periodicals mainly of an academic stripe, including the long-lived magazine Harriet Monroe founded in Chicago, Poetry, originally the showcase of Modernist work but, during the decade of the 1960s, one of the last bastions of formalist practice.  Thus one of the earliest of the post-Modernist generation of poets, one of the first contemporary formalists, led the parade to antiformalism in the academy, and then was the earliest of the converted to backslide again to formalism, long before the Neoformalist movement got its foothold in the 1980s.

 

         "The Fly," which appeared in Shapiro's first book, became one of his most famous and most anthologized exercises.  It can stand as well as any of his poems as an example of the poet's formal style.  Here is the first stanza:

 

O hideous little bat, the size of snot,

With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes,

To populate the stinking cat you walk

The promontory of the dead man's nose,

Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan-Phyfe

The smoking mountains of my food

And in a comic mood

In mid-air take to bed a wife.

 

         By the mid-sixties, Shapiro had moved to straight, un-lineated prose as a vehicle, as his "Death of a Student" shows:

 

Down the funeral aisle ("my" student in coffin, car wreck, youngish death, eyeglasses polished, suit pressed as if for class, except that he's dead) come the grandparents, farmers, barely walking.  Followed by yet another generation — over the arm of a younging man a girl about three asleep — drugged? — her golden pony tail flopping, asleep.

 

Tie tied, suit without lint, the curt sadistic sermon. Love stiffens her back.  The child evades the question, as if tossing her hair.  Nihilo lies sleeping.

 

         By the standards of the time, and compared with the output of such people as Allen Ginsberg, this prose poetry was quite tame and unrevolutionary.  Nevertheless, by the time The Bourgeois Poet was published, many of the Academic poets were abandoning not only formal verse, but the teaching of the elements of formal verse writing.  They were stepping down from their hard-won positions of leadership and joining, as footsoldiers in the war against the "Military-Industrial Complex," the legions of their anti-intellectual students who were crying "Make Love, Not War" and "You Can't Trust Anyone Over Thirty."  As a sign of their good earnest, the former Academic Poets tried to act as though they didn't know as much as they did, but only enough to get by.  Teachers began to hear their students say in class that learning the techniques that had been used to write poetry in English for centuries was too "constricting."  They had to be "free."  Arguments to the effect that ignorance was not freedom and that the more one knew how to do, the more one could do, fell upon deaf ears.

         As the 'sixties turned into the 'seventies, a generation of student writers could hardly imagine how Shakespeare could have written those sonnets.  By the time the late 'seventies had arrived, many of these student writers became teachers themselves in the proliferating writing arts programs and workshops around the nation.  By the 'eighties, so much competence and lore had been lost, it was hard to imagine how it could ever be regained.

         At the Library of Congress' National Poetry Festival in 1962 I had the privilege of hearing Mr. Karl Shapiro expound upon the doctrines of Karl Shapiro, which doctrines seemed to have something to do with obliterating everyone who didn't immediately go out and memorize William Carlos Williams and say Whitman's "Song of Myself" every evening before bedtime.

         It was also my privilege at that Festival to rise from the audience to suggest that all proselytizers for a New Poetry on the American Plan be rounded up, put on a diesel, and shipped to Kankakee or Sheboygan, there to inflict upon themselves their own hot air so that the rest of us, who want simply to write as well as we can, as well as we may, according to what we can find in us to write with and about, in whatever style or tradition we may be able to develop or discover, may get on with our writing undisturbed.

         I said in 1963 that I re-opened that invitation, and suggested that Mr. Shapiro be made chief engineer, and Allen Ginsberg be made conductor. And, further, since the creation of poetry is an external reaction to an internal and private act of discovery, I would have liked to see a committee of scholars formed to survey various other cities and towns in these United States for the purpose of finding suitable isolation areas for all preachers of whatever doctrines, be they Wintersical or Shop-Heroic. All that theoretical fallout was contaminating the atmosphere, and I believe that people who are truly interested in poetry would rather look for a good poem to read than have to thumb through reams of hypotheses about poetry.

         In 1964 Karl Shapiro read what I had to say on this subject and referred, in an essay of his own, to "Some young poet [who] wrote an article in which he was saying about me and others — leave us alone. Shut up about Whitman and Williams and prose and let us write our poems in peace. Maybe he is right. An overnight collapse of the stanza might be as dangerous as the abolition of the Army. Poets still need close-order drill and the barracks mentality. It's too bad that they do. Novelists don't, nor does any other kind of artist I know of. But poets are still the hostages of convention."

         For the purposes of his polemic, Mr. Shapiro distorted at will. Let me say, however, that I do agree with his remark that "poets are still the hostages of convention," and always have been, and always will be, which is not to say they are incapable of innovation, demolition, dullness, or fancy. Or, to put it as Proust put it, "Our greatest poets have been forced to achieve their finest lines by the tyranny of rhyme," meaning, certainly, not just rhyme but all of the strictures of poetry, of language art. They were forced to invent, to be artful, in order to be both intelligible and “spontaneous,” as Mr. Shapiro well knew, having been himself a formalist poet before he saw the light and was blinded. To claim that it is impossible for poets of a particular generation and geography to write great traditional poetry would seem to be as foolish as to say that they cannot (as some do say) write great revolutionary poetry by breaking out of the old forms.

         What Mr. Shapiro seemed to be arguing for in the end was a popular poetry: "Nobody loves it. Nobody wants it." This is absurd and petulant. Mr. Shapiro wanted a renascence in poetry comparable to that which was taking place in other arts: Did he mean that in the 1960's people were flocking to the galleries to bask in abstract expressionism? To the concert halls to wallow in twelve-tone compositions? To the theaters for long-run theater of the absurd? To gymnasiums to be ravished by modern dance? To the book stalls to gobble up copies of the works of all those great new novelists? Does one really need to say that a good book on the best-seller list is a freak of nature? That..., oh, well.

         I think of those hordes of Italians who gossip about their opera stars, yet who have never been near one of the state-subsidized opera houses; of all those French fish-mongers who have never even smelt a page of Cocteau. Or was Mr. Shapiro talking about the Rockettes? We have the kind of poetry he wants; we've always had it: John Godfrey Saxe, James Whitcomb Riley, Ogden Nash, Edgar Guest — all have the public heart: Everybody Loves It. Everybody Wants It. It's real Americana.

         Robert Frost, said Mr. Shapiro, is a master, but he's not an American. He's a non-existential New Englander. And Stevens. And Robinson.  And all those great un-American versifiers.  One keeps asking, what on earth is the difference between a great writer and a great American writer?

         And this business about "academic poetry"— what is it? Is it a job? Is it a meter? Is it a mood or a fashion? Was T. S. Eliot not really a banker but a graduate student who was nutty about John Donne? Were Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell, Howard Nemerov and Karl Shapiro, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell all "academic" because they taught? Is teaching worse for poets than slaving over ledgers Like Eliot or insurance reports like Wallace Stevens, or scribbling verse on prescription blanks like William Carlos Williams? "Academic poets?" said a Beat pal of mine. "I dunno, poets who know what they're doing, I guess."

         It must not go unremarked, however, that Shapiro was a lively presence on the literary scene for a long time, and that he labored in the vineyards as well as scaled the slopes of Parnassus. He wrote some poems that will remain with readers for many years.

Defining "Free Verse"

         Robert Wallace begins the first paragraph of his essay, "Meter in English" (in Meter in English, q.v. bibliography, below) with an assertion that others have made before him: "The difference that distinguishes verse from prose or speech is the unit of line."  Not so.  Much more than merely the existence of "lines" in the genre of "poetry" distinguishes verse from prose, the only modes of language in which any genre (fiction, drama, poetry) may be written.

         Wallace begins his second paragraph with another disputable sentence: "In free verse, the units of line are or appear arbitrary, that is, relatively unpredictable."  What I object to here is the use of the undefined term "free verse," as though such a term makes sense, for, to reiterate, there are only two modes in which any genre can be written, prose and verse.  Prose is unmetered language; verse is metered language.

         If Wallace wishes to take exception to this definition, he should direct his remarks to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary which notes as the first definition of prose, "The ordinary form of written or spoken language, without metrical structure" [emphasis added].  Similarly, the first definition of verse in the OED is, "A succession of words arranged according to natural or recognized rules of prosody and forming a complete metrical line [emphasis added]."  The first definition of metre, "To compose or put into metre," according to the Oxford, is obsolete; the second is, "To compose verses; to versify."  Wallace, like many traditional prosodists, seems to have forgotten that the term "free verse" came to us in the twentieth century from the nineteenth-century French vers libre, but adopting a foreign term does not rewrite history, nor change the definitions in our dictionaries.  As to the concept of "line" rather than "meter" being primary in the recognition of "verse," nowhere in the OED can one find that verse means "a line of language," only that a verse may mean "one of the lines of a poem or piece of versification."

         Wallace didn't even bother to try to define the term upon which his essay is built, nor has anyone had success in conventionally defining the term "free verse." The point I make in The Book of Forms (q.v. bibliography) is that "poetry" is a genre, with fiction, drama, and the various nonfiction genres (autobiography, travelogue, epistles, journalism, and so forth), whereas "verse" is a mode, like prose, and, again, any of the genres may be written in either of the modes.  We are victims of the traditional Anglo-American cultural bias that poetry must be written in verse or it isn't poetry (the terms "verse" and "poetry" are often confused), and that bias clouds our judgment just as it clouded that of the French, forcing them to come up with definitions that transform prose modes into verse modes — hence vers libre / "free verse," which is clearly a contradiction in terms: how can "verse" be "free" if it must (according to dictionary denotations) be "metrical"?

         Anyone who reads the Bible can tell that prose poems have existed from the beginnings of history.  Anyone can prove by scanning (if one knows how to scan: see "the Rules of Scansion" in The Book of Forms, Third Edition) nearly any piece of English prose that it consists primarily of iambic and anapestic rhythms, not meters, for Whitman was not counting syllables in his prose poems, though the parallel grammatical structures of his prosody certainly did provide repeating rhythms, as The Book of Forms discusses.  We know when Whitman was writing metrical poems, which he did early in his career and when he wrote "O Captain, My Captain," because the verse lines are apparent on the page, and one can count the strict lengths of the accentual-syllabic verses.  This brings up another point: the mere act of scanning prose does not turn that prose into verse.  Verse is verse only by virtue of the fact that the maker of the verses counted the syllables, stresses, and/or verse feet in discrete lines.

         Why do traditionalists insist that poetry in English must be written in some sort of "verse" or it isn't poetry?  And why do they have to justify line-phrased prose as verse?  The answer is simple: given the former bias, the latter is a requirement if prose works are to be allowed into the poetic canon.  Perhaps if we plow a few rows with everyone's exemplar, Walt Whitman, we can illuminate this discussion of "lineation" and "verses."  As I type I have beside me several editions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.  Let's here set down the first few "lines" of that "poem," together with the poet's own line counts, first from the edition of 1855:

[1]

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

 

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass.     5

 

[2]

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes....the shelves are crowded

         with perfumes,

 

I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,

the distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

 

The atmosphere is not a perfume....it has no taste of the

         distillation....it is odorless,

 

It is for my mouth forever....I am in love with it,                            10

I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

         Now, what are the "lines" of this passage?  Where, for instance, does line 6 end, with the word "crowded" or with "perfumes"?  If with the former, then Whitman's "line 10" is really line 12.  What caused Whitman (who was his own printer) to curl line six over?  Why, right-hand justification, of course, just as though it were prose.  The page wasn't wide enough to print the clause all in one line.  Can this be proven?  Certainly.  Here is line six of the same poem (only now titled "Walt Whitman") from the third edition (1860-61):

         Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves

                  are crowded with perfumes,...

Why does the "line" now break after "shelves" rather than after "crowded"?  Because the pages are narrower in this edition, therefore the right-hand justification required that this prose sentence break elsewhere.  Here is the same passage from the edition of 1900:

         Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are

                  crowded with perfumes,...

Francis Murphy's edition of The Complete Poems breaks this passage of the protean poem in the same place, but now it is line 14, as it is in some of the other editions published during Whitman's life.

         What constitutes the Whitmanian "line," then, at least in the poet's own view?  Clauses, generally independent clauses.  Meter has nothing to do with it, nor has "versification" of any known kind.  Line one is an independent clause; so are lines two and three and all the rest of the lines of this passage.  They are linked independent clauses in parallel constructions.  One can see the parallelism by running one's eye down the left-hand margin of the poem.

         Now, if we scan the "Song of Myself," what will we find?  We will find iambs and anapests randomly, except where the parallels require that the same rhythms appear in approximately the same order.  This is not versifying; these are not meters.  Although "lineation" is taking place, it is not typographical "lineation" but grammatical lineation.  If we want Whitman's prose poem to look even more like a "traditional" verse-mode poem, we may line-phrase it further, in the manner of William Carlos Williams, by breaking the clauses into phrases:

                  I celebrate myself,

                  and what I assume

                  you shall assume,

                  For every atom

                  belonging to me

                  as good belongs to you.

Have we made this poem any more of a "poem" by doing this?  Is it any more "verse" than it was before?  Have we hurt the poem or helped it?  We have done no more to it than draw attention to it for a specific purpose.  By the way, did Whitman use the term "free verse"?  Certainly not, as it didn't exist in English at the time.  He knew he was writing prose poems.

         Until someone else can establish a "convention" for free verse — that is to say, a definition that most users of the English language can agree with, "free verse" will not, in fact, exist except as a confusing term.  Despite the fact that we have been using it for most of a century, there is no reason for anyone, at this juncture, to jump on the free verse bandwagon and define it as anything but prose, whether "lineated" or not.

         Wallace nevertheless elsewhere in the opening section of his essay continues to treat the term "free verse" as though such a convention actually exists.  He writes, "Reading or hearing unmetered verse...we are not aware of any fixed or predictable pattern."  Does the term unmetered verse make sense in terms of the OED definition?  "In free verse, there will of course be natural patterns and probably significant repetitions of them, but we have no particular sense of predictability or expectation."  What does Wallace mean by natural patterns?  Is this term the same as his other neologism, "speech-run"?

         Wallace also refers to "free verse" as "the predominant verse form in the twentieth century."  Is prose a verse form?  One had thought that the term referred to such things as sonnets, sestinas, or villanelles.  Does he mean that prose has become the predominant mode for writing poetry in the twentieth century?  I can agree with that statement, but the "forms" of prose used in modern poetry are the forms of grammatical parallelism (synonymous, synthetic, antithetic, and climactic parallels) to be found in Whitman and the Bible (and in The Book of Forms).

         In the early chapters of his book Free Verse Charles O. Hartman (q.v. bibliography) talks about the necessity for "conventions" in poetics and prosodics.  He reviews the various prosodies and the inappropriate application of the concept of "isochrony," or musical time, to English poetry. Hartman spends all of his chapter three telling the reader that no one agrees on a definition of "free verse”; then, in chapter four, ignoring what he has just written, Hartman talks about English poetry primarily in terms of isochrony and begins to come up with yet another definition of "free verse" that I for one cannot even understand.

         Let me be specific.  Hartman writes, "A meter is a prosody whose mode of organization is numerical." Certainly not.  A meter is a meter; a prosody is a prosody; to wit: a prosody is any system for writing the genre of poetry (OED); there are verse systems and prose systems: verse and prose are modes.  Some examples of verse systems are accentual verse, syllabic verse, and accentual-syllabic verse (although Wallace does not believe that the first two of these exist).

         Within these prosodies there are various specific meters; for instance, within accentual prosody there can be a meter called dipodics; in syllabics, decasyllabics; in accentual-syllabics, anapestic trimeter (Wallace denies that any of these things exist).  An example of a prose prosody is grammatic parallelism, as in the Bible.

         There are many of Hartman's and Wallace's scansions with which I do not agree, nor do I see how many others could agree with them.  For instance, Hartman distinguishes between two lines: "Shivering in their beds in November's wind" and "Shiver in their beds in November's wind." But in fact the two lines scan exactly the same way: "Shiv'ring" is an elision — who, except perhaps for Wallace, who does not believe in elision, either, pronounces it with three syllables?  Therefore, "Shiver" is a trochee also, and the line looks like this in both versions: ´x | .x | ´x | x´ | x´ — there are three trochees in the line, so it is trochaic pentameter both ways standing on its own, but in an iambic pentameter poem both lines would be headless iambic — (x)´ | x. | x´ | xx´ | x´ — with a promotion in the second foot and an anapest substitution in the fourth foot.

         Hartman scans some Hopkins lines, but in the "dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in (secondary stress by promotion) his riding" sequence he doesn't stress dawn or drawn, even though they are sprung with alliteration and rhyme; he doesn't show the promotion of in, and he doesn't show the stress in riding, which any pronouncing dictionary will indicate.  The same is true in the following line, where the un in "underneath" is obviously accented, as is the first syllable of steady.  In the next line, "there" takes a rhetorical stress; "how" takes an alliterative stress, and the second syllable of upon is normally stressed.  I simply have no idea what Hartman is talking about here in his discussion of Hopkins' prosody.

         Hartman's scansion of Morris' poem is equally baffling to me.  No matter how one pronounces "Gradually," whether with four syllables or three (a w-glide elision on dua), one of the normally unstressed syllables in "...dually in the" is going to be promoted — I hear it on the y.  Ditto in the following line: one of the syllables in "That are out..." must be promoted if they are all normally unstressed, but in fact out in "outlasting" takes a primary stress, according to my dictionary, which also shows that the dis in "disappear" takes a primary stress.  The reader may check any pronouncing dictionary to confirm these assertions.

         At the beginning of chapter three Hartman asks, "Why is poetry usually written in verse?"  It isn't.  If he had said "English language" poetry, the question might have been appropriate, but the poetries of many cultures are, and always have been, written in prose, which was the first mode for poetry beginning with Gilgamesh and continuing through the "Song of Songs" and the Psalms.  In English Christopher Smart, William Blake, Martin Farquhar Tupper and Edgar Allan Poe wrote prose poetry before Whitman did.  Even Euphues is more poem than novel.

         Hartman wrote further, "Though isochronous prosody only marginally belongs to poetry — its natural home is in song — the lines of distinction are not always easy to draw. " ***  "...Once words give up the rhythmic support of music...the temporal prosody becomes one of two meters.  In a stress-oriented language [like English], it becomes accentual meter."  Hartman goes on then to mis-scan the Morris poem mentioned earlier and to discuss accentual meter, but five pages later he talks as though isochrony were applicable to English, which it is not, as he himself had just finished pointing out.

         On page 64 Hartman talked about "counterpoint between accentual isochrony and lineation," which sounded as though it might be an interesting idea, but he discussed it in terms of some lines from W. C. Williams' "The Dance."  Hartman maintained that the first and last lines, which are identical, "In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess," "...is so clearly a line."

         But it isn't!  Without a gloss, how does the ordinary reader pronounce "Kermess," with the stress on the first syllable?

         In Breughel's great picture, '' The Kermess

or on the second?

         In Breughel's great picture, '' The Kermess

Hartman gives no scansion, and a standard dictionary is of no help.  If the word is pronounced the first way, then it is a stich of Anglo-Saxon prosody with the caesura out of place, and it's a poor line for that reason; if it is pronounced the second way it scans x´ | x´ | ´x |.x |´ (x), starting out iambically and shifting  to trochees, and it's still a bad line rhythmically.  The "tweedle of bagpipes" line is a good line, but it's also obviously a perfect line of Anglo-Saxon prosody, including alliteration, and that's why we like it, not because it is "anacrustic" and so forth, as Hartman maintains.

         At least here Hartman is talking about "counterpoint" as something rhythmical.  I understand the term to mean more specifically variations, including substitutions, in an accentual-syllabic poem, as I have written in The Book of Forms.  One has also heard of "eye counterpoint," which is spatial — I was the first to use this term, I believe, as applied to verse, and Hartman uses it as well although he, like others — including the so-called "New Formalists" and Wallace — doesn't cite, or even mention, any edition of The Book of Forms, which was first published in 1968, long before Hartman's book, or any neoformalist volume, was published.  "Eye counterpoint" has to do with the placement of lines on the page, and perhaps Hartman was trying to work the two ideas together somehow, but he wrote, "These shifting relations between syntax [my emphasis] and linear isochrony constitute the poem's prosody." That is opaque for these reasons:

         1)  Hartman had earlier said that isochrony is not really applicable to accentual or accentual-syllabic prosody.

         2) He had talked about "counterpoint" in terms of meter, and perhaps worked it along to a consideration of something like "eye-counterpoint" in his discussion of "lineation," a term out of art, not out of literature, according to the OED.  Here, however, Hartman is getting into matters of sentence structure as well.  By the time the reader reaches page 72 Hartman has left the concept of counterpoint as a rhythmic device well behind and he is talking about "the counterpoint of lineation and syntax alone."

         By the time we have arrived at this point Hartman has completely lost me and, I am sure, nearly everyone who cares about verse writing or even prosodics.  Hartman is nowhere near establishing a "convention" regarding "free verse," nor even a reasonable definition of it.  Wallace in his essay attempts a finesse by not trying to establish a definition but simply acting as though one exists.  My own definition has the advantage of simplicity and is easily defended: verse is metered language, and prose is unmetered language.  The OED definition of these terms is the same.

 

WORKS CITED

 

David Baker, editor, Meter in English, A Critical Engagement, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997

Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse, Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1980.

Lewis Turco, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Lebanon NH: University Press of New England, 2000.

——. The Public Poet, Ashland: Ashland Poetry Press, 1991.

Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy, New York: Penguin, 1975.

——. Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley, London: Secker and Warburg, 1959.

——. Leaves of Grass, Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860-61.

——. Leaves of Grass, Philadelphia: David McKay, 1900.

REMARKS

Excellent essay, Lew! I've printed it out to read again, more slowly and carefully. Thanks!

Love,

Rhina

Lewis,

Enjoyed reading this on your site. I tend to put the term 'free verse' in quotation marks when using it. Maybe now just I'll stop saying it altogether. I must say that 'accentual-syllabic' is still a mystery for me; I thought I understood it clearly until I read Mary Kinzie's version of it. What do you think of her Poet's Guide? It seems to me an odd mixture of the simplistic and the abstruse! (Besides having a great many typos.) But there is much that is helpful.

Marta Finch

 

Marta,

I haven’t seen Ms. Kinzie’s material. Why do you need anything else if you own The Book of Forms? There’s nothing hard about “accentual-syllabic” prosody. The poet counts, first, all the syllables in the line; then he or she counts the stressed syllables in the line, and finally the poet counts the verse feet in the line. In a perfect line of iambic pentameter verse there will be, first, ten syllables in the line; second, there will be five stressed syllables in the line, and these will alternate regularly with the unstressed syllables, the line beginning with an unstressed syllable, which will yield, third, five iambic verse feet. Of course, there should be variations of one kind or another in the line, but iambs must predominate; that is to say, the iamb must be the running foot, and very few lines should be perfect.

Lew

Lew,

Thanks, that was fast! But you very kindly explained the part I knew. Of course I have read and re-read your book's explanation, and here you make it seem very simple. But it isn't. What throws me is when there are 13 syllables in a line and it can only properly be scanned as pentameter; or, conversely, when a line of only 9 (or even 8) syllables must be. If a 10-syllable line has 6 strong stresses, is it still a pentameter line? And is that what makes it accentual-syllabic? Or is it what I would have thought — just a poor line? (Yes, I know it depends on the poet/poem, but could it be accentual hexameter?) I'll look for some examples in the next few days and send them to you to perhaps clarify what I'm trying to say. 

Marta

 

Marta,

I described a PERFECT line of iambic pentameter verse. But I also said, "Of course, there should be variations of one kind or another in the line, but iambs must predominate; that is to say, the iamb must be the running foot, and very few lines should be perfect." So in any iambic pentameter line as variations there may be up to two other kinds of feet. If you substitute two three-syllable feet, say two anapests for two iambs, the syllable count will be twelve, not ten, but iambs will still PREDOMINATE, and it will still be an iambic pentameter line, though with two variations. If your line contains thirteen syllables, it's not likely to be an iambic line because there will be three variations, and odd feet will predominate. Similarly, the only way that an iambic pentameter line can contain six stressed syllables is by substituting a spondee for an iamb, which one can do in the first foot (very unlikely anywhere else). Contrarily, if one drops an unaccented syllable somewhere, most likely in the first foot (a "headless" line), the syllable count will be nine, not ten, but it will still be an iambic line, and what is most important is that there be five verse feet in the line. ALL THIS IS IN The Book of Forms, Third Edition on pages 37-43.

Lew