Metre is regular and regularly recurring, as in iambic metre where the metric stress alternates uniformly all through; rhythm varies from line to line with the run of the words and depends on their meaning. So the metre of Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang would go ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum; the rhythm would go tum-tum-ti-tum (pause) tum-tum-ti-tum-tum-tum; if I had you here I could demonstrate in five seconds. Playing off the two kinds of stress against each other gives English poetry its characteristic effect. —Kinglsey Amis

When the meter as such dominates meaning, we approach doggerel. As Robert Frost said, “You save it [a poem] from doggerel” by “having enough dramatic meaning in it for the other thing to break the doggerel. But it mustn’t break with it. I said years ago that it [verse in which the meter and the meaning have a proper relation] reminds me of a donkey and a donkey cart; for some of the time the cart is on the tugs and some of the time on the hold-back.” —Brooks & Warren

Which is why it seems to me a very difficult thing to understand poetry without being able to feel it as several levels one of which is the level at which you hear it, which means you ought to read it aloud and learn to read it passingly aloud. I listened recently to a series of lectures on poetry in which the chap did not read formal poetry aloud very well—I would give him a D- on reading poetry aloud. He read free verse well enough, having a good feeling for it since he was guided by the appearance (free verse depends on its effect on the way it looks on the page in a way that formal verse does not. In both the effect can be important, but in free verse the break of a line is more crucial of a metrical indication since it is the only clue that is certain—I think. There is a feel to it but you have to be given clues as to its appearance or have a good reader to feel its music. It was interesting to me the chap in recognizing Walt Whitman as the first to use free verse, also pointed out that one of the main influences on this development was the cadenced prose of the King James Bible) but not formal poetry, and yet was able to expand it well enough. Still he read formal poetry too much like prose, in a flat and unfeeling way not to my liking at all. So I say it is difficult, especially for me to see how it is to be understood, but not impossible. There are some who read with ridiculous drama and embarrassing emphasis; avoid them and while you’re at it avoid making yourself a fool this way before other people. There are recordings of good poets reading their own and other’s poetry. Hear them before all others.

Of course another level at which you must feel it is just at the level of meaning. You must understand how the sentences make sense. Especially with long sentences and awkward syntax this can be difficult. I suppose for any poet there is going to be a pull toward music at the expense of meaning, or toward meaning at the expense of music according to his inclinations and abilities. Not only is there the proper arrangement of rhythm and meter, but also the related, but distinguishable problem of making music and meaning complement each other correctly. You can see how a poet has to be concerned about saying things in the proper meter, with the sound of words and the sounds of things together, and with that music being the music of his meaning. Fortunately music is more general and multivalent, or perhaps I should say, otherwise specific and specifically equivocal (I still remember the very funny young lady who once wondered if it would be proper to sing more than one stanza to any one tune as the meaning of the second stanza might not correspond to the music which so well fit the first—not that this is not a consideration, but that it is hardly a problem). Nevertheless, it is well to remember that there is something suitable about a limerick using an anapestic trimeter. It is said—if I remember correctly—of T.S. Eliot’s poetry that what he captured more than anything were the rhythms of the feeling of modernity upon modern people. To read in silence without the echo of the music in your head, it seems to me, is to miss a great deal of the poetry of poetry.

If you want more ideas about effects you should read the Wicked Wasp of Twickenham’s Essay on Criticism. I am not much of a one for Aristotelian or Catholic or Age of Reason ideals; give me romanticism. There is a good reason the yawning middle ground of the notion purgatory appeals to something that takes such unambitious and unadventurous views. But one cannot say it is all unsound, just that one always feels there has to be more and that only person with a mediocre tendency to prefer safety and security can really be satisfied with it, that is it little more than glorified common sense.

Listen to it here.

James Joyce, I understand, taught himself to write poetry by writing the poems collected under the title of Chamber Music. These are fine poems, and the reason James Joyce was able to do this was that without any question he was a genius. Other persons must learn by a rather longer and more patient road. James Joyce was a great genius, but he lived in great poverty, wrote for years and produced not much more than five volumes of writings.

It is probably not much disputed that of all the arts of writing, poetry is the highest. If one were exploring the essence of poetry, one would perhaps be tempted to wonder if it were not in some way possible to maintain that poetry is ultimate communication. But that is not what one is exploring and one does not think that, though pursuing the notion seems interesting. What one is exploring is how much learning goes into the writing of poetry. It all depends on the person you are. For me, for example, matters of punctuation are matters of blood, sweat and tears—and if you think what James Joyce was laboring over was punctuation, then you are wrong; I’m sure James Joyce could punctuate accurately before he could talk. There is nothing easy about it for me, nothing intuitive. I have no proper feeling for it, it seems. If something so basic is labor, how much more complexities.

Meter is not something that comes easily to most of us in this age. We are not used to hearing poetry read well aloud and most of us do not read very well when we read aloud. (Listen to poets reading poetry. Listen to Eliot, to Thomas, to Yeats. You’ll find none of their reading drab or listless, nor dramatized and exaggerated.) But meter is more than lining up all the right stresses and lack of stresses; a poet has to struggle against the metrical regularity making jingles of his verse. I was reading some criticism of Robert Frost (a major poet, in case you were wondering) in which the critic observed that when it came to couplets, Frost’s ear was not always accurate. This same critic also observed that Frost’s pentameter was sometimes too dependent on monosyllables, a criticism of the same kind. If Robert Frost had rythmical-metrical problems, then it is well to draw the lesson that when it comes to meter, no poet can be a dabbler.

Never mind learning to get the meter right and mastering technical things. What about the actual things one writes? I was reading a preface to a collection that Auden wrote in which he said there were four kinds of poems: the ones that nobody else ought ever to see, the ones that were a good idea and failed, the ones that the poet has nothing against other than their lack of importance, and then the few remaining ones that a poet would like to be remembered by. How much practice goes into writing one worthwhile poem? This was W.H. Auden, another major English poet.

T.S. Eliot made a notorious observation that there were two strategies to going about being known for poetry (we are talking the big leagues here, and the lofty ambition since we wish to make the point a fortiori—if the big guys could not afford to dabble, how much less [minortiori?] can the small or minuscule who wish to make a decent poem): publish much and keep the name before the public even if not all the poetry is of the best, or publish only the best and keep your name high if sporadically present at the expense of a low output. The point is that even if you are a great poet you do not write a lot of great poetry. You write a lot of poetry and a little of it is great. You work a lot; you do not dabble.

And consider how many of the great poets made their living by writing poetry. No, my friends, no poet is a dabbler, however minor his verse. It is an occupation that requires the intensity and attention of a concert pianist who must always be practicing, except it does not really pay.

I was hoping for a little more give and take on the question of what is poetic. It would have been interesting to explore it further with questions and with answers. I have been thinking about it again recently, and it would seem some writing and consideration would be just the thing.

Poetry as the right words in the right order, is an explanation you will run across from time to time. It is one of the best ones I can think of. Poetry is when you exploit the possibilities of language at every level, not only at the level of words, of syntax, of meaning, but also at the level of effects: the music of the sound of what you’re saying, the rhythms associated, and all the intricate connections and meanings you can make with rhyme and assonance and such. Still, that is not complete; that is how poetry works but not what poetry aims at.

I have some thoughts on that, but I will instead say it is not my purpose to distinguish poetry from all other forms of literature. I am not interested in that right now. That will be anon if ever.

Since summer is monotonous and enervating I will dilate on the explanation and see about sorting some of my thinking in that regard, and if you do not take it very seriously it might be interesting or at least probably not that much harm. I realize it sounds like I’m going to be didactic and that is the most boring blogging there is, even though people often seem to enjoy it. Do not worry about that; I intend to be much too incoherent even to appear to be didactic.

Here are the things it has occurred to me to consider:

1 How the poet is no dabbler.
—perhaps some objections from frivolous persons.
—some considerations. (i.e. what is there to learn? Everything, depending on how much said poet doesn’t know.)
2 The music of language.
—effects, meter, rhyme.
3 The warehouse of language.
—vocabulary.
—punctuation.
—syntax and expression.
—perhaps more on the possibilities of rhyme.
4 Technical matters.
—mostly how that is a place of great early effort.
5 Personal development of a poet.
—stagnations & anxieties.
6 Controlling one’s figures.
—when the simile is apt.
—when the metaphor.
—other figures.
7 Some observations about the Psalms.

I was at church. Near the end of the day I saw the last light of the sun in a remote window near the front. The light fell through the yellow-tinted panes onto the dark wood of the sill. The inside of the church is comely: with white walls, with exposed stained wood, and all well proportioned. It is small and old, but very like a church and pleasing. The building shows both attention and neglect, and it is one that had perhaps spent more of its years waiting to be used during the long days of the week than actually in use. I wondered how many years the patient sunlight had streamed in in that way near evening, lighting that part of the building in an unnecessary and unused way.
(more…)

Please feel free to ask any questions that might occur to you. The only reason I take them as a personal attack is that I’m paranoid, but that is no reflection on the person asking and should in no wise inhibit sensible persons.

Is there something you have always wondered about? Ask it here and you can be sure I will either answer you, make fun of you for asking, or take it as a personal insult and make my rejoinder in a series of oblique posts that sort of take on a life of their own and perhaps even develop their own category. The only thing I can really offer as a mitigation to the fact that you may get one of the three kinds of responses listed above is that there is no predicting which you will get.

If the world is made by God then there is no reason why anything other than perversions and heresies (“Strange without heresy,” the chap says in Love’s Labor’s Lost, and rightly even though the chap is a chump and says it to a pedant) should be uninteresting. Scripture teaches that Christians should not pay attention to heretics and should be able to refute them and excommunicate them and I cannot help feeling that part of the poetic gesture of the proper biblical treatment of heresy is to communicate to the heretic a great, holy yawn. Nobody, my dear ass, is interested in your silly and repugnant innovations since reality is much better and far more interesting. Pay no heed to heresies for they are, at very least, tedious; and heretics would not be dangerous were people never to pay attention to them. One cannot help feeling that even in the absence of disgust toward heresy if the heresy were received with ordinate boredom that more heresies would dry up and go away; one feels that heretics want nothing so much as they want attention which is why they set themselves up as teachers.
(more…)

It has been a long time
since shadows of the rain
darkened under waiting plants
with their obscure and soft-
muttered anticipation.

And June’s fecundity
is everywhere; no more
the outlines of a world
of winter. Now the strength
of summer will devour all.

The abundance of the spring
is ripe, and Summer works
a gradual violence
in which we await the cool
decrepitude of fall,
the rotten fruit and fly.

Here is a grouchy, opinionated and amusing article on the music and the listeners and anybody else implicated in a classical music concert in our day.