I should buy more beach reading.
Oct. 6th, 2003 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksAfter all, I live just off Rhoads Beach. I can see the pond from here. Anyhow, I am bedridden today, it being the one day a month I am bedridden. It has now gotten to the point where I simply plan that one day of the month will be devoted to heavy drugs and no unnecessary movement. It continues to get slowly worse as time passes, but I consider it acceptable as long as I only lose a day. The thing is, I slept for six or seven hours earlier in the day, assisted by said heavy medication, and have now reached that aggravating sort of state in which the mind is awake, and alert even, and the body does not desire more sleep, but the body is in no shape at all to do anything more involved than sitting up, with assistance from pillows. This computer chair is pushing it. So I have been reading, or trying to read, because I find upon examination of my library that I have yet again followed the principle of bringing everything I cannot live without. This is a reasonable principle, but the books I cannot live without tend to be masterpieces, deep works of art that engulf the reader and cause philosophical reflection and thought and change for the better, and so they take the entire concentration of an alert and awake and non-sedated mind, which means I can't track on them in this sort of condition. Also I try not to reread books very often for fear of finding that I have memorized them, which feels like an inefficient use of mental resources-- I wouldn't worry about this if it hadn't happened with, for example, the complete librettos of Gilbert and Sullivan. When I am bored I do things like try to remember every line by every character in G&S whose name begins with the letter P (Patience, Psyche, et al.), but I wish to keep as much of other authors' prose out of my subconscious as possible, thank you. So upon looking over my shelves I discovered that the only things I hadn't read within the last six months were Wuthering Heights and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, both of which qualify as bona fide Masterpieces Which I Do Not Have The Brain For Right Now.
I then spent an hour-and-a-half reading Swinburne, who while demanding concentration is at least short, and another two hours reading Yeats, who while demanding concentration is at least shorter, and have gotten to the point where I think I could not handle anything else longer than a haiku. However, it got me thinking about poetry, and I find writing to be a different sort of concentration then reading, and one I can better handle at the moment, so I decided to write up some of my thoughts on poetry and inflict them on the universe. I think I have remembered how to do cut text, even, so I shan't inflict it on anyone who doesn't want it, meaning probably that Ruth will read it out of a sense of obligation but nobody else because there is really no reason anyone but me should care about my opinions on poetry, which I freely admit. Expressing opinions nobody solicited is, after all, what LJ is for.
Things I firmly believe about poetry:
1. Poetry should be distinguishable from prose.
So often, these days, poems seem to be words arranged in an unconventional method on the paper. I find that this really does not work.
This, for
example is not
a
poem no matter how hard
I work at rearranging it
and leaving out punctuation and doing Odd
Things w/Caps and Abbrevs. etc.
because if I just typed it in a paragraph, as any sensible person would, there would be no way to distinguish it from any other sentence. I find that a good litmus text for the presence of poetry is to rearrange the lines in a conventional paragraph structure and see if the result becomes ordinary prose. Even if the poem doesn't contain the standard rhyme schemes or rhythmical usages that modern poets seem so determined to rebel against, one should be able to figure out that it is poetry, and where the line breaks are, and why it was originally put in the line format it appeared in first.
I think W.H. Auden demonstrates this reasonably well, in his elegy for Yeats: "He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, and snow disfigured the public statues; the mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. O all the instruments agree the day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness the wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, the peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; by mourning tongues the death of the poet was kept from his poems."
I submit that this does not read like prose, cannot read like prose, especially when read aloud with attention to where the stresses of the sounds are placed and the near-rhymes occur. See if you can guess at least some of the line breaks; most of them are relatively obvious because of their necessity (there are a few in this one that aren't, but well over half seem required to me).
2. On the other hand, poetry should follow and use the natural rules and rhythms of speech and grammar.
Otherwise, it sounds artificial and bombastic. Have you ever heard a small child read a sonnet? Whether it's a good sonnet or not, everything else in the poem becomes subsumed to the iambic pentameter, which becomes the only thing really perceivable. Some very good poets have fallen into the trap of subsuming the words themselves to rhythm or rhyme in this fashion. My example here is Shakespeare, I'm afraid, and from the sonnets, and a famous one:
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May"...
and so on. The first two lines are magnificent, fitting the rhythm without forcing it, joining the plainness and ease of colloquial speech with the usages of the form required here. The third line I have never been able to forgive for the word 'do'. I probably never will. Firstly, the emphatic isn't a form that's used much in English, and though it was used more in Shakespeare's day than it is now, it still required a purpose for its use and the purpose was, in fact, emphasis. Had anyone doubted the phrase in which the emphatic appears here? Is there need to make the point clear as a counter to things in the rest of the poem which disagree? No. As a result, the grammar feels forced. Upon reading aloud, the voice is forced too; you have to put far more stress upon 'do' here than would ordinarily be placed on that part of the emphatic; usually it's the main verb and not the auxiliary verb that takes the vocal weight (I do think so, don't you?). Both of the words surrounding the auxiliary, which are the words with actual semantic weight, are made into unstressed syllables and consequently tossed off lightly, which is not the desired effect. In short, the placement of 'do' here is solely for the purpose of creating and maintaining the iambic pentameter. It has no other use. The grammar and the meaning have both become secondary to the rhythm, making this a badly structured line in my opinion.
This kind of error is far more insidious than the first I mentioned, because of the concept of poetic license and because people feel that poetry should have a different texture to it than prose and that that texture can come from grammatical manipulation, as indeed it can. However, poetic license and the manipulation of grammar should be tools of the poet, and not the poet's masters. It shouldn't be necessary to mangle the language to create a desired structure; rather, the structure and the language of the poetry should be unified, so that each creates and influences the other. The result when this occurs is a poetry that flows like natural, conversational speech and sings with the eloquence of carefully constructed images; a poetry in which, when it is read aloud, the natural stresses of the language will make rhythm and rhyme perfectly obvious without the work and discipline that went into their creation being visible.
In the end, it is the structure that makes the poem. And the structure tends to based on rhythm. A poem can be brilliant without rhyme, but I've never seen one that works without some form of definite rhythmic structure to its language, whether the rhythm is set in one of the conventional patterns or no.
3. There is nothing wrong with the old forms of poetry, and there is equally nothing wrong with innovation.
The old forms, by providing a structure ready-made, make the poet use her discipline to overcome it so that the structure does not become the whole poem, which is not done as often as it might be, but is done. Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets are an admirable example:
"Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless I am save to love's self alone.
Were you not lovely I would leave you now;
after the feet of beauty fly my own."...
This is colloquial, comprehensible, clear, yet also recognizably a sonnet. The rhythm comes from within.
Innovation, of course, makes the poet have to use her discipline to ensure that there is a structure at all, which is just as difficult and is failed at just as often. e.e. cummings is one of the masters I point to in this area.
The combinations that poetry asks of discipline and innovation, structure and originality, produce in the best cases work of a staggering originality that nevertheless speaks universally, particular images that come off the tongue easily and with beauty in them.
Some poets who meet my exacting requirements as above listed and are hence my favorites: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marilyn Hacker, Algernon Swinburne, William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, e.e. cummings, Robert Browning, Emily Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, portions of Dylan Thomas and of Byron, much of John Donne, A.E. Housman.
Some who don't, and whom I consequently dislike despite their reputations: Marianne Moore, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, John Milton, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, much of Shakespeare.
Two poets to whom this entire discussion holds no relevance, since they are engaged in something entirely different, and whom I admire: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound.
And a poet who breaks every rule I have set up, and whom I love dearly and indefensibly: Rudyard Kipling.
I then spent an hour-and-a-half reading Swinburne, who while demanding concentration is at least short, and another two hours reading Yeats, who while demanding concentration is at least shorter, and have gotten to the point where I think I could not handle anything else longer than a haiku. However, it got me thinking about poetry, and I find writing to be a different sort of concentration then reading, and one I can better handle at the moment, so I decided to write up some of my thoughts on poetry and inflict them on the universe. I think I have remembered how to do cut text, even, so I shan't inflict it on anyone who doesn't want it, meaning probably that Ruth will read it out of a sense of obligation but nobody else because there is really no reason anyone but me should care about my opinions on poetry, which I freely admit. Expressing opinions nobody solicited is, after all, what LJ is for.
Things I firmly believe about poetry:
1. Poetry should be distinguishable from prose.
So often, these days, poems seem to be words arranged in an unconventional method on the paper. I find that this really does not work.
This, for
example is not
a
poem no matter how hard
I work at rearranging it
and leaving out punctuation and doing Odd
Things w/Caps and Abbrevs. etc.
because if I just typed it in a paragraph, as any sensible person would, there would be no way to distinguish it from any other sentence. I find that a good litmus text for the presence of poetry is to rearrange the lines in a conventional paragraph structure and see if the result becomes ordinary prose. Even if the poem doesn't contain the standard rhyme schemes or rhythmical usages that modern poets seem so determined to rebel against, one should be able to figure out that it is poetry, and where the line breaks are, and why it was originally put in the line format it appeared in first.
I think W.H. Auden demonstrates this reasonably well, in his elegy for Yeats: "He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, and snow disfigured the public statues; the mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. O all the instruments agree the day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness the wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, the peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; by mourning tongues the death of the poet was kept from his poems."
I submit that this does not read like prose, cannot read like prose, especially when read aloud with attention to where the stresses of the sounds are placed and the near-rhymes occur. See if you can guess at least some of the line breaks; most of them are relatively obvious because of their necessity (there are a few in this one that aren't, but well over half seem required to me).
2. On the other hand, poetry should follow and use the natural rules and rhythms of speech and grammar.
Otherwise, it sounds artificial and bombastic. Have you ever heard a small child read a sonnet? Whether it's a good sonnet or not, everything else in the poem becomes subsumed to the iambic pentameter, which becomes the only thing really perceivable. Some very good poets have fallen into the trap of subsuming the words themselves to rhythm or rhyme in this fashion. My example here is Shakespeare, I'm afraid, and from the sonnets, and a famous one:
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May"...
and so on. The first two lines are magnificent, fitting the rhythm without forcing it, joining the plainness and ease of colloquial speech with the usages of the form required here. The third line I have never been able to forgive for the word 'do'. I probably never will. Firstly, the emphatic isn't a form that's used much in English, and though it was used more in Shakespeare's day than it is now, it still required a purpose for its use and the purpose was, in fact, emphasis. Had anyone doubted the phrase in which the emphatic appears here? Is there need to make the point clear as a counter to things in the rest of the poem which disagree? No. As a result, the grammar feels forced. Upon reading aloud, the voice is forced too; you have to put far more stress upon 'do' here than would ordinarily be placed on that part of the emphatic; usually it's the main verb and not the auxiliary verb that takes the vocal weight (I do think so, don't you?). Both of the words surrounding the auxiliary, which are the words with actual semantic weight, are made into unstressed syllables and consequently tossed off lightly, which is not the desired effect. In short, the placement of 'do' here is solely for the purpose of creating and maintaining the iambic pentameter. It has no other use. The grammar and the meaning have both become secondary to the rhythm, making this a badly structured line in my opinion.
This kind of error is far more insidious than the first I mentioned, because of the concept of poetic license and because people feel that poetry should have a different texture to it than prose and that that texture can come from grammatical manipulation, as indeed it can. However, poetic license and the manipulation of grammar should be tools of the poet, and not the poet's masters. It shouldn't be necessary to mangle the language to create a desired structure; rather, the structure and the language of the poetry should be unified, so that each creates and influences the other. The result when this occurs is a poetry that flows like natural, conversational speech and sings with the eloquence of carefully constructed images; a poetry in which, when it is read aloud, the natural stresses of the language will make rhythm and rhyme perfectly obvious without the work and discipline that went into their creation being visible.
In the end, it is the structure that makes the poem. And the structure tends to based on rhythm. A poem can be brilliant without rhyme, but I've never seen one that works without some form of definite rhythmic structure to its language, whether the rhythm is set in one of the conventional patterns or no.
3. There is nothing wrong with the old forms of poetry, and there is equally nothing wrong with innovation.
The old forms, by providing a structure ready-made, make the poet use her discipline to overcome it so that the structure does not become the whole poem, which is not done as often as it might be, but is done. Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets are an admirable example:
"Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless I am save to love's self alone.
Were you not lovely I would leave you now;
after the feet of beauty fly my own."...
This is colloquial, comprehensible, clear, yet also recognizably a sonnet. The rhythm comes from within.
Innovation, of course, makes the poet have to use her discipline to ensure that there is a structure at all, which is just as difficult and is failed at just as often. e.e. cummings is one of the masters I point to in this area.
The combinations that poetry asks of discipline and innovation, structure and originality, produce in the best cases work of a staggering originality that nevertheless speaks universally, particular images that come off the tongue easily and with beauty in them.
Some poets who meet my exacting requirements as above listed and are hence my favorites: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marilyn Hacker, Algernon Swinburne, William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, e.e. cummings, Robert Browning, Emily Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, portions of Dylan Thomas and of Byron, much of John Donne, A.E. Housman.
Some who don't, and whom I consequently dislike despite their reputations: Marianne Moore, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, John Milton, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, much of Shakespeare.
Two poets to whom this entire discussion holds no relevance, since they are engaged in something entirely different, and whom I admire: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound.
And a poet who breaks every rule I have set up, and whom I love dearly and indefensibly: Rudyard Kipling.
