AN Introduction to Poetry, A complete online course, lectures

 

Introduction

Students often cringe at the idea of studying poetry. In our experience, they do so for two main reasons. Either they fear that studying something meant for pleasure goes against its nature (students sometimes tell us that poems, like songs, are simply meant to be enjoyed, so why not just leave it at that?) or they fear that they’ll never be able understand poetry. It’s a foreign language. They have been exposed to poetry in middle school and high school—a little Shakespeare, a little Emily Dickinson, a little Robert Frost—and they could never figure out how the teacher got from the words of the poems to the meaning the teacher ascribed to them. And why did it matter anyway? If a poem had anything to say why not just say it? Why dress it up with convoluted sentences and archaic words and rhymes?

An Introduction to Poetry starts off where so many of our students start off, with the very misunderstandings they bring with them to the course. Having taught and tested the material in this course for more than ten years, we have accrued ample evidence that students—whether excited or dreadful about being in our class—almost always come to class with misconceptions that impede their understanding.

The two attitudes mentioned above can also be characterized this way.

“I hate poetry (and I don’t know why they’re making me study it).”

“I love poetry (and don’t want you to ruin it for me).”

To these statements, we respond: “Why do you love (or hate) poetry?” “What do you think poetry is?” And, “How do you know that the thing you love or hate is a poem?”

As for the lovers of poetry, very often these are students who confess that they write poems themselves, or that they used to write poems. They use poetry to express their emotions. Poetry is perhaps the art form people are most likely to feel entitled or equipped to practice without ever studying. But do these students who come to class loving poetry really know what it is they love—are they sure that what they really love is poetry. Often these students who love poetry don’t love any actual poems.

When they tell us they you shouldn’t have to study something meant for pleasure, we let them know they are right. You certainly can leave poetry at pleasure; there’s nothing wrong with that. You can eat food without studying nutrition, just on the basis of enjoyment. However if you take a nutrition class, you aren’t going to be able to get away with deciding what foods are good or bad based solely on taste. And if you take a class on nutrition you will get more out of eating food. Nor is it suitable in a college class merely to read poems and not also to study them. You wouldn’t take a class in music and expect merely to listen to songs for three hours a week or a class in auto mechanics and expect just to drive a lot of cool cars. And you won’t expect in a poetry class to read poem after poem without thinking in various ways, including technical ways, about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how the poems you are studying work.

Poetry is perhaps the world’s oldest science as well as the world’s oldest art (yes, we tell them, poetry is also a science—a form of knowledge, a way of knowing). You don’t have to enjoy a poem to study it; you don’t have to study a poem to enjoy it. But if you enjoy poems, you will be motivated to study them, and if you study them, you will improve your enjoyment.

As for the haters, we tell them we don’t believe it’s possible to hate poetry. They may hate the fact that poems sometimes make them “feel dumb.” Of course they are not dumb. But it’s hard not to feel that way when, it seems, everyone around you is sharing a deep, meaningful experience of a poem while you’re scratching your head and praying no one will ask you what you think. If a student feels that way—and everybody does from time to time when learning something new and foreign, whether it’s poetry or French or cooking or car repair—we show them that it’s not poetry that is the problem, nor is it their intelligence. We assure them that once they learn how to read poems, they’ll see that they can’t hate them. Human beings cannot hate poetry any more than they can hate music. No one hates music. There are people who are indifferent to it. And you can be indifferent to poetry, we suppose. And nearly everyone dislikes particular styles of music or particular songs. And you can certainly dislike some styles of poetry, and if you don’t dislike some poems, you are not a very careful reader. But to the best of our knowledge all human beings respond to rhythm and—unless they are deaf—sound. And even deaf people respond to music.

So our complete course is designed first to get students over their impeding prejudices. Thus we spend the first two weeks mainly reading poems, listening to poets talk about what they do, and letting students react however they like. We respond to their comments with guiding questions that point them always back to the poems: “Why do you think the poem says that?” “What words are you looking at?” “What do you do with these other words?” We ask them to think first about what a poem says, not what it means: we ask them to read, not to interpret. (Student often get into trouble when the jump to interpretation without carefully reading the lines and the sentences of a poem.) Because this text has been designed for an online class, each chapter includes a video in which we invite students to watch us read poems in ways that respond to the theme of the particular unit or chapter.

After exploring for two chapters various ways of thinking of what a poem is, we draw students more deeply into the process of reading in our third chapter. We ask them to forget for a while that poems are historical documents created by human beings. Instead, we tell them to read poems without any help but a dictionary. We ask them to read ahistorically, the way the New Critics asked us all to read 70 or so years ago. We say, before you bring into the poem any apparatus that may lead you to feel comfortable with half understanding a poem, learn all that you can from the words alone.

Each following week is devoted to a theme or an issue. The earlier of these chapters explore in greater depth the things that often make it hard to understand poems. We devote a week for example to exploring how poems reference other poems in ways only someone deeply read in poetry is likely to recognize and another on ways that poetry reflects on itself and the question of what it is and what it’s for. We spend yet another week on figurative language and another on poetics. After this, we devote an entire week to the sonnet, as an example of how form works in poetry, and then we include in the next week a number of other forms—odes, elegies, villanelles, ballads, epics, and sestinas. (We don’t ask them to read entire epics.)

Having devoted the first half of the course mainly to reading and formal topics, we spend a week exploring the topic of the representation of women in poetry, from medieval lyrics to the late twentieth century, revealing a narrative that develops like a novel through time, as men represent women and women’s (mostly sexual) power and as women, first quietly and then much more vigorously, write back to that representation.

Having traced one topic over centuries, we look more closely at those centuries in the final weeks of the course. We start with the English Renaissance, the earliest period whose poems students can be expected to read without straining, before moving, in large hunks, through the Enlightenment, Romanticism and into the twentieth century, where the course ends. Here we can only manage to give a taste to the broad evolution of poetry through time. But by now the knowledge we’ve been accruing all term about what poetry is and how it works are placed in historical contexts that allow them to make better sense of what has been happening all along.

Although the text comes out of an online Introduction to Poetry, we have followed it closely in face-to-face classes as well. We have worked to develop a text that is easily adaptable. There is a theme to each chapter that makes it possible to consider it as a stand-alone unit. At the same time each may serve to build on what came before.

Acknowledgements: in addition to the hundreds of students whose experiences and reactions have shaped this text and the colleagues whose suggestions through the years have influenced our teaching of this material, including David Edward, Paula Delbonis-Platt, Kristina Lucas, Lynn Kilchenstein, and Cathy Eaton, we would like to acknowledge the help of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Community College System of New Hampshire Humanities Collaborative in the development of this course. We also would like to express our special thanks to former New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alice B. Fogel for her kind permission to allow us to include recordings of her work made especially for this text.

 Chapter 1

What Is Poetry? When Is a Poem?

“In my view a good poem is one in which the form of the verse and the joining of its parts seems light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed.”   —BASHO (Translated by Lucien Stryk)

 

Some say a poem is a song or a prayer; it’s both controlled and uncontrollable, a flight of the imagination or it comes from a dream state. It is both inspiration (breath & movement) and perspiration (a poet’s practice of craft).

 

A poem is a made thing. And, according to Ed Hirsch writing a poem “is a soul-making activity . . . [p]oems communicate before they are understood and the structure operates on, or inside, the reader even as the words infiltrate the consciousness.

 

POETRY AND MUSIC

 

Imagine yourself driving down the road, listening to your favorite song, either singing along or just grooving to the beat. Your passenger in the seat next to you asks, innocently, “What does this song mean?” You stop; you think. It’s your favorite song. But what can you say?

 

“I dunno. I just like it.”

 You are welcome to “just like it.” Who says you can’t like a song just because it feels good?

 

• Of course, we can ask what the song is about, what it means, but we know we don’t have to ask in order to like it. Most songs do have meaning. Even dumb songs have meaning. We know that.
• We also probably know that the meaning of a song is not limited to the lyrics; a song expresses its meaning through the lyrics and the music. We all immediately understand that words like “I’ll love you always and forever” have one meaning when they are sung to a tender, lilting, melody and a very different meaning when they are shouted over screeching guitars.
• Poems have a lot in common with music. Poems can be enjoyed for their sound and rhythm alone; they can be appreciated for how they make us feel without conscious consideration of meaning. They also have a meaning. As with songs, the meaning of a poem is never absolutely separate from the meaning of its sounds and rhythms—its music. We don’t have drums and electric guitars and pianos; but rhythm and sound still carry meaning, and, like poets, we readers can learn how this works.

 

Our most fundamental job this semester is to discover how poems create meaning through language and rhythm and sound.

 

• Students sometimes cringe at the idea of studying poetry. They fear that studying something meant for enjoyment goes against its nature. Students think that poems, like songs, are meant to be enjoyed. So leave it at that.
• You certainly can leave it at that; there’s nothing wrong with leaving it at that. You can eat food without studying nutrition just on the basis of enjoyment. However if you take a nutrition class, you aren’t going to be able to get away with deciding what foods are good or bad based solely on taste. Nor would it be a suitable attitude to adopt in a college class merely to read poems and not also to study them. You wouldn’t take a class in music and expect merely to listen to songs for three hours a week or a class in auto mechanics and expect just to drive a lot of different cars. And you won’t expect in a poetry class to read poem after poem without thinking in various ways, including technical ways, about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how the poems you are studying work.
• Nor is it contrary to the nature of poetry to study it. Nor does it take the fun out of reading poems. Poets themselves have all spent countless hours studying their craft, its history and its methods, and are thrilled when readers appreciate the technical innovations of their work.
• And serious readers of poetry (and serious students of all the arts) have always known that to fully appreciate an aesthetic object, you need to study both the object itself and the history and mechanics of the type it represents.
• Poetry is perhaps the world’s oldest science and art (yes, there is a science of poetry). You don’t have to enjoy a poem to study it; you don’t have to study a poem to enjoy it. But if you enjoy poems, you will be motivated to study them, and if you study them, you will improve your enjoyment.

 

 

Five Myths That Make Poems Harder to Love

 

In our more than 30 years of teaching poetry in colleges and universities, we’ve observed that students tend to approach the subject from certain common half-truths or misconceptions. We’ll call them myths. Although these myths are not true and not even compatible with each other, a number of students believe all of them.

 

1) It’s all subjective: Some students believe that poems have no real meanings at all. When they read a poem, students may think, “I can think anything I want about the poem. It’s all interpretation, and there are no right and wrong answers.” (We hear those sentences many times a year. It’s a hard myth for some students to give up). 

 

2) Poems are nothing but ideas that rhyme: Some students insist that poetry is the practice of putting “ideas” into rhyme. Some may think “the poem is all about what it says; the rhyme is there just for fun.”

 

3) Poetry is just a form of self-expression: Whatever students believe about the meaning of a poem and the relationship of the meaning to the sounds, many students believe poetry is mainly about “expressing yourself” or, more specifically about “expressing your emotions.” They may think that, “in poetry, poets simply put what they feel onto paper in words.”

 

4) Poetry is all about how it makes us feel. So it doesn’t matter what the poet might have thought about what they were saying when writing the poem.

·       One student put it this way: “I would like to think that although I’m unable to point to something specific in the poem that gives me a particular feeling, it’s still a reaction I get from reading the poem. And if my particular feeling is not what the poet intended, well it’s just too bad. I feel something after reading a particular poem, and I’m not totally wrong, because it’s my reaction to it.”

 

5) Poems give advice, mainly good advice, about how to live. Students who understand that it’s possible for a poem to say something then often assume that what a poem says can be boiled down to simple wisdom or a cliché like: “Be yourself,” “Live life to the fullest,” or “Appreciate the small things.”

 

• You probably find yourself in one or more of these places. This is where most students begin. You may be glad to know that most Americans probably agree with you. Nonetheless, we must understand at the start that these are myths. There may be an element of truth to some of them, and they are more false than true. As we study poetry this semester, let’s work to overcome these myths and prejudices. And remember, most Americans have never really studied poetry.
• If you leave the class with any of these prejudices unqualified or untransformed, something will have gone very wrong for you in your introduction to poetry. We will be dealing in one way or another with each of these prejudices throughout the term.

 

 

Now, we’ll comment on each of the 5 myths in a preliminary way.

 

• These five myths are not just common; they are understandable. It’s not hard to see why people who have had only a slight association with poems would believe these things. They are so pervasive that most people pluck them out of the air.
• And then they read some poems, perhaps in high school English that they don’t understand. And since they don’t understand the poetry, they assume they must not have any meaning—in the ordinary sense.
• Or perhaps they are forced, in class, to come up with a meaning for a poem they don’t really understand, and therefore they decide that the poem just conveys some quasi-profound sentiment we’ve known since our Sesame Street days.   
• In fact, there is so much going on in most poems that it’s easy to be confused by them. Of these myths or prejudices, only the first one is absolute nonsense. Poems are never meaningless.
• Although some skill may be required in understanding the ways that poetry works, and although people do often debate the meaning of poems, poems (as we’ll say several times and in more detail) are made out of sentences; the sentences these poems are made of are English sentences with English words in them.
• These sentences follow the exact same grammatical rules as any written English sentence and, although they do more than most sentences not found in poems, they produce meaning in the same way that English sentences always produce meaning.
• This bears repeating: there is no way of using language that is exclusive to poetry. Not even rhythm and rhyme.
• We’ll see during the semester that poetry uses language more intensely than normal for producing meaning and thereby produces more meaning than a typical sentence such as the one you are reading now.
• This does not negate the grammar of the sentences or the meaning of the words. The concentration of words makes poems more meaningful, not less.

 

Often, this concentration of words along with the unique form of a poem can make poetry seem more confusing and difficult. And it is because poems are often confusing (and in rare cases deliberately confusing) that readers sometimes assume they don’t really mean anything at all, or that there are no right and wrong answers.” (I hear that sentence many times a year. It’s a hard myth for some students to give up on.) Read this:

• The second myth—the “Hagar the Horrible” prejudice, that poems put ideas into pretty sounding words—comes from the fact that many poems use a range of sound and rhythmic devices that appeal to readers in a visceral way, as music does.
• What we hope to understand, in studying poetry, is that the “pretty sounding words” are not merely decorations on the meaning of a well-written poem (nor is the music simply a decoration on the meaning of a good song). They are part of the meaning. You cannot understand deeply what a poem is about unless you understand how the poem is saying what it is saying or doing what it is doing. The words may sound pretty, or they may sound deliberately ugly. However they sound, and the sounds are carefully chosen and meaningful. They are not just decoration.

 

• The third myth—that a poem is merely a poet’s expression of emotion—is at best an oversimplification, and with the vast majority of poems, it’s simply false. A poet is as free as any writer to write about themselves or their emotions. Most poets do not. Poets aim at common or even universal experiences, not personal ones. So even if they do happen (as they sometimes do) to write about their own lives or experiences, the point of the poem is never in fact the experience of the poet.
• Although we don’t divorce feeling or emotion from poetry, if a poet, (a human being like the rest of us), just wants to express emotion, they probably have better ways of doing so than writing a poem. The poet can yell or scream. They can punch a wall or a kick a cat. The poet can sigh or cry or laugh, spit in someone’s eye or give someone a big passionate kiss. Against these possibilities, saying something in stanzas and meter and rhyme—a process which takes hours if not weeks or months to do, much more time than anyone can sustain an emotion—seems a pretty inefficient way to express emotion.
• Still, this prejudice is the most pervasive of all. The problem is not, then, that the prejudice or myth is absolutely false, but that it is limited and misleading. If we hang on to it too tightly, it causes us to misread poems. In fact, the importance of emotion varies greatly from poem to poem. Some poems may wish primarily to produce an emotional effect. The vast majority of poems also wish to produce a meaning effect as much as an emotional effect. The emotion is something you feel; the meaning is something you understand. It is the reader’s not the poet’s emotion that matters. 
• The fourth myth—that all reactions are valid because they are reactions—is impossible to deny. If you fall in love with a dog because he bites you, no one can tell you haven’t fallen in love. We might however question whether that was an appropriate reaction to a dog bite. Of course all reactions are “right” insofar as they are reactions, but not insofar as they are interpretations (or readings) of a particular poem. And we hope that, whatever your reaction, you feel absolutely free to announce it in the discussions.
• Still, not all reactions ultimately make sense in relation to the poem. And once you’ve announced your response in this class, you’ll also be asked to explain it. One may very well misunderstand a poem and then respond to the misunderstanding. The student quoted above was convinced that the poem she’d read was about “rebirth.” Her reasoning was this: “Every life comes from death, and with death comes life.” The problem was just this: the poem in question was demonstrably not about rebirth. (If you don’t understand Italian you might think all Italian songs are love songs because the language is so pretty.) It was a good reaction. It was a good defense of her reaction. But it was still wrong.

o   Responses to and interpretations of poems need to be grounded in the poem itself—in the words and the form the words make on the page.

 

• The fifth myth—that poems give advice—is different from the others because it admits that poems have something to say. There is no law that says a poem can’t give advice. And it’s often possible to turn an observation into advice. But poems are not about giving advice. Poems make observations and convey experiences. That’s really all they do. We may wish to turn these observations and experiences into advice. We are free to do that. But poems do not expect us to do that. And in our experience it’s not a good idea. If we say, “It’s very cold out,” you might decide, “I’d better stay in.” If we were your fathers or mothers or lovers, we might want you to draw that conclusion, to stay inside. If we were your poets, we would not care what you did. We would merely hope that whatever you did, you did it in the awareness that it’s very cold out. It is one of the most universally true things you can say about poem: Poems do not give advice.
• You may still think otherwise. You likely have read any number of rhyming texts that do give advice—they circulate on the Internet pretty freely and we tend to call them poems.[*] But these texts are poems in only the most general sense of the word

 

poems because they rhyme. Such trite and sentimental verses are quite different from what we are studying. The poems like those in our course—poems that dedicated artists write—explore and observe human life and human experiences and aim at unique but representative moments. They attempt to say what has never been said before, to say it fresh. One of the reasons poetry is difficult is that it says new things or old things in new ways. One way of attempting to understand—or pretending to understand—what we don’t understand is to force it to conform to something we do understand. The result often is to convert a unique and challenging observation into comforting advice.   

 

 

 

So What Is Poetry, Really?

 

If these myths or prejudices don’t tell us what we need to know about poetry, what do we need to know?

• The two most common responses we get from students regarding poetry are these:

 

1) “I hate poetry.”

 

2) “I love poetry.”

 

• The first is we’re sad to say, far more common than the second. Presumably, since you have voluntarily chosen to take this course, you will lean closer to response 2. This gets us over one of the difficult humps in the road to a fuller understanding and appreciation of poetry. But it does not necessarily get us to where we need to be: a workable starting point for the study of poetry.
• When we get either response, we like to find out if the sad or exuberant student has a clear idea of what it is they love or hate. Students tend to find our follow up question odd. Instead of asking, “Why do you love (or hate) poetry?” we prefer to ask “What do you think poetry is?” Or, to ask it another way, “How do you know that the thing you love or hate is a poem?”
• We don’t believe it’s possible to hate poetry. People who say they hate poetry usually struggle with their inability to understand particular poems. They hate the fact that poems sometimes make them “feel dumb.” Of course they are not dumb. But it’s hard not to feel that way when, it seems, everyone around you is sharing a deep, meaningful experience of a poetic lyric while you’re scratching your head and praying no one will ask you what you think.
• If you do feel that way—and everybody does from time to time when learning something new and foreign, whether it’s poetry or French or cooking or car repair—you must first of all understand that it’s probably not poetry that is the problem, nor is it your intelligence; it’s unfamiliarity in general and the need to learn. Once you learn how to read poems, you’ll see that you can’t possibly hate them. Human beings cannot hate poetry any more than they can hate music. No one hates music. There are people who are indifferent to it. And you can be indifferent to poetry, we suppose. And nearly everyone dislikes particular styles of music or particular songs. And you can certainly dislike some styles of poetry, and if you don’t dislike some poems, you are not a very careful reader. But to the best of our knowledge all human beings respond to rhythm and—unless they are deaf—sound. Even deaf people respond to music.
• So the most trimmed down answer we can give to our question “What is a poem?” is this: A poem is a work of resonant, sensual language that makes a unique observation about life.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Final Words

 

That’s not an entirely satisfactory definition. So here are some more thoughts.

 

• Poetry happens when resonance and sensuality combine. This means that “poetry” is a feature (or function) of language in general and is not in any way restricted to poems. Poetry is however made manifest in the form and content of poems.
• True, not everything that looks like a poem is necessarily poetry; some “poems” may be merely verse (simple ideas that use meter or rhyme merely for decoration). And sensual, resonant language is not restricted to poems. One may find it in conversation, prose writing, cereal packages—anywhere language is deployed (we call such instances “poetic,” as in, “she speaks so poetically about playing tennis that it makes you want to take up the sport).
• While poetry may appear in these other places, poems are where poetry must always be. Poems and poetry are defined in relation to one another.

 

 

 

 

LECTURE #2: How to Read a Poem (and Maybe Even Fall in Love with Poetry)

 

“The reader of poetry is a kind of pilgrim setting out, setting forth. . . .  Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.”                                                                                                —Edward Hirsch.

 

 

Are Poems “Open to Interpretation”?

 

That depends on what you mean by “open for interpretation.”

 

Picture this: A politician says, “I won’t support this bill because it will hurt the middle class.” You hear that and maybe you think, “Yeah, right. You won’t support the bill because if you do the bozos who elected you won’t vote for you next time, and you’ll lose your cushy job.”

 

Or this: You ask a professor a simple question about quadratic equations and she spends half an hour tracing the origin of mathematics through the middle ages all the way back to ancient Greece. So you think (but are too polite to say), “This is about math, not about you. Stop showing off.”

 

What do these incidents have in common? In each case, someone interpreted what someone said to mean something other than or more than what it seemed to mean.

 

We could multiply examples of this all day. You may have come into this class thinking that poetry (or literature) is unusual in using language to mean more than they seem to say. But in fact language itself can always mean more than what it seems to mean. We are all interpreters of language. Hearing what is not said is something we learn to do from a young age, and it’s a skill we use every day.

 

To the extent that poems are made of sentences, and all sentences, even this one, are to some degree “open for interpretation,” so are poem. And yet...

 

• Many students enter this course with a profound misunderstanding of the issue of interpretation with regards to art in general and poetry in particular. Somewhere along the way, you may have picked up on the idea that poems are “completely open to interpretation.”  But what would be the point of that?
• What do we mean when we say a poem is “open for interpretation”?
• Two things:
• First, all language, even this paragraph, is by its very nature open to different understandings. (We’ll explore this further in the next lecture.)
• Second, poets (who are artists) often exploit the inherent ambiguities, playfulness, and multiple meanings of language in order to create their art. They do this on purpose, with specific intentions, in order to create multiple meanings and to enrich their art.
• So, yes, understood correctly, poems are “open for interpretation. But
• Not all interpretations are equal. And
• While no interpretation is complete
• Some interpretations are defensible (which is a better word than “right”), and
• Some are not.

 

 

We can be more specific: Here are a few problems poems bring to inexperienced readers and ways to overcome them.

 

1)    The poem conveys a difficult idea.

          Difficulty if this type in poetry is not essentially different than difficulty in prose. Even experienced readers of philosophy sometimes read the prose of a profound philosopher and feel their brains oozing toward their ear canals. Sophisticated, subtle or specialized language is often difficult. This is not, however, the most common problem in poetry. Solution: Don’t try to figure it out on your own. Ask questions.

 

2)   The language is old or arcane. 

The words may be unfamiliar or seem familiar because they’re unusual or have specialized meanings. Solution: All you need to do if you don’t know a word or if you think you know a word but don’t understand how it’s being used is look in a dictionary.  Readers use dictionaries.

 

3)   A poem’s syntax (word order) is unconventional or a sentence is unusually complex.

·       In some poems, perhaps in order to get the rhyming words in the right position, poets, at certain times in history, felt an urgent need to rearrange sentences (in imitation of Latin), a big problem in English poems of the Eighteenth-Century.

o   The line “What dire offense from amorous causes springs,” puts the verb, oddly, at the end. In ordinary everyday English (even in the 18^th century, when the line was written) it would read: “What dire offense springs from amorous causes.” 

·       In other poems, sentences are rearranged in order to surprise the reader, something that poetry often seeks to do. In other words, poets seek to create possibilities of meaning not available otherwise. And poets use syntax (as well as line ending) to play with readers’ expectations and stretch the many meaningful possibilities of language.

·       Some sentences are particularly complicated.  You may get lost.

·       Solution: ignore the ends of lines. Read the poem as though it were prose and put the words back in their normal order. Look for the subject or verb; you may need to separate a main clause from a subordinate clause. (Warning: This may destroy all the “poetry” in the poem, so make sure to put it back together and read it again when you’re done.) And always ask for help when you need to.

4)   The sounds (or music) in a poem are a distraction.

·       They can be. Poetry tends toward concentrated and lyrical or musical language. Therefore, you’ll need to enhance your powers of concentration. This takes practice.  Just keep reading.

·       Solution: Practice.

 

Of course, there are other reasons why poems sometimes seem difficult. However, the difficulty of poems is usually less than it seems. Poetry is a specialized use of language. It’s the art of language. Some artists use sticks or metal to make sculpture; some use pigments to make paintings or sounds to make music; poetry uses words to make art. It’s therefore a highly self-conscious use of language. And it’s in constant search for new subjects and new materials: words. Learning poetry is something like learning an always-changing dialect of your own language. A guide can help. But persistence helps more.

 

 

 

 

Try not to forget as you go through this material that the most important thing that could happen in this class would be for you to learn to enjoy poetry (and dare we say fall in love with it?).

 

But, since the enjoyment of poetry is one of those things that cannot be tested, we’ll have to lower our sights a bit and try to help you get a better understanding of poetry. If at the end of this unit, you can reply to the doubters in defense of poetry, we’ll have accomplished something. We will console ourselves in the knowledge that a better understanding of poetry may lead to an actual enjoyment of it.  

 

Some things you need to know:

The study of poetry is work. It involves

• Careful reading
• Analysis
• Testing.

 

What we’ve said so far is sound general advice for getting the meaning (in the ordinary sense) out of poems. But let’s put you in this very concrete situation: You’re sitting down in front of a poem you’ve been asked to write about for this class. What do you do?

 

Learning to read a new poem is like learning to play a new song a guitar. So try this: Decide before you begin that you are going to read every poem at least three times. It’s important no matter how long the poem is.

 

Reading poems out loud is best. Read the poem the first time straight through, pronouncing each word. You’re not looking for meaning or sounds. You’re just familiarizing yourself with the words, allowing them to bend back the grass in your brain so that they’ll be easier to walk through the next time.

 

Read the second time for sound. Concentrate on how the sounds fall. Hit the rhymes, pick up on the rhythms, notice (but don’t dwell on) any interesting use of sounds in the

poem.

 

Read slowly and smoothly. If you stumble through the poem the second time, read it again and again until you get to the point where you no longer stumble over sound.

 

Read the poem the third time for meaning. When you are reading for meaning, keep in mind two things.

 

§ First (we say it again), the vast majority of poems are written in grammatically correct sentences. It will help you a lot if you know how to recognize a verb, a noun, and how to find them. And, if you know how to distinguish a subject from an object, you’re well on your way. If you go through the sentence from beginning to end and don’t understand it, look for the verb, find its subject and its object. Don’t confuse line ends with sentence ends or even with natural pauses. You’ll be tempted to pause at line endings.  Realize that the pause may not come where it would come if the same sentence were presented as prose. Often the sense keeps going past the end of lines. It’s good practice to try to paraphrase the sentences of the poem one at a time.

§  Second, it’s nearly always possible to see the poem as a story. So look for it. Even poems not generally considered to be narrative poems tell or suggest a story. Most poems have at least some of the basic elements of a story: characters, dramatic situation, setting, action. Ask yourself what story the poem seems to tell.  As with most stories, a poem is likely to come to us in two distinct voices: the voice of the poet and the voice of the speaker of the poem (when we are talking about fiction, we use the terms “author” and “narrator”). Most students do not realize that the speaker of the poem is not the same as the author of the poem. And sometimes it’s true that this distinction does not matter. But in most cases, a poem is spoken by an unnamed “voice” created by the author for the particular purpose of the poem. The easiest way to show this is with an example.

 

Look at these stanzas from a poem about discovering a snake in the grass:

 

A narrow fellow in the grass

Occasionally rides;

You may have met him—did you not

His notice sudden is,

 

He likes a boggy acre,

A floor too cool for corn,

But when a boy and barefoot,

I more than once at noon

 

Have passed, I thought, a whiplash,

Unbraiding in the sun,

When stooping to secure it,

It wrinkled and was gone.

 

I’ve never met this fellow,

Attended or alone,

Without a tighter breathing,

And zero at the bone.[†]

 

This poem, by Emily Dickinson, relays the experience of a boy who was scared when he stooped down to pick up what he thought was the lash of a whip only to see it slither away. Dickinson was never a boy and may never have had the experience she writes about. Why she decided to narrate the poem from a boy’s point of view is something we can discuss. When we discuss the poem, we typically refer to the poet or voice(s) as the speaker or narrator in the poem.

 

However, what she does shows us is that we should not automatically assume that a poem or the facts it contains are autobiographical. If there is more than one speaker or voice in a poem then it’s important to hear all the voices.  

 

• If you think the poem is a story and recognize the speaker (or narrator), and if you can paraphrase each of the sentences, you’ll have a very good handle on the verbal meaning of a poem.
• Don’t panic if this doesn’t work. Perhaps you’ve missed something—like an obscure meaning of a word, and the issue may not be yours at all. It may be that the poem resists this approach. This is when you need a guide.
• Poems were originally intended as communal, not individual, objects. And they are still best read in a community. In this class, as soon as you are stuck, it’s time to post. Get on the appropriate discussion and write about what happened when you read the poem.

 

Remember, while meaning (in the ordinary sense) is hardly ever the primary element in strong poetry, it’s always there. Any poem that simply puts the music at the service of the meaning is likely to be inferior for that reason. Language in which meaning is primary is plentiful enough. It’s simply not the case with poetry. In poetry the music itself is inseparable from the meaning.

 

Verbal meaning is important, and often is necessary for a reader to be able to paraphrase a poem. But verbal meaning is never the whole. In good poems, musical meaning is not secondary. And poems exist that cannot be paraphrased. So when we think about what a poem is doing, we need to think about the music in addition to (or as part of) the meaning of a poem.

 

This really is not a strange concept. If I scream “I love you” through gritted teeth, the words won’t mean the same thing they mean if I say them softly on my knees handing you flowers. The meaning is not in the words alone.

 

Lecture #3: Poetry’s Poetry Period: Reading Ahistorically 

 

 

 

         

1. What Is Ahistorical Reading?

 

Poetry has always been poetry. Sort of. Everything changes. In history, magic transformed into science. Alchemy became chemistry. Natural philosophy became geology and physics. Poetry too has changed. But it has not changed as radically as those other disciplines.

 

We can treat poetry as though it is one thing and that it has always been the same thing. And that makes sense because poetry’s fundamental job of exploring and understanding what it means to be human has stayed pretty consistent. Maybe that’s because we human beings have always been more or less the same. Certainly there is, at least, part of us that has always been the same.

 

In the course of this term, we will spend a lot of time following the changes in poetry over time. But for this week, we want to ignore those differences and think of all poems as just poems. We’ll treat a poem by Shakespeare the same way we treat one by Donald Hall.

 

We will assume that, despite changes, there is an unchanging element in poetry that responds to whatever is unchanging in ourselves. In other words, we can decide that we’ve always used poetry the same way or gotten essentially the same thing out of poetry no matter what clothes it wears, and so, in a sense, that poetry has always been poetry.

 

What is “timeless” in human beings is sometimes called “human nature,” and when human nature is mentioned, it has always been considered our essence, and sometimes capturing human nature in words has been described as the goal of poetry (and in fact of all literature). It is natural in humans to fear death, for example, and to love, to fall in love, to hate, to seek justice, honor, dignity, power, and revenge; it is human nature to ask questions about existence and to seek answers. And all of these things are also subjects and purposes of poetry. Humans have presumably also always found comfort in meaning and in music. Poetry has provided these things too, always in response to these needs.

 

If in some ways people are always the same and poetry is always the same, then we don’t necessarily need to appeal to anything outside of a poem in order to understand it. We just need to understand the meaning of the words and of the sentences. Reading a poem without reference to when it was written or who wrote it means reading a poem ahistorically.

 

Students often find the idea of reading a poem ahistorically puzzling. Why wouldn’t you want to ask the poet what she meant to say when she wrote the poem? And why would you not want to look at the historical context in which a poem was written? If a poem is about slavery, wouldn’t you want to know if the poet was a slave?

 

While it’s true that knowing history and biography can be helpful in reading a poem, we don’t need to know these things to understand most poems. And there are a number of reasons why seeking that knowledge may not be the best place to start.  

 

1)    As the poet Paul Muldoon says, “The idea that poetry comes from beyond oneself is vital.”  In other words, according to Muldoon (and most poets) the writer is not the origin of his poems. Poets generally agree that they don’t know where poems come from. It could be the muse, it could be nature, it could be the unconscious, it could just be language. Poet in an important sense are therefore readers of their own poems. So they don’t necessarily have any better authority than anyone else to explain all the meanings of their work. They are good and useful readers. But that is all they are. We don’t need their opinions.

 

2)    History can mislead as well as clarify. At every moment in history millions of things are happening. Each one of them is something you could use to help read a poem. But how do you know which are relevant or how any one thing is relevant to understanding a poem? If you choose the wrong one, you will probably go in the wrong direction in your interpretation. Until you have gone as far as you can into understanding a poem without invoking history, it’s usually best not to invoke history at all.

 

3)    If you do need to call up history, the history you need to call up is probably already in the poem. If for example the fact that the author was a slave is relevant to the understanding of the poem, that fact will probably be revealed in the poem itself. We’ll see specific examples this when we look at poems in the video lecture. So it’s a good strategy to look very carefully at the words of the poem before looking for anything outside the poem.

 

We do want to make it clear: history and biography can be useful. But they become useful after you have read the poem as thoroughly as you can without them. They are not essential for understanding poems. Start with the poem itself. Most of the time you’ll find that this is enough for a sound, satisfying understanding of a poem.

 

As we said above, certain features of poetry make it possible to think of poems as always and everywhere the same thing. What are those things? We must start with one that seems so obvious it might seem not worth mentioning: the word “poetry” itself and its related words (poet, poem, poetics). William Shakespeare in the sixteenth century may not have been doing exactly the same thing in many respects that Donald Hall in the twenty-first century did when he wrote a poem, but certainly he wasn’t doing something entirely different either. And both poets were aware of the fact that they were writing a thing they called a poem, making a work of art out of written words. The word itself carries a certain degree of sameness.

 

The second and third thing may also seem obvious: the look and sound. Although it is not quite universal, the vast majority of poems are defined to a great extent by the line—that string of words that starts on the left side of the page and never seems to make it all the way to the right side. Nearly all poems look different on the page from the way non-poems look.[‡] You can usually recognize poems just by looking at them. While this does not absolutely define poetry, it is one nearly universal feature of poems. Most poems also use the resources of rhythm and sound in such a way that you can recognize a text as a poem even if you are not looking at the words on the page but just hearing them read.

 

We’ve already pointed to two other features as well: subject and function. While it’s certainly true that poetry does not always and everywhere focus on the same subjects and doesn’t always do exactly the same thing, it’s equally true that certain subjects and functions persist over time. We’ve always had love poems. We’ve always had patriotic poems. We’ve always had poems about death and war and religion. And poems have always helped us understand and invited us into emotional experiences.

 

Poetry has also always explored and observed the human and natural world. It has always tried to find answers to the question of what it means to be human and it has always worked to give readers or listeners a particular type of intellectual/musical pleasure. In last week’s lectures we called poetry “sensual language.” This is useful. But, like all the qualities mentioned so far, it cannot be absolutely defining. All language (which is always in some sense material even if it is restricted to your own private brainwaves) is to some degree sensual, and the best prose may sometimes exploit the sensuality of language better than some poetry, but along with form and subject, the concept of sensuality certainly helps us get an understanding of the things that throughout history have continued to be true about poetry.

 

When we talk about the poetry ahistorically, we must talk about poetry’s relationship to language in general, its particular ways of using language. It has often been said of poetry that it uses language most fully: The Romantic-era poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously called poetry, “The best words in the best order.” More recently it has been said that poetry is “language at its best: Poets use its full potential, using more of it and using it to better advantage than we usually do.” Of course not all actual poems manage this. But the best poems and poets do. And it is always the goal. One thing that makes something a poem is the striving for the fullest use of language. Poetry is language with a musical (sensual) side. It’s language that calls attention to itself as language, and that has a tendency toward creating an experience. Poems use language to create or express meaning, but the poem is not about that meaning itself as much as they are about a created experience.

 

This is how the language of poetry is different from the language of science for example.  If, in science, you explain Einstein’s theory of relativity well, you have done justice to the theory. There’s no need to read Einstein’s version. If you explain it better than Einstein did, then losing Einstein’s own explanation would be no loss at all. With science the point of the explanation is the understanding of the theory because the language of science is all about its meaning; the point is not the language is used to explain it. It’s not even the E=MC², even though the formula is elegant. Other letters tied to the concepts of energy, mass, and the speed of light would serve just as well; for the sake of explanation, a sentence would do the same job as the mathematical equation.

 

A poem is different. If you explain a poem, you have done some service to the poem. But you have not got the poem itself. You can only hope to “have” the poem by reading or experiencing the poem. A poem, unlike a scientific treatise, is never exclusively about the thing it says, its meaning. It’s always also about the way it says it. If you say the same thing in different words you have a different thing.

 

So when we read a poem, what we want is the experience the poem creates. And to get that, worrying about the history of the poem and the intention of the poet can be distracting. That is why, to start with, we are happy to ignore these distractions. 

 

2. So does this mean that when we read a poem we are free to interpret it anyway we like?

 

Let’s be careful here. What does it mean to “interpret” a poem (or anything else)? To interpret is, most basically, to read and understand. We tend to use the word “interpret” for things whose understanding is not obvious or that different people are likely to understand differently. “Interpretation” is not just something we do to poems or to art. Certainly poems require interpretation. But so does every sentence that you read. And the process of interpretation is not fundamentally different whether the sentence is written in a poem or an essay or a news article or your own private journal. It’s true that poetry takes greater advantage of the material aspects of language (its sounds and rhythms and its look on a page) than other forms of writing. And it’s also true that poems are more likely to use elaborate figures of speech than other forms of writing. But all types of writing not only use figures of speech, but they use exactly the same types that poems use—metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy, etc. You use these and interpret these same figures every day without thinking. Moreover, all types of language, even science, use rhythm and sound as well. So the question of interpretation is a question about language and not a question about poetry. The best poems may use all the parts of language to create meaning. But even so, there is nothing about the language of poems that is true only in poems. There’s literally nothing unique about the way the poems use language.  

 

It’s true that everyone is, to some degree, different from everyone else. It’s also true that all people are to a large degree the same. We will all bring our unique perspectives to everything we do—whether that’s poetry or algebra. But if we didn’t also bring our sameness, communication would be impossible. In both poetry and math our uniqueness can be both a hindrance and a help. One way we are not unique is that we all speak the same language, English. And in English (as in all languages) words have established, accepted meanings that we can’t ignore if we wish to talk to one another. That’s as true in poems as it is in any other form of language. This means that it is possible to have a common understanding of a poem—of what a poem is saying. On its most fundamental level, the understanding of almost any poem is common (that is, shared) to all readers and the author of the poem.

 

In fact it is not only possible but in most situations necessary to have a shared understanding of the meaning of poem, of what, in the most obvious way, it is saying, in order to interpret it. We must share as much as we can in order to open ourselves to where we can legitimately differ.

 

So let’s be clear: There are right answers and there are wrong answers when it comes to poems. But this doesn’t mean there’s only one right answer. In fact there is never only one right answer if by “right” we mean a complete or perfect or final or absolute answer. We can say a lot of true things about any poem, just as we can say a lot of true things about a dog. And we can always understand any poem better no matter how well we understand it now, just as we can always understand ourselves or friends or our lovers better. This is something we have to understand: although no answer is final or complete, it is possible to misunderstand a poem. And it is even possible for two people to misunderstand a poem in the same way. Let’s look at an example.

 

This poem is by Emily Dickinson:

I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop—docile and omnipotent—
At its own stable door.

If we ask, “what is the poet describing,” you might reasonably respond, “a horse.” And you might explain that horses live in stables and they neigh and they feed at tanks—sort of. But if we tell you in fact she’s writing about not a horse but a train, you might see that much more of the poem makes sense. Things you ignored because you didn’t know how to fit them into your horse interpretation now make sense. Real horses don’t neigh “like Boanerges” (sons of thunder). And they don’t really drink from tanks. They drink from troughs. And a horse cannot as easily be said to chase itself downhill as a train can. In fact “train” makes “sense of every detail of the poem, whereas horse makes sense with only some. In short if you said, “this poem is about a horse,” your interpretation would be understandable, but it would be wrong.

 

What this means is that in an important sense what a poem says is not usually “open for interpretation.” But as for what it means, that’s different. We all need to agree about the basic meaning of the sentences. What the poem itself uses these sentences to mean (in a bigger sense) is not limited to what the sentences mean on their surface. We can talk as long as we like about that deeper meaning. Is Dickinson celebrating progress? Is there any sense of irony in her celebration of a train as though it were a living thing? (Is she really saying she doesn’t like trains?) What does it mean to call a train “docile and omnipotent”? If she likes to see it “lap the miles” does she like the sounds it makes too (“complain… in horrid, hooting stanza”)? Knowing what a poem is saying does not end the interpretation. This is where interpretation starts. Knowing what a poem is saying is just a matter of plain reading. Missing or skipping this step often causes students problems.

 

And what a poem is saying is not a riddle. If you don’t understand it immediately, there are various reasons for that, depending on the poem. The grammar of the sentences may be too complex and hard for you to follow. You may not know all the words. You may think you know the words but not realize these words are being used in a special or rare sense. You may not realize that a certain image is meant figuratively. And on and on. These problems can be easily fixed. If you don’t understand a poem, this is not a judgment on you or the poem. All you have to do is explore—which means, as a start, asking questions about it. Since the poem is not a riddle, the question of what it is saying is not what we are after in this class. There is no secret we’re trying to uncover. We may need to paraphrase the poem to show that we understand it. But that is where the discussion begins, not where it ends.

 

In almost every case, if you are confused about what a poem is saying, you will not be able to interpret it. And in almost every case, it’s easy to show you what a poem is saying. As with this Dickinson poem, the misunderstanding will probably be easily fixed.  

 

Does this mean that all poems are paraphrasable? No. Some poets play with language in ways that make it impossible to come up with an adequate paraphrase. But these are rare. A paraphrase tells you what the poem is saying. But the meaning of the poem in a more profound sense is in what it is doing, not what it’s telling you, but what experience it is offering you. If a poem could be understood by its paraphrase, then there would be no point writing the poem. Confusing a poem with its paraphrase is like confusing a picture of a bird with an actual bird. You cannot experience an eagle by looking at a picture of an eagle or even a filmed eagle. And you cannot experience a poem through reading a paraphrase. But sometimes that paraphrase offers you a way into a poem.

 

 

 

 

Poetic Language

 

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “he (or she) was just being poetic.” It’s a phrase you wouldn’t be surprised to hear after someone utters some flowery description of a sunrise or a snowstorm. It describes a use of language that is perhaps pretty, but also empty, something that meaninglessly ornate. It’s an unfortunate use of the word. Authentic poetic language is very different.

 

We will call “poetic language,” that language which is most closely associated with poetry. It is also called “figurative language.” It is opposed to so-called “literal” language. Understood in the context of actual poetry, poetic language is not nice-sounding words that have no real meaning. It is the fullest possible use of language. Poets pack the absolute maximum of meaning (in every sense of the word) into every part of the poem. This does sometimes make poems hard to understand, and that may mislead a hasty person to think there is nothing to understand. In other words, one of the reasons poetry sometimes seems empty is that it is so full.

 

It’s important to understand first that poems are not made entirely of what is properly called “poetic” language. Poems don’t use only figurative and never literal language. As I’ve said already: the language of poetry is not essentially different from the language of everyday life. That means two things: it means that everything we do when we use language outside of poem, we also do in poems. It also means that everything we do in poems, we also do in everyday language. All of the “devices” that we properly associate with poetic language are also used regularly in everyday language, spoken or written, and not just by people who have a vast or specialized education or a particular facility with language. “Poetic language” is used by everyone, including you and your three-year old brother. It’s not overstating the case to say that poetry is a part of language itself and that poems are merely the most concentrated expressions of language’s inherent poetry. Poets are more conscious of the the poetry already in language and more deliberate in their use of it. Poems heighten or intensify certain ordinary ways of using language. We might say that poems put the emphasis on different aspects of language—including the language we call figurative. But they still don’t do anything that we don’t already do every day when we speak.

 

And yet poems don’t usually feel like everyday language. Everyday language is usually easy to understand. And poems often are not. Everyday language tends to say exactly what it means—or at least tries to. Poems don’t seem to do that. We come back again to a question we addressed in Lecture #1: Why don’t poems just say what they mean? We began to answer this question when we said that poems are not merely trying to say something. They are also trying to do (or be) something. But that answer is incomplete. We did not explain how poems use language to do things. We will begin to answer to that question here. We know that poems use sound (such as rhyme), and rhythm and lines. We’ll talk about these other things in later lectures. Here we will be thinking about how poems use figurative language to create meaning and experiences.

 

Literal and Figurative Language

 

As I said, so-called figurative language is usually opposed to what is called literal language. Literal language is language that says exactly and directly what it means; it is language without figures. Figurative language then, as it is usually understood, is language that takes a kind of roundabout path to its meaning. It uses various devices to get you where it wants you to go. That might lead you to believe that figurative language is harder to understand than literal language, and that we should use literal language whenever possible. But that’s not quite true. In everyday usage, figurative language is usually used to help us understand what a literal statement cannot. Its most important job is to make difficult things easier to understand. It is also used this way in poetry.

 

For example, I might say to a child, “A country is like a school with a president instead of a principal.”  Here I’m using the figure of speech known as analogy to bring a new concept to a listener.

 

Figurative language is also used to give more weight or authority to a statement. I’m using figurative language if I say, “According to the White House” instead of “According to the President.” This figure is known as metonymy, the substitution of one thing for something closely associated with it.

 

If I say, “That was the funniest thing in the whole universe,” or “Hitler wasn’t very nice to the Jews,” I’m using yet other kinds of figurative language and again getting more out of the words than a literal statement could. The first statement is an example of hyperbole       (high-PER-bow-lee, also called exaggeration). The second is the opposite, litotes (lie-TOE-tease, or understatement).

 

We use many kinds of figurative language every day because we want to do more than just state facts. We use this sort of language all the time, usually without knowing we are doing so. So the good news is that you do understand figurative language; you understand it so naturally that you probably do not even notice that you are interpreting such figures as irony, metaphor, simile, hyperbole, litotes, personification, apostrophe, metonymy, or synecdoche. So the first problem is just learning to recognize and name things you are already unconsciously familiar with. The second is to understand how these figures are being used in particular poems. Poems are likely to use figurative language more often and in more nuanced ways than we use it in everyday language.

 

That’s the bad news. Poems don’t always use metaphor to make hard things easier to understand, for example. Poems may use metaphor to make seemingly-simple things no-longer simple. Remember, poems want you not just to understand but to experience the world in new ways. But we are so accustomed to seeing things however we see them that the work of a poet is quite difficult. We resist without even knowing we are resisting. And we may often fail to see figurative language in a poem for what it is. And even the most experienced readers of poems argue sometimes about what counts as a metaphor or a symbol in a poem and about what a particular figure means. This is something to love about poetry. You get to enter and participate in an ongoing conversation. But to do that, you need to ground yourself in the figures. You need to be able to name and point to them.  

 

You might wonder how it is that experienced readers of poems can argue about what counts as a particular figure in a particular poem. This is because the very ideas of “literal” and “figurative” are not as clear as we might like to think they are.

 

Again, according to the standard definitions, figurative language is language that states its meaning indirectly. It represents one thing by means of another thing. The “president” is called “The White House”; the ocean is called a “pond.”  At the same time, literal language is language that states its meaning directly. The president is called the president, and the ocean is called the ocean.

 

But that already creates a problem. In one sense, all language is figurative. The distinction between “literal” and “figurative” language does not easily correspond to the facts. Unless the word “ocean” is something you could be tempted to swim on, we have to admit that the word ocean is something used to represent an object, and is therefore not literally literal. The word “ocean” is not the ocean. It stands for or represents the idea of the ocean. And representing one thing by another thing is, by definition, what figurative language does.  

 

When we are talking about “literal” language we are merely separating off from all language that part which seems to be the most direct or transparent, which is to say the most commonly or habitually used representation of a given idea. (If I say, “What is that?” and point to the ocean, most people will say, “the ocean.” So we call that literal.)

 

So, there is no such thing as an absolutely non-figurative language. This means that you can never absolutely guarantee that any statement, no matter how literal it seems, is not also figurative. Take this simple sentence: “He fell down the stairs.” You’ll probably want to say, “that’s obviously literal.” But is it? For it to be literal it has to describe an event that actually happened. Outside of a known context there’s no way to decide whether the sentence is literal or figurative or both (yes, a sentence can be both at the same time). The sentence “He fell down the stairs” could describe what it felt like for him to have his heart broken, or it may describe the effects of getting a demotion at work: “He went to the boss thinking he was going to get a promotion. He thought he was going up in the company. Instead, he fell down the stairs.”

 

Compare some other common figurative expressions that at first glance sound literal: “he was on fire,” “he bought the farm,” “he got burned,” and “he lost his way.”

 

So the difference between literal and figurative language has nothing to do with the words themselves. It has to do entirely with the way the words are used or understood in a specific context. The same sentence which in one context, or read one way, would be literal, in another context or read another way would be figurative. Because one of the most natural things to do with words is use them to represent (to represent either “things” or “concepts”) it will never be absolutely possible to prevent any words from being taken figuratively even if it was not meant that way (this is true in everyday language as well as poetry, but it doesn’t usually cause any confusion in everyday language).

 

The poet Marianne Moore, a great baseball fan, once described a new young poet by saying, “He looks good—on paper.” The effect of the sentence depends up on the reader’s understanding that poems are literally written on paper and that, figuratively speaking, “he looks good on paper” means “the information we have on him tells us he should be good, but we still have to see him perform.”

 

The boundary between literal and figurative isn’t always clear.

 

We also need to say a few words about the distinction we made above, that literal language is “more direct” than figurative. This may not even be true either. So-called “literal” statements can only be considered more direct in regard to the most superficial meaning of the word “meaning,” that is, only in regard to the referential content of a statement. But recall what we have been saying all along: that “zeroing in on a meaning” is never more than one possibility of language. And it’s never the sole purpose of a poem. Figurative language is therefore not necessarily “roundabout.” Figurative language is often more direct than “literal” language. This is because in a poem the thing we are directing our attention at is an emotion or an experience rather than a meaning. If I say “Tom Brady was ‘on fire,’” I’m getting closer to the emotional truth of the event than if I say “Tom Brady played exceptionally well last night.” I am also getting closer to the truth of the experience of watching him this way than I would be if I listed his accomplishments. I’m giving an indication of what it was like to watch him play, what it may have been like for him to play. And if that’s what I want to do, the figurative language does it better—more directly.

 

Everything is guided by purpose, by what the poem is doing.

 

Compare these three examples: 1) She felt sad.

                                           2) She felt as though she’d just lost her best friend.

                                 3) She turned away and looked out the window. The world outside became blurry.

 

Let us say that example 1) is literal, i.e. that it refers to an actual woman or girl who really feels sad. In that case the statement is referentially true, but it carries little emotional content; example 2) would then be figurative. You will notice that it also captures somewhat more of the case. If true, it is more accurate than example 1) because its figure reproduces more of the emotional quality of the sadness than any purely literal statement could. But because the figure is a cliché, it still manages less emotional content than a careful writer probably desires. Example 3) is the most emotionally effective. It is the most effective because it is both literal and figurative. Turning away and looking out the window are actions that suggest more meaning than the actions alone convey. And the world did not really become blurry. Really, she started to cry.  

 

We can say then that we need both figurative and literal language because they do different jobs. A writer, whether she is a writer of prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, will choose the method of expression according to the job that needs to be done.

 

Now that we have an understanding of what poetic, or figurative language is, let’s define more precisely the most common examples so that you can practice identifying them when you come across them. They are: metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, litotes, irony, apostrophe, symbol, personification

 

Here are some examples:

 

Metaphor—a figure of speech in which one thing (which usually is easy to understand) stands for another thing (which is often more abstract).  You’ll see that the metaphor works a little differently in each of the three examples below. In the first case the metaphor has an obvious, simple relationship to what it refers to. In Bradstreet’s “The Poet to Her Book,” the title tells us that the poet is talking to her book. We quickly infer upon reading the poem that the book is compared metaphorically to a child.  

 

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain…

 

If you do not read carefully, you may think Bradstreet is writing to a literal child. But as soon as this mistake is pointed out to you, you realize that she is, of course, pretending that her book is a child. The metaphor works because a book like a child is created by someone (a parent/author) whom it resembles and who cares for it and whose reputation depends on it.

 

On the other hand, a metaphor may have a less clear relationship between its two parts (its image and referent, more formally known as its vehicle and its tenor). In Blake’s “The Tyger,” we know that the tiger is not quite a literal tiger. But it’s not entirely figurative either. The figure depends for its meaning on the “tigerness” of real tigers. But what exactly the tiger refers to or stands for is never made crystal clear.

 

Blake’s painting of his tiger.

 

                              Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

                              In the forests of the night,

                              What immortal hand or I

                              Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

You might also notice that within the overall metaphor of the tiger, there are other metaphors such as “burning bright.” “Burning bright” compares our metaphorical tiger to a fire.” But why is the tiger burning? When you read the poem, you will see that this tiger was made with a hammer and chain in a furnace. The metaphor makes a tiger the creation of a blacksmith (the blacksmith being a metaphor for God). This is not how “literal” tigers are made. Why has Blake chosen these metaphors? What effect do they have on our reading or understanding of the poem? Such questions can be answered—and they can be answered either well or poorly. But the answers will not be as simple or final in this poem as the answer to the question of the child/book figure in Bradstreet’s poem.

 

Still other metaphors may be impossible to pin down precisely. Both of the figures mentioned so far evoke emotion or feeling as well as meaning. But it is possible to take a figure so far into the emotional that it loses all sense of the intellectual meaning, as some claim T.S. Eliot does in this image from a poem not on our syllabus, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it as a soft October night,

Curled once around the house, and fell asleep.

 

It’s clear that the poet is comparing fog to a cat (this is an implied metaphor because the cat is invoked without ever being named). The “catness” of fog is however far less obvious than the fearful power of blacksmith/God is to a tiger or the mother to child relationship of an author for her book. Moreover, this fog-cat metaphor is stretched out to such an absurd length that it begins to lose sense. We learn very much less about fog by comparing it to a cat than we learn about books by comparing them to children or about God by comparing him to a blacksmith.

 

But the difficulties we may have with the cat-fog metaphor doesn’t mean that the poet has failed. In the context of the poem it is clear that the metaphor is meant to reveal more about the state of mind of the title character than about the catness of fog. 

 

We’ve barely begun to discuss the intricacies of metaphor. But that will be enough for now. We can explore metaphor more in discussion.

 

Simile. Simile is very much like a metaphor but it uses an explicit word, usually “like” or “as,” to compare one thing to another. So instead of saying “My book is my child,” You say, “My book is like a child.”

 

Metonymy and Synecdoche. Metonymy is the substitution of a name of an object closely associated with the word you have in mind for that word: “White House” for president. “Crown” for King. “The sweat of the brow” for “hard labor.”

          Synecdoche is similar to metonymy; it is the substitution of a name of some part of a thing for the whole thing: You say “trunk” for tree in a sentence such as “We have fourteen trunks on our property,” or “wheels” for “car,” in the expression, “a nice set of wheels.” With synecdoche you can also do the opposite and choose a whole to name a part. You can call a police officer “the law,” for example, as in “The law is coming to give me a speeding ticket.”

 

Hyperbole. We mentioned this above. It is exaggeration. “This book weighs a ton.”

 

Litotes. This too we mentioned above: understatement. Of homerun slugger Barry Bonds, “He’s not he weakest person who ever played the game.”

 

Irony: saying one thing but meaning another, generally the opposite. Saying of a beautiful painting, “Oh, isn’t that ugly.” In irony we perceive that the words deliberately fail to coincide with their usual meaning. 

 

Apostrophe: An apostrophe we speak to an inanimate object or an absent person. “Western wind, when will thou blow?”

 

Symbol: The use of a verbal object or quality of an object to stand for an abstract idea. The black hats worn by bad guys in Westerns and the white hats worn by Good Guys are symbolic of evil and good.

 

Personification: Ascribing the qualities of a human being to an inanimate object or an abstraction. “The waves sang to the moon.”

 

Two more notes: First, these are dictionary kinds of definitions. A poet’s use of figures of speech may not be as straight-forward as the definitions will lead you to believe. Second, a given example of figurative language may qualify as more than one type of language. A symbol can by metonymic and ironic all at the same time. I may want to use a sword to symbolize the sexual prowess of a knight, but since a sword is also associated with knights, it may also be said to be a metonymy. I may say “the sword did battle with the harem.” If the sword turns out to be fake, rubber perhaps, and flops down when he pulls it from his scabbard, the symbol of a rubber sword becomes ironic. Poets often use such complex figures.

 

 

Lecture #5 Poetry as Conversation

 

I

n Lecture #3, we noted that poetry is part of a continual tradition which is conscious of the fact that it is a tradition—in other words, that poets of every era have carefully read the poets not only of their own time but also of the past. As we said then, certain features of poetry make it possible to think of poems as always and everywhere the same thing. We learned then that ignoring the history of poetry affords us certain insights into the craft. It is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. It forces us to see certain things that we might otherwise be distracted from. But it’s also true that paying attention to history will allow us to see things that we miss when we ignore it. So this week we want to bring some history into our discussion.

 

Poets are always reacting in various ways to their predecessors and their contemporaries as though they were all contemporary. One prominent literary critic named Harold Bloom has argued that the primary driving force in the best poets of any age is the drive to overthrow the best poets that came before them. So a nineteenth-century poet like William Wordsworth, according to Bloom, feels as though he is in competition with a premier eighteenth-century poet like Alexander Pope even though Pope was already dead before Wordsworth began writing. The history of poetry, according to Bloom is a struggle for supremacy with each “strong” poet of every time trying to place himself at the center of the whole history of poetry.

 

A lot of readers disagree with Bloom’s way of describing the history of poetry. But whether Bloom is right or not about the struggle for supremacy, he is certainly right to perceive a that poets respond to other poets in their poems. For our purposes it will be more useful to describe this relationship as a conversation than as a struggle because it allows us to think about other kinds of responses than the search for dominance. But we should keep in mind that part of conversation is struggle, and that no poet responds to an earlier poet merely to agree with him or her.

 

Any poet of any skill must see him or herself in the context of the history of poetry. This on-going conversation among poets is not the essence of poetry any more than the things we’ve mentioned in previous lectures are. Nonetheless, conversation is so pervasive an aspect of the poetic tradition that we will have a hauntingly incomplete understanding of what poetry is if we do not notice it and think about it. In fact, failing to recognize the status of a particular poem in relation to the poetic tradition is another reason why poetry often frustrates students. Reading poems is often like coming in on a conversation in the middle. If someone doesn’t help you get caught up, you may well miss the point.

 

Let us look at an example. First, read this poem by William Wordsworth:

 

My Heart Leaps Up

 

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man:
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety

 

You could read this poem ahistorically and enjoy it. But something else happens when you think about it as part of an historical conversation.

 

According to this poem, the poet’s heart reacts to rainbows in a particular way: it leaps up. To understand this simple-sounding statement as more than a sentimental enjoyment of rainbows, you will need a certain understanding of the movement in literature known as Romanticism—which may be thought of as the name of the conversation going on among poets and other writers of the time. We will cover this in detail later in the semester. For now it will be enough to gloss a few terms.

 

By “heart,” Wordsworth includes not just the organ associated with love but something closer to his soul, the essence of his being, which includes here his capacity to imagine. The rainbow in line two is a symbol of nature. It’s not just rainbows that affect this poet this way, but all of nature. The rainbow is a good choice to illustrate this because rainbows come upon us unexpectedly. But Wordsworth will have in his poetry other examples in which he is suddenly confronted with some natural phenomenon that affects him as this rainbow does. Finally, “leaps up,” tells us that his reaction to nature is sudden, spontaneous, out of his control. There is an affinity between his essential being and nature that makes him wish to join it whenever he recognizes it like a dog that leaps when he sees his master.

 

All the great poets from Wordsworth’s time have similar images of nature in their poems, each with a different emphasis that marks that poet’s contribution to the conversation.

 

The first thing I want you to understand is that this information is not something the poem is likely to reveal at first glance without someone telling you. Secondly, and still more importantly for our purposes, Wordsworth is reacting both to the poems of other writers of his time and to earlier nature poetry, such as that of Thomas Grey. Here are some lines of his:

 

  In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,  

  And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire:  

  The birds in vain their amorous descant join,  

  These ears alas! for other notes repine;  

  A different object do these eyes require;  

  My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;  

  And in my breast the imperfect joys expire; 

 

Did you notice how much easier Wordsworth’s lines were to understand than Grey’s? That’s one way Wordsworth is reacting to Grey. Grey was fond of what is “poetic diction,” which includes using fancy sounding words to describe ordinary things (saying “reddening Pheobus” instead of “the rising sun”). This was very popular in Grey’s century. But Wordsworth detested it, and he wrote his poems to show that you don’t have to do that to write good poetry. Grey’s poem is about his inability to respond to nature (because someone has died in his case). Wordsworth’s poem is about his inability NOT to respond to nature. Wordsworth is saying to Grey, “If you can’t respond to nature it may not be because your friend died but because of the weird way you think about it, how you cover it up with words instead of revealing it.”

 

Let’s look at another example that is even clearer. Here’s a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote a century after Wordsworth.

 

Spring

 

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

 

This poem is also about nature. It is not a specific reaction to Wordsworth’s poem, but it is a reaction to the large body of “Romantic” nature poetry produced during the nineteenth century. These poems, including Wordsworth’s, try to reassure us that, to put it in very simple terms, the divine can be found in nature. Millay sees the same thing that Wordsworth sees: natural beauty. When she says that spring comes “strewing flowers” she acknowledges this. She does not deny that spring is an extraordinary time. But she sees, or rather looks at, things that Wordsworth and other Romantic poets overlook: heat and maggots in particular. Nature for her does not convey a message from God; no, it babbles like an idiot. And when she says “it is apparent there is no death” she is quoting a line from other Romantic poet, one who in his turn had responded to Wordsworth. In this case it is the American Romantic poet Walt Whitman who, in Song of Myself, “6,” wrote: “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.”

 

Millay replies to Whitman’s statement of faith with a snarky: “But what does that signify?” She’s not buying Whitman’s or Wordsworth’s Romantic optimism about nature.  

 

Obviously, it helps to know these things. If we learn to see the allusion twentieth-century poems make to Romanticism, we’ll understand those poems more easily, just as we’ll understand the works of Romantic poets more easily if we see how they are reacting to eighteenth-century “Neoclassicism.” As readers we need to become part of the conversation for two reasons: first to avoid confusion. Readers commonly feel a sense of confusion when they do not see what words the words in front of them are responding to. Secondly, to get the fullest meaning from the words that they offer us. A poem like Millay’s or Wordsworth’s can give pleasure even if it is the only poem you’ve ever read. But it gives a much fuller experience if you perceive their places in ongoing conversations.   

 

I’ve only scratched the surface here of how poets respond to each other. We will pursue this issue together in more detail in the discussion. Think of this week’s selection of poems in pairs or groups. As you read, see what other ways of responding you can identify. Think about the conversation that you as a reader of poetry are entering.  

Lecture #6: Poetry as Meditation on Poetry

 

 

 

 

 

They shut me up in Prose –

As when a little Girl

They put me in the Closet –

Because they liked me “Still” –

—Emily Dickinson

 

• Chapter 5 left out one important aspect of the conversation poetry is always having. This part of the conversation is so pervasive and fundamental that it may be part of all poems: poetry itself is always attempting to figure out what it is and what it is doing. One of the oldest on-going conversations in the world of poetry is the one about poetry. We’ve heard it said that philosophy is understood by many as an endless debate about what philosophy is. Poetry is no less subject to this way of thinking: Poetry is always trying to figure out what it is and what it’s doing. And poets address the question of the nature of poetry in many ways.
• For example, in Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man,” the question of how to “interpret” winter is closely related to the question of how to interpret poetry. The same is said of the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Walt Whitman.
• In a famous poem we haven’t read yet, Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” the Romantic poet meditates on the power of poetry to take us out of the world of suffering and death and into the eternal world from which the nightingale’s song emerges. The speaker concludes, rather pessimistically: “The fancy [imagination] cannot cheat as she is famed to do.” Poetry cannot get us there, says Keats, cannot even deceive us into thinking we have gone there. Or so he tells us (though the poem may leave us wondering where we are, as in the end of the poem when the poet does not know if this life is the life of dream or the life of wakefulness).  No matter what else poetry is about, it’s about art. And art is almost always, at least in part, about itself as form and its process of becoming.

 

• So what does poetry say about itself?  Poems say many things about what it is or does. Most significantly it never stops asking, whether implicitly and explicitly. Here’s a fragment of another poem that comes right out and tells you what it’s about:

 

Now, again, poetry,

          violent, arcane, common,

          hewn of the commonest living substance

          into archway, portal, frame

          I grasp for you, your bloodstained splinters, your

          ancient and stubborn poise

          —as the earth trembles—

          burning out from the grain

 

                                                            —Adrienne Rich’s “The Fact of a Doorframe”

 

• How do you know when poetry is about itself?

 

• Aside from the obvious cases in which poetry openly tells you it is about itself (recall also Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” and Archibald MacLeish’s or Elizabeth Alexander’s “Ars Poetica”), you can be pretty sure that poetry about music is also poetry about poetry. The word “song,” in fact, has a secondary meaning of “poem,” particularly in poetry. Poets writing about singing are writing about what they are doing.
• Poets praising other subjects are often also writing about poetry. Poems in praise of women, for example, may also be in praise of poetry because women and poetry are considered (especially by poets of the past), throughout essentially the entire history of Western literature, to represent the highest reaches of human beauty. For example, Ezra Pound’s “Portrait d’une Femme” (“Portrait of a Lady”) is primarily a portrait of poetry. The same is true of poetry about landscape, Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty” for example. This poem is explicitly about the creativity of God and the beauty of nature. But the creative principle is the same whether God makes a fish or a poet makes a poem. So whatever the poet intended as the subject, if a poet is writing about the beauty of any created thing, we may legitimately consider the poem as a comment on poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In actual poems, poets meditating on or writing about poetry is a rather complex issue. So what a poem about poetry is saying about poetry may not always be as simple as what you might understand from an essay or a lecture like this. For example, Thomas Wyatt in “My Lute, Awake,” tell us that his music (i.e. poetry) is as useless in moving his beloved’s heart as speaking when there is no one to listen, or like trying to write on hard marble with soft lead.

 

As to be heard where ear is none, 

As lead to grave in marble stone, 

My song may pierce her heart as soon; 

Should we then sigh or sing or moan? 

No, no, my lute, for I have done. 

 

So he’s going to give up music (poetry) altogether. But if he really means that, why would he write the poem to begin with? Isn’t the poet again attempting to win the beloved by saying he’ll stop trying? Or is he perhaps seeking embarrass his beloved or even get a little symbolic revenge?

         

 

         

         

Lecture #7: The Technical Language of Poetry

 

H

ere we’ll be looking at some basic formal elements of poetry.

 

 

The vocabulary that has been developed to study poetry is elaborate. Although you may feel you’re being exposed to a lot of new words at once, in fact we will only be sampling this vocabulary here. You’ll find a longer reference list of common vocabulary words on this week’s Requirements page. You won’t be required to memorize all those words. But you should recognize them and know when and where to look them up.

 

The study of the nature, forms, rules, and techniques is called poetics; part of this, the study of poetic meter and sound, is called prosody. The following poetics describes very well the majority of poems written in English from the late 15^th century (the time just before Shakespeare) to the present. The major exception is free verse, which is primarily a 20^th-century phenomenon. Although you may use this lecture as a supplemental glossary, the entries are not in alphabetical order because concepts described in many entries depend upon a knowledge of those that have been described before. You can’t understand what blank verse is, for example, until you know what meter is. Fortunately, you have a computer and can search for entries easily if you need to refresh your memory.  

 

These are the most basic words anyone needs to know who wishes to discuss poetics:

 

Foot:  We mentioned in a previous lecture that for the most part English poetry is measured by stressed syllables. As we stated there, a stressed syllable and its accompanying unstressed syllables is called a foot. English poetry has four basic feet, the iamb, the trochee, the dactyl and the anapest. Of these four, the iamb (pronounced “I am”) is by far the most common. The iamb consists of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable:

 

            U     /

iamb:   The bar

 

A trochee (pronounced “troh-kay”) is a backwards iamb, a two-syllable foot in which the first syllable is stressed:

 

       /       U

trochee:  bro-ther

 

 

The anapest (pronounced as written, “an-a-pest”) and dactyl (pronounced “dak-til”) are three syllable feet thus:

 

                                                             U    U       /

anapest:  on the hill

  

      /     U   U

dactyl:  dumb  as  a

 

In addition to these four basic feet, there are two more, less common, that you should know, the spondee (“spon-day”) and the pyrrhic (“peer-ik”). These feet are common substitutions in poetic lines. In other words, they are not generally the basic meter of the line, but serve to add variation to the regular pattern set up in the meter by repeating one of the four basic feet. The spondee consists of two accented syllables together; the pyrrhic consists of two unaccented syllables together.

 

                /  /

spondee: We real

         

             U   U

pyrrhic:  to  a

         

Line and meter: A string of feet is a line. The pattern of stresses in a line is called the meter. It’s obvious from looking at a poem where a line begins and ends. What you may not know is that lines have names based on the meter and on number of feet the line contains. Lines in English poetry tend to repeat the same foot a number of times. Variations tend to be isolated. For example, one anapest, or spondee or pyrrhic may show up in an otherwise iambic line. But it is still an iambic line.        

 

          Here are some more line names, from one beat to eight:

 

You’re unlikely to come across a regular line longer than eight feet.

 

To give the full name to a line you put the adjective form of the foot beside the name of the length. Greek epics, for example are written in dactylic hexameter. The line is natural to Greek and rare in English. (Even translations of Greek Epics are often not rendered in dactylic hexameter.)

The most common line in English poetry is iambic pentameter. A pentameter line, as the name suggests, is a line with five feet. An iambic pentameter line would therefore look like this: U    /   U     /   U     /   U     /   U     /

 

                                 U         /       U     /   U         /              U      /       U        /

An example would be, The bear is in the house be-side the brook.

 

The second most common line is iambic tetrameter, a four beat line: U    /   U     /   U     /   U     / 

 

 

 

                               U    /     U       /        U       /           U        /   

 I nev-er lost as much but twice

 

The third most common is iambic trimester, for which I assume you do not need an example. You should be able to recognize these on sight. Any other line you may have to cross reference with your vocabulary list if you need to name it.

 

If you feel you understand, great. If you want to set the idea of iambic pentameter more firmly, here is a video that will help.

 

Scansion/Scanning/Scan: The task of determining the meter of a line, of being able find the proper name of a poetic line, is called scanning or scansion. If you are asked to scan a line, you are being asked to put a “U” on top of the unstressed (or slack) syllables and a “/” (an indication of stress) on top of the accented syllables. (In canvas, you’ll want to substitute CAPS for stressed and uncapitalized letters for unstressed to make things simpler: i NEV-er WILL for-GET your FACE.)  

 

A word of warning: to understand how poems work, it is necessary to be able to scan them. However, knowing what scansion is and being able to scan are not the same. Many students in the past have come to me saying they can’t figure out how to scan a given line in a poem. The only sure way to improve is to practice. Here are a few helpful hints that might get you started.

 

·       First, you should understand that stress is based both on the natural rhythms of the language, and is therefore “natural,” and also upon the habitual practice of poets, and is therefore “conventional.” If you are a native speaker of the language, then you have much of the expertise you need in order to scan a line. But you will also need to read a lot of poems with an ear for the meter to get the rest.

·       That said, if you are asked to scan a line, do this:

o   Identify the stresses of longer words. If a word is longer than one syllable, the stressed syllable is the normally accented syllable. If you can’t figure out which syllable is accented, say the word over and over, stressing a different syllable each time. Only one pronunciation will sound right. If you are still confused after doing this, you can always look in a dictionary. Dictionary pronunciation guides identify accents.

 

o   Note, one syllable words are tricky. You can usually decide ahead of time that prepositions such as “in” and “on” will not be stressed. But this is not always true. And pronouns such as “I” or “she” may or may not be stressed depending on the line. Consider the following two lines:

 

          I never lost as much but twice             [i NEV-er LOST as MUCH but TWICE]

 

          If I am forced to stay I’ll scream.        [if I am FORCED to STAY i’ll SCREAM]

 

In the first line the first “I” is unstressed. (The first time we read this line we might stumble over this word wondering whether to stress it or not. Further reading will reveal that for the sake of a smooth rhythm it should not be stressed.) In the second line the first “I” is stressed but the “I’ll” is not stressed.

 

How do we know? The tendency of the English line is to fall into regular patterns of stress. The determination we’ve made for these three “I” syllables cause these lines to fall into regular iambic patterns. Repeated readings of these lines will show that native speakers tend to read these lines as we’ve indicated.

 

o    So, third: once you have found the fundamental foot, let that guide you in determining stress—keeping in mind that substitutions are always possible.

 

o    Fourth, remember scansion is not an absolute science. People do disagree about how to scan particular lines. And there may be more than one way to scan some lines. The trick is to read the line naturally and then take a hint from the obvious pattern developed by the line to help you through troublesome syllables. Remember, unless you are reading free verse, most lines will fall into a regular pattern. (But I repeat: most poems throw in substitutions here and there to keep you from falling into a trance.)

 

o    Remember that in scanning you are merely uncovering and identifying what you already are doing when you read the line. The line should always sound natural. You only scan a poem to analyze it—to find out how it works.

 

But why do poets use different lines anyway?

 

We’re making a slight detour from vocabulary building here. But if you know why this matters you will probably be more able to learn the material. Different lines have different effects. We won’t be able to go into any elaborate study of different lines and their effects here. But I’ll offer two very different lines for comparison.

 

First we have four lines of the typical iambic tetrameter: U/ U/ U/ U/

 

whose WOODS / these ARE / i THINK / i KNOW.

his HOUSE / is IN / the VIL-/ lage THOUGH.

he WILL / not SEE / me STOP- /ping HERE

to WATCH / his WOODS / fill UP / with SNOW.

 

(Notice in the second line here “in” is stressed, even though it’s one of those little prepositions I mentioned above, and “is” is unstressed even though it’s a verb: the line determines the pattern of stresses.)

 

Now compare that to this slightly irregular dactylic dimeter: /UU /UU

 

          HALF a league, /  HALF a league

          HALF a league / ON-ward

          ALL in the VAL- / ley of DEATH

         

The dactylic foot makes the line seem faster and gives the appropriate sense (for this poem) of horses running. Even though the dactylic foot is longer than the iambic foot, its slack syllables give it the impression of speed; the frequent stress in an iambic line gives slows that line down.

 

Now back to vocabulary…

 

Rhyme/rhyme scheme: You already know what rhyme is. Poems don’t just have rhymes they also have patterns of rhyme. Rhyme is one of the most obvious elements of poetry. When the last words of lines rhyme, this is called end rhyme.

 

Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead:    
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

 

When rhymes appear in the middle of lines, this is called internal rhyme.

 

Once upon a midnight, dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary.

 

The pattern of end rhymes is called rhyme scheme. Rhyme scheme is designated by alphabetic letters in this way:

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood     a

And sorry I could not travel both            b

And be one traveler long I stood            a

And looked down one as far as I could   a

To where it bent in the undergrowth                b

 

NOTE: If you are asked to show the rhyme scheme of a particular poem, you must do so using a’s, b’s, c’s etc., in lower case.

 

A perfect rhyme of vowel alone (if there is no consonant) (go, show) or vowel + consonant is there is one (goat/boat), is called true rhyme.

If the “rhyming words” sound similar without a true rhyme, (like car/tear or goat/slow), this is called slant rhyme (or off rhyme or half rhyme).

 

Note: rhyme is based entirely on sound, never on spelling. “Cough” and “off” are a true rhyme. “How” and “low” are a slant rhyme even though they look the same.

 

When two words end with the same spelling but different sounds (cough/through), this is called sight rhyme.  

 

Other sound devices. Poems use other forms of sound-alike in addition to rhyme as well. These include

o   alliteration, the repetition of a consonant sound: Billy Bob burnt Busy Bills bumblebee;

o   assonance, the repetition of a vowel sound: Billy wins his millions limping,

o   anaphora, the repetition of the same word at the beginning of several lines.  

 

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,

Out of the Ninth-month midnight,

Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond

 

o   epistrophe, the repetition of the same word at the end of successive lines Epistrophe is very rare. Here’s an example  

 

We real cool. We   

Left school. We

 

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

 

Sing sin. We   

Thin gin. We

 

Jazz June. We   

Die soon.

 

Rhythm: Patterns of stress produce rhythms. Rhythms are named by the meter, using the vocabulary you learned above. We say “the poem has an anapestic (or an iambic) rhythm.” The word applies to poems in the same way that it applies to music. Poets choose rhythm to create tone, and mood, and pace—to bring out their subjects. Think of how painters use color. Listen to the quick anapestic rhythm of the following:

 

      

       The Dance

 

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess

the dancers go round, they go round and                            

around, the squeal and the blare and the                                   

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound)

their hips and their bellies off balance

to turn them.  Kicking and rolling about

the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those

shanks must be sound to bear up under such

rollicking measures, prance as the dance

in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.

 

Notice how the rhythm of the poem imitates the dance it describes. Here’s a copy of Bruegel’s great picture: The Kermess.  eHH

 

 

 

Stanza: a group of lines, ususally set off by a space above and below, is called a stanza. You probably already know this word. You might not know that stanzas, like lines, have names. There are general names for stanzas based on the number of lines. There’s no name for a one-line stanza. But a two-line stanza is called a couplet. Here are some other stanza names:

 

Three lines = tercet

Four lines = quatrain

Five lines = quintet

Six lines = sestet

Seven lines = septet

Eight lines = octave or octet

 

Stanzas longer than eight lines are rare.

 

To give the basic name for a stanza you need only count the number of lines. Nothing else matters.

 

However, in addition to these general names based on number of lines, certain stanzas have more specific names based on the particular combination of the number of lines, the meter, and the rhyme scheme. For example, a stanza (of any length) in unrhymed iambic pentameter is called a blank verse stanza (see blank verse below). An iambic pentameter tercet that rhymes aaa is called a triplet.

 

At once extinguish’d all the faithless name; 
And I myself, in vengeance of my shame,
Had fall’n upon the pile, to mend the fun’ral flame.

 

A four-line stanza written in iambic tetrameter or alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter is called a ballad quatrain.

 

All in the merry month of May, 

   When green buds they were swellin’, 

Young Jemmy Grove on his death-bed lay, 

   For love of Barbara Allen. 

 

 

There are a great number of specialized stanzas in English poetry. We will not, however, be concerned with any others for now.

 

Blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. Long ago English poets experienced the poverty of rhyme in our language. Hence they often did not bother with it. Retaining the meter of the most common English line, iambic pentameter, they dispensed with end rhyme. Shakespeare’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy is a good example:

 

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—

No more, and by that sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to…

 

WARNING: Students often confuse blank verse with free verse. This is a mistake. Don’t do it. Free verse lacks any consistent meter. Blank verse has a regular iambic meter.

 

Poetic Forms: Future lectures deal with the notion of poetic form. If lines and stanzas have names, so do poetic forms. We’ll concern ourselves with a limited number for forms this term—sonnet, ode, ballad, free verse among others.

 

Final word: There are a lot of new words and concepts here to take in all at once. Your next step should be to look at the video lectures that illustrate these concepts more thoroughly. It’s good to read about these things. It’s better to read about them and then listen to how they sound. Poetry is all about sound.

 

Lecture # 8 Poetic Form: Open and Closed

 

Closed form poetry did not just dominate poetry from its origin up to the end of the 19^th century, it was synonymous with poetry. For thousands of years all poems were written in closed form. It was not until the middle of the 19^th century that poets like Walt Whitman in America and a group of French poets (who came up with the term vers libre) gave up on meter and begin to write poems without any prescribed forms. Indeed the first, easiest test of whether a poem is in open or closed form is simply to know when it was written: before 1850, closed; after 1850—better check and see.

 

But that won’t tell you anything about what makes a poem “open” or “closed.”

 

 

 

 

WARNING: Before we go any further, we have to make clear that the subject here is form not meaning. Form refers to poetics, what we studied last week. It does not refer to what a poem is saying.

 

Two ways of thinking about form.

 

The poetics you were introduced to in the previous lecture was all about so-called “closed” or “fixed form” poetry. The word “closed” (or “fixed”) must be understood properly. In fact, language itself is never absolutely open or absolutely closed. On the one hand, language is always more or less fixed—by grammar, syntax (word order) and the meanings of the words.

 

• If I say “I locked my keys in the car” everyone will know what you mean. These are the words the language asks you to use and this is the order you are expected to put them in if you want to say the thing expressed here. There aren’t a lot of ways to say it. And if you do try to say it another way, you risk not being understood. Language is always more or less closed.

 

But on the other hand, language is always also more or less open; within the restrictions of grammar, syntax and meanings, you can always say new things. You can recombine words, you can use old words in new says, you can reorder phrases in new ways. It would not be language if content didn’t play (move about) within form like furniture in a house. Language needs to be both open and closed to function.

 

• You can say, “my car was locked with the keys inside.” Or “Inside my locked car are my keys.” You can say, “my keys were locked in the car.” People will understand you if you say, “Locked in the car were my keys.” But they’d think you were weird. (You can also say, “I locked my keys in the car” and mean, as a secret code, “I left the disk drive with the secret formula in my computer.” But you’ll probably have to establish the code beforehand.) But you probably can’t say with any hope of being understood, “Keys my in car left locked I.” Not even Yoda has that much freedom.

 

So, to repeat: language itself is always more or less open, more or less closed.

So what do we mean when we call some poems “open” and some “closed.”

 

There are two ways to think about this. Both of them apply.

 

In fact all poems exist on a continuum. All fit in the same circle, some toward the top, some toward the bottom,

 

 

But imagine if we had a class of eighth graders and we had to put them into two groups: tall and short. There will be some in the middle. But we don’t have a middle circle. Everyone is marked as “tall” or “short.”

 

• When critics and other readers use the words “open” and “closed” they tend to think of them as designating two fields that never touch.

 

They put some poems in the left circle and some in the right.

 

Although it can be misleading, it is also useful. The judgment is made based on certain criteria, the most important of which is meter.

 

We say that poems that lack rhyme and meter are “open” in form and poems that have rhyme and meter are closed.

 

And that way of thinking will cover most of what we need to say this week.

 

But we can do better. Once you start studying what is called “open” and “closed” form, things start to become complicated.

 

 

What is called closed form poetry is an organization of language that adds more than common rigidity to language and then tries to create the maximum possible freedom—or openness—within that space. Closed form is an obstacle course for the poet to run language through as gracefully as possible. Watching language run gracefully through these often formidable obstacles is one of the greatest pleasures of reading poetry.

 

While there is more than one way for a poem to be considered closed, the vast majority of poems are called closed because of their steady beat. Closed form poems also often rhyme, and when they rhyme they do so in consistent and sometimes complex patterns. They also often repeat the same stanza over and over. But it is the meter not the rhyme or the stanza that defines the type.

 

The Varieties of “Closed Form.”

 

Although meter has been the most prominent element in closed form poetry since the middle ages, there are other things besides meter that determine whether or not a poem is in closed form. But let me be clear here: if a poem is written in meter, it’s closed. Period. As for rhyme, while most poems that rhyme are closed and most open form poems do not rhyme, rhyme alone is not a good indication of whether a poem is in open or closed form. Why? Open form poems sometimes use rhyme (in a limited way), but more importantly many closed from poems do not rhyme.

 

So what besides meter can close a poem?

 

Alliteration can. Old English poetry (like Beowulf) was written in alliterative verse. Alliterative poetry is closed by the number of repeated sounds in the line. The line of an alliterative poem has, usually, three instances of the same sound (note the “f” sounds this line: “The folk-kings’ former fame we have heard of”). Alliterative verse does not necessarily count stresses or syllables, only alliterative sounds.

 

Accent Count Sometime Old English alliterative verse does count accents. When it does, or when any verse does, we call that “accentual verse.” In this type, you can have as many unstressed syllables as you want, but the accented syllables remain constant or follow a pattern.

 

Syllable count Syllabic verse (such as haiku) counts only syllables. It is not written in meter or rhyme. In fact any poem that maintains the same number of syllables in each line or in corresponding lines in each stanza is closed by syllable count alone.

 

Accentual-syllabic As you may have guessed from the name, if you count both the syllables and the accents, you have accentual-syllabic verse. The sonnet is an accentual-syllabic form. But so is most English-language poetry.

 

Pre-established form. Named forms, such as villanelle and sestina (we’ll learn about them later in the term), are determined by word or line pattern. Villanelles rhyme, but they don’t have to be in meter. Sestina’s don’t rhyme and are rarely in meter.

 

If none of these criteria apply (meter, alliteration, syllable count or form name), then you can be pretty sure your poem is in open form. (See flow chart for further help.)

 

Open (Free) Form

 

Open form poetry is significantly less rigid than closed form, and it is only by contrast with closed form that it can be called open. It is usually less rigid in regard to line, stanza, meter, and subject matter—in short everything formal that has traditionally made a poem a poem. It seems to be in some ways closer to prose than to closed form poetry but, at the same time, still not so “open” as prose generally is.

 

The pleasure we get from closed form is to see how the language can play—can create room—within rigid form. That’s why knowing the forms helps us appreciate and enjoy that poetry more. To say it another way, we look for what freedom the language can attain within the artificial restraint of form.

 

That advantage is lost in degree as the form becomes less restricted. If other pleasures do not compensate, the movement from closed form to open is wasted. The pleasure offered by open form poems certainly runs the risk of not being the pleasure of poetry.

 

Before talking more about this sort of poem—which became so dominant in the twentieth century that for many years other forms of poetry were rarely published—let’s look at a few examples.

 

Here’s a particularly notorious example by William Carlos Williams (you certainly can’t say it’s hard to read):

 

The Red Wheelbarrow

 

so much depends

upon

 

a red wheel

barrow

 

glazed with rain

water

 

beside the white

chickens.

 

We can talk about this poem in detail in our discussion. But for now, I want to ask the question: in what sense is this verse free? Well, it doesn’t rhyme. It does not have a consistent meter. But it does have a consistent line and stanza: each stanza consists of one three-word line followed by one one-word line. Williams has even broken up the single word “wheelbarrow” into two words to fit his form. It is as rigorous as haiku in its way. It just doesn’t follow rules previously put down by a poetic tradition. Because the history of poem does not consider word count (as distinct from syllable count) an element of closed form, the poem is considered to be open form. It would show up near the middle of our continuum circle.

 

Here’s another:

Sea Rose

 

Rose, harsh rose,

marred and with stint of petals,

meager flower, thin,

sparse of leaf

 

more precious

than a wet rose

single on a stem—

you are caught in the drift

 

Stunted, with small leaf

you are slung on the sand

you are lifted

in the crisp sand

that drives in the wind.

 

Can the spice-rose

Drip such acrid fragrance

Hardened in a leaf?

 

 

Again, in what way is this poem free? Well, in addition to the ways that Williams’ poem is free, this one lacks a consistent meter, line and stanza. It seems to have a consistent four-line stanza through the first two. But then the next one is five lines and the final one three. (Look how easily the poet could have turned these sixteen lines into four-line stanzas if she had wanted to.) It would be closer to the top of our circle than “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

 

Free verse is generally easy to recognize. What is harder to recognize is the principle of order that free verse poems employ. There usually is one: it may be the number of words or syllables in a line, it may be the grammatical clause; it may be the principle of the breath (the line pauses when the poet expects the reader to breathe), or it might be that the line seeks the most dramatic moment at which to break. It may be that the first word of the next line changes the meaning of the last word of the previous one, as the word “not” did in the recent language fad when it was stuck at the end of a sentence. For the sake of analysis we do want to discover what makes a free verse poem a poem, and not just broken up prose. But if it is a matter of identifying the form of the poem, this is much simpler: anything that’s not closed form, is open.  

 

One of the things you discover in reading open form poems is that each must be taken in itself, with as few preconceptions as possible. Each time you may ask again, “What’s going on here?” We will continue to pursue these questions in class discussion.

 

How did poems become open anyway?

 

But before ending this lecture it might be useful to pursue, briefly, one other question: What happened here? How did closed form poetry so suddenly become open form poetry?

 

That question has been answered in diverse ways. I will mention only two.

 

·        Formally, the problem faced by early twentieth-century when the popularity of open form began to overtake that of closed form, English language poets felt a sense of the used-upness of closed form. It was believed by many that form had been exhausted, that nothing new could be done with it, that nothing new could be said in it. It’s certainly true that there are a limited number of things that can be done in meter, and that after 900 years or so, meter and rhyme were becoming a little old.

 

·        Ideologically, the problem was that closed form didn’t seem to fit the times. The way we say things says a lot about how we think. Closed form expresses a more rigid view of the world, one more sympathetic to monarchy than to democracy. (Walt Whitman in the middle of the nineteenth century had already rejected traditional closed form for his democratic poem.) Open form simply fits better with the open twentieth-century view of the difference and the significance of the individual. This is another topic we can explore in more depth in the discussion forum.

 

 

 

Lecture #9: Sonnet: Form and History

 

Eternal glory to the inventor of the sonnet—Paul Valery

 

Amongst contemporary poets, the sonnet is alive and well.

 

Before we get into the specifics about the history, traditions and forms of the sonnet, let’s look at a contemporary example and think about the diverse ways in which poets are continuing to both work in the form and break with its historical traditions.

 

Below is Mollycat Jones’ “Unholy Sonnet Number One”:

 

My bowl of lamb and gravy from the can

appears each morning when at last you rise.

An hour ago I batted at your eyes,

and it’s been two since first the birds began.

My brother has already fouled the pan;

you slept right through his scratching and his cries

(their tone suggesting something oversize

and fetid, for which you’d require bran).

Your feet are on the floor. That’s a relief.

Your awkward fingers soon will pop the lid

I yearn for, giving proof to my belief

that God made humans well the way He did.

You Big Ones, lacking claws and feline verve

were clearly planned to open cans—to serve.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Tribute to the Sonnet

Mollycat Jones (Christine Potter): “Once I believed that poetry was something to distract my human companion, so I could knock the pens off her desk and swish my tail under her nose. That was before I discovered metrics and rhyme. Christine mostly writes that ridiculous vers libre, for Big Ones as silly as herself. I write for felines everywhere! And I write in form because the anarchic spirit of all cats is an explosive force that needs something powerful to contain it.”

Christine Potter, in her title, is riffing off metaphysical poet, John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets or Divine Meditations” originally published in the first edition of his Songs and Sonnets (1633). Donne wrote 19 “Holy Sonnets” in direct address to God, and he employed violent and sexual imagery. Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” is one of his most dramatic devotional lyrics.

 

• With wit and in the voice of an angry cat (because the poet slept too late), Potter brings together God and cats in the sonnet form. We love how the cat is the speaker in the poem, and from a superior position, addresses and critiques humans for their slothful forgetfulness.
• The poem is a one-stanza 14-line sonnet with a rhyme scheme of—abba abba cdcd ee (see below). We scan the first line as: “my BOWL of LAMB and GRA-vy FROM the CAN”—a line of iambic pentameter. We do this to show how the poet embraces some of the conventions of the traditional sonnet (see below) while blowing some of the conventions out of the water to make the poem uniquely her own.
• In the ending couplet, there’s a turn (or volta, see below), continuing in the cat’s voice and perspective, in which the cat pronounces, essentially, that humans are inferior to felines and fit only to serve them.

 

Origins of the Sonnet:

• Credit for the invention of the form is given to the Italian poet Giacomo de Lentino in the 14^th century. It is not however Lentino but Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch, who is most closely associated with the early form of the sonnet. Petrarch established the themes and dominated the practice of the Italian sonnet.
• Although we can be sure English poet Chaucer encountered the form in the late 1300s, it took approximately 200 years for the sonnet form to make its way from Italy to England.
• In the mid-1500s Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (usually referred to simply as “Surrey”) and Thomas Wyatt translated Petrarch into English for the first time. They also wrote the original sonnets of their own, the first in English.
• Surrey is credited with creating the now Standard English form of the sonnet, although that form is more closely associated with Shakespeare, who perfected it.

 

General Form:

• The sonnet is one of the most recognizable of poetic forms. It is a poem consisting of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. Not much more can be said by way of set-in-stone definition. In fact, even these absolutes of the sonnet have been challenged. Shakespeare wrote one 15-line sonnet, for example.
• Others have written 16-line poems they have called sonnets. Some, like Philip Sidney, have written iambic hexameter or other lines in what otherwise are called and seem to be sonnets.
• However, these two criteria remain the most fundamental for sonnets written in the English language: 14 lines of iambic pentameter. Beyond that, sonnets generally are divided into sub-stanzas, differently depending on the subgenre.
• Sonnets generally have a volta, or “turn” as well. The volta is where, logically, the sonnet suddenly switches direction. The poet will seem to be saying one thing and then suddenly starts saying another.
• The volta may bring about the answer at the end of a sonnet to the question being asked to that point. Or it may occur where a false claim is replaced by a true claim, as in Michael Drayton’s Sonnet 61 in which he tells us in the first part of the poem, “I’m so glad we broke up,” and in the second, “But can we get back together.”

 

Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)

 

There are several recognizable versions of the sonnet. The following are the most common:

 

Petrarchan (Italian) Version:

• The most common subject of the sonnet is love. This subject is particularly common in the Italian form. The story of love most commonly told is the story of unrequited love from the perspective of a man. In this story, the man feels hopelessly in love with a woman who is his moral and social superior.
• Here is an example (there are more on the syllabus). It was written in the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas Wyatt and is one of the earliest sonnets in English. (We’ve updated the spellings and changed a few of the words to make it easier to understand. You can find the superior original here.)

 

          Whoso wish to hunt, I know where is a hind,

          But as for me, alas, I may no more;

          The vain travail has wearied me so sore,

          I am of them that furthest come behind.

          Yet may I by no means my weary mind

          Draw from the deer: but as she flees before,

          Fainting, I follow. I leave off therefore,

          Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

          Whoso wish to hunt, I put him out of doubt,

          He as well as I may spend his time in vain;

          And carved with diamonds in letters plain

          There is written, her fair neck round about,

          No one may touch me, for Caesar’s I am,

          And wild to hold, although I may seem tame.

 

• An Italian sonnet is not defined primarily by its subject matter, however. In fact a sonnet can be about anything at all. The word refers only to the form: the line, the stanza and the rhyme scheme.

 

Here is Wyatt’s sonnet again with the meter and rhyme scheme noted and a space added at the volta:

 

 

   /          U      /           U      /        U        /           U        /   U        /

Whoso wish to hunt, I know where is a hind,              a

U           /    U       /       U  /      U    /       U         /

          But as for me, alas, I may no more;                           b

          The vain travail has wearied me so sore,          b

          I am of them that furthest come behind.          a

          Yet may I by no means my weary mind            a

          Draw from the deer: but as she flees before,              b

          Fainting, I follow. I leave off therefore,             b

          Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.              a

 

          Whoso wish to hunt, I put him out of doubt,               c

          He as well as I may spend his time in vain;                 d

          And carved with diamonds in letters plain                   d

          There is written, her fair neck round about,                c

          No one may touch me, for Caesar’s I am,                   e

          And wild to hold, although I may seem tame.   e

 

The Subject Matter:

• Although the poem seems to be about a man who is hunting a deer, this scene is in fact a metaphor for a man who is trying to seduce a woman who will have no part of him. We should note that the poem, as presented, does not necessarily reveal this to be so.
• To see this it helps to know a little about the author and the circumstances in which the poem was written. The “deer” in the poem is probably Anne Boleyn, who was then the lover of Henry VIII. The “Caesar” in the poem is therefore Henry VIII, who would have had Sir Thomas Wyatt, the author, killed for seducing Anne. It’s a pretty tricky situation. Wyatt obviously could not write about it directly. (He was, in fact, eventually hanged for treason—but not for this). In this early English sonnet, Wyatt has translated an Italian sonnet and applied it to his own situation.

 

The Line: You may notice the extra accented syllable on the first word of the first line. This is a normal kind of variation that a poet employs to keep the reader’s interest or to surprise the reader. It’s one of the ways the poet opens up the closed form. Still, the poem is overwhelmingly written in iambic pentameter.

 

The Rhyme Scheme: abbaabba cddcee. This is one of two most common options for the Italian sonnet. The other has the same first eight lines (the octave) but cdedce for the next six (or sestet). Other variations for the sestet also exist.

 

The Stanza:

• Whichever rhyme scheme is chosen, the Italian sonnet breaks into two stanzas as noted above (although the volta is not usually noted with a space): an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet.
• This is the primary difference between the Italian and English forms of the sonnet. The volta generally appears at the point where the octave divides from the sestet. You will notice here that lines one and nine begin with the same words, as though the poet is starting over. The octave of a Petrarchan sonnet will likely present a problem, and the sestet will provide the solution or resolution to that problem.

 

 

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

 

Shakespearean (English) Sonnet:

• English, unlike Italian, is a rhyme-poor language. It’s a struggle for an English poet to find enough “a’s” and “b’s” for a sonnet. The most common sonnet form in English is therefore not the Petrarchan, with its rich demand for rhyming words, but the English or Shakespearean, which allows for a greater number of rhymes.
• Shakespeare followed it in all his sonnets—which are the most famous in English. It’s also called the Elizabethan sonnet. Being a sonnet, it has fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter. But the form is different, and it’s less likely to be about the unrequited love of a man for a woman. Here’s one of the sonnets on our syllabus.

 

Sonnet 73

 

That time of year thou mayest in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few to hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

 

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

 

In me though see’st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

 

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which though must leave ere long.

 

 

So that the meaning doesn’t interfere with the understanding of the form, here’s a paraphrase:

 

When you look at me you could think about the very end of autumn, when maybe a few last yellow leaves or maybe none at all hang on the boughs of the trees that are shaken by the cold wind.

 

Or when you look at me you think of the end of the day, after the sunset fades in the west, just before night comes to seal up life in a death-like sleep.

 

Or when you look at me you see an almost burnt up fire, a fire that has consumed its fuel, and the very substance that nourished it, the way that people consume themselves by burning up their youth.

 

You see these things when you look at me, and they make your love for me stronger, because you know I will not be around much longer.

 

 

Here’s the poem again:

 

That time of year thou mayest in me behold                               a

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang                 b

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,                       a

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.                   b

 

In my thou seest the twilight of such day                                   c

As after sunset fadeth in the west;                                             d

Which by and by black night doth take away,                 c

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.                               d

 

In my though see’st the glowing of such fire,                              e

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,                          f

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,                                    e

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.              f

 

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, g

To love that well which though must leave ere long.                   g

 

We haven’t scanned the line. But if you do, you will see the regular iambic pentameter throughout. You will notice that the rhyme scheme and stanza form differ from the Petrarchan. Here we have three quatrains and a couplet. And the rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. These things do not change in a Shakespearean sonnet.

 

We also notice that the volta comes after line twelve. The first three stanzas elaborate the same idea, which the couplet resolves. Not all Shakespearean sonnets follow this pattern. The stanza forms and rhyme scheme do not change, but the volta can still come after line eight. You have to look for it.

 

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

 

Spenserian Sonnet:

• While the Petrarchan and Shakespearean forms are the most common in English, there are others. The Spenserian sonnet, named for the chief practitioner, Edmund Spencer, is a variation on the Shakespearean form.
• Like the Shakespearean it is written in three quatrains and a couplet. But, unlike the Shakespearean, the quatrains are tied together by the rhyme. Here is an example (from Spenser’s series of Sonnets called Amoretti). If you read through this sonnet for a little while, you will be able to understand the meaning. But all that matters for the moment is that you take in the form:

 

                        Sonnet 29

 

See how the stubborned damzell doth deprave*             a          *misinterpret 

with simple meaning disdaynfull scorne:             b

And by the bay* which I unto her gave              a          *laurel, a sign of victory in athletics

Accoumpts myselfe her captive quite forlorne.    b                                 

 

“The bay,” quoth she, “is of the victours borne.  b

Yielded them by the vanquisht as theyr meeds,* c          *rewards

And they therewith doe poetess heads adorne,   b

To sing the glory of their famous deedes.”                      c

 

But sith she will the conquest challeng needs,    c

Let her accept me as her faithfull thrall              d

That he great triumph which all my skill exceeds,           c

I may in trump of fame blaze* over all.              d          *proclaim

 

Then would I decke her head with glorious bayes,          e

And fill the world with her victorious prayse.       e

 

• We’ve added spaces to make the stanzas clearer. You’ll notice that the end rhyme of the last line of each quatrain is repeated in the first line of the next quatrain, making the division into quatrains suspect.

• The repeated lines give the poem a couplet every time the stanza changes, and carrying one of the rhymes from stanza to stanza weaves the sounds tightly. However the sense or meaning may change from stanza to stanza, the sounds bind them to each other. A good sonneteer would use this form to play the logic of the form against the logic of the words.

 

Terza Rima:

• Terza rima is a special kind of tercet that was used by the Italian poet, Dante in his famous Divine Comedy. It has also been used now and then to great effect in the sonnet.
• The terza rima stanza sequence is similar to the sequence used in the Spenserian sonnet, but is one line shorter: a terza rima sequence runs aba bcb cdc, etc.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Frost have done a particularly good job in this form. Here’s an example, the first of five sonnet stanzas in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” which you can find the whole of in our course. In this case the spaces between the stanzas are Shelley’s.

 

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,      a

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead             b

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,                 a

 

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,                          b

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,                       c

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed                      b

 

The wingéd seeds, where they lie cold and low,          c

Each like a corpse within its grave, until                     d

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow                            c

 

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill                          d

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)              e

With living hues and odors plain and hill:                              d

 

Wild Spirit, which are moving everywhere;                           e

Destroyer and preserver, hear, oh, hear!                    e

 

 

You’ll notice that this sonnet also ends with a couplet.

 

A Nonce Sonnet:  

• There exist other named forms of the sonnet. But they are too rare to mention here.
• At the same time, there are many sonnets for which the form is generated once and not repeated. These are called nonce sonnets.
• They’re still written in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. But the rhyme scheme and stanza form vary from any established sonnet pattern.
• The unrivaled greatest of these—and of perhaps all sonnets—is, in our opinion, Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” which is on our syllabus. When you read this sonnet, note the rhyme scheme, the surprising internal rhyme and the complex form accompanying the complex ironies of the content.
• The pleasure of all fixed form poetry is partly mathematical. This is never truer than in the sonnet. In the Renaissance one expression for writing poetry was “doing numbers.” If you said, “it is written in numbers,” you meant, “it is a poem.” And just rattling off numbers could tell the listener what type of poem it was.
• You will notice that none of the standard sonnet forms break down evenly into two seven line stanzas. Such sonnets have been written, but the disproportion of the stanza size adds more to the effect of the sonnet than the balance of two septets.
• The form of a sonnet is mathematically rigid in respect to meter and stanza. The trick is to find freedom and flexibility within this rigidity. The pleasure of a sonnet is the pleasure of maximum freedom within maximum restraint: emotion tied to math.
• Study this aspect of the form when you read this week’s poems. Watch how the units of meaning—usually the grammatical sentences—coincide rigidly with the stanza in the earlier sonnets, how the lines tend to stop sharply, and how these aspects of the sonnet loosen up as the centuries pass.

 

The Sonnet Sequence:

 

• You may notice that although many sonnets were written in the early 1600s, very few were written in the 1700s.
• The 18th-century perceived the sonnet as an exhausted form, a form in which nothing was left to say.
• This is at least partly because of the great sonnet craze of the 1590s. In that decade, and in the years around that decade, it seemed every major poet not only wrote sonnets but sequences of sonnets: sometimes very long groups of sonnets that told a story or illustrated a theme.
• Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence is 154 sonnets long. And it’s one of the shorter sequences. After such great voices as Edmund Spencer, Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare (not to mention Lady Mary Wroth, one of the few women poets of the time) had handled this form so thoroughly, newer poets tended to avoid it—to make their reputation elsewhere.
• Shakespeare even, famously, used the form now and then in his plays. The most famous instance of this is the 14-line-two-voiced-sequence that occurs when Romeo and Juliet first speak.

 

Romeo:              If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

 

Juliet:                  Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

 

Romeo:              Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet:                  Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo:              O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;

They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

 

Juliet:                  Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

Romeo:              Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

 

• In the 19th-century the interest in the form revived. Although the sonnet will probably never regain the popularity it had in Shakespeare’s time, many extraordinary innovations, it turned out, remained to reinvigorate the form once the time was right and it became possible to discover them. You will note as you read how different the sonnets from the 1800s and 1900s are from those in the 1600s, both in form and content.

 

The Sonnet’s Future:

We began the lecture with a tribute to the sonnet from a contemporary poet.

• It is worth knowing that the sonnet is alive and well, as is the sonnet sequence. For example, poet Joan Larkin wrote a sonnet sequence, “The Blackout Sonnets” included in her 1986 collection of poetry A Long Sound. The sonnets deal with the impacts of alcoholism and reiterate what poet, Christine Potter wrote about the form’s ability to contain chaos, “[a]nd I write in form because the anarchic spirit of all cats is an explosive force that needs something powerful to contain it.”

 

• Also noteworthy is poet Henri Cole’s 2007 collection of sonnet-like poems, Blackbird and Wolf. In this collection of 38 poems divided into 2 sections of 14 poems each (the last section contains 10 poems), the speaker grapples with the death of his mother, desire, and difficult truths. Nearly each of the 38 poems is 14-lines long with sonnet-like voltas at the end.

 

Lecture #10: Other Forms: ode, ballad, elegy, epic, dramatic monologue, villanelle, sestina

 

Lyric, Narrative, Dramatic, the ancient distinction, held until the 18^th-century. It derives from Aristotle (who used the word “epic” rather than “narrative”). From the 19^th-century on, it has lost categorical force.

 

Lyric, poetry written from the first-person point of view of the poet. Originally poems intended to be recited or sung to the accompaniment of a lyre.

 

Narrative, epic poetry, poetry that tells a story in which a variety of characters speak and interact. What had been the stuff of narrative poetry has become the purview of novels and prose fiction nowadays.

 

Dramatic, poetry told in the point of view of a character.

 

This categorization of types held from the time of Aristotle (4^th C. BCE) until the time of Johnson (18^th C. CE). Most poetry today, however, is written in the lyric mode. “Dramatic” and “Narrative” being largely taken over by prose fiction. The subgenres, mostly subgenres of lyric, must still be recognized, however.

 

The Ode: The ode comes in a number of flavors—Pindaric, Horatian, English, Irregular. We’re not going to cover them individually. Some are very strict in form, some very loose.

 

Its origins are in the Latin poetry of the Roman Empire, and there its form is very strict. Some English poets imitated Latin form. But most practitioners of the Ode in English have taken only some of the particulars of the Ancient ode to heart as they reproduce the form. The ode is a longer poem, serious or meditative in nature, commonly about events of a public nature, written in formal language and usually having a strict stanzaic structure.

 

It’s hard to come up with a better definition than that because the actual poems that call themselves odes vary a lot. You will notice for example that Pope’s “Ode on Solitude,” is a short poem—unusual for an ode—and that Keats’ “great odes,” are about very private matters. In fact, from the late 18^th century on, odes commemorating public events rarely survive the event of their publication. The odes we read today do not seem so public. Let’s look briefly at two odes, one with a regular stanza, the other irregular.

 

Regular odes, such as those of Keats, are often composed in very elaborate stanzas. Students often find these difficult to read both because of the form and because of the elaborate language.

 

Here’s the first stanza of the “Ode to a Nightingale.” It’s intimidating even to look at:

 

          My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

              My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

    One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk,

‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

    but being too happy in thine happiness—

          That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,

             In some melodious plot

Of beechan green, and shadows numberless,

    Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

 

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes students say they hate poetry. It can make you feel stupid. That’s a false impression however. You can scan the poem and note the rhyme scheme if you like. We’re going to be concerned with the language—which is the most significant feature that separates the ode from other forms.

 

What should you notice about it? You may or may not have found the Shakespearean sonnet difficult. If you did, it was not because the language was difficult; it was because the language is old. If you’d lived in 1595, you would not have had trouble reading Shakespeare. On the other hand, Keats’ ode has always been difficult. It uses words that were unusual or specialized even in its own day. It also has the most formal syntax possible, and allusions only educated people could get. (Did the average coal miner of the early 19^th century know of the river “Lethe,” the classical river of forgetfulness through which the dead soul passed in order to forget its early life as it crossed into the underworld? It was one of five rivers in Hades.)

 

Here’s a paraphrase: Listening to you, little nightingale, makes my heart ache and I feel a drowsy numbness pain my senses as though I’d drunk the deadly poison Hemlock or as though I’d drunk some other dulling drug to the bottom of the glass. If I’d listened to your song one more minute, I think I would have sunk down into the river of forgetfulness. It’s not because I envy your happy life that I feel this way; it’s because you are too happy in your happiness. It’s because you—light-winged spirit of the trees—sing your strong, beautiful song about summer (in a musical place full of green trees and lots of shadows) so easily, so naturally. [Whereas I, the poor human poet, have to work so damn hard to make my poems—and I don’t end up with anything so beautiful as your song.]

 

The meaning isn’t hard. Only the language.

 

As far as the stanza goes I want you to notice that although it is as formal as a sonnet, the stanza was freely chosen. If Keats had written the ode in some other stanza, it would still be an ode. The length of the stanza and of the poem is up to the poet as well. He’s not restricted to a certain number of lines.

 

Beyond the structure (it needs to have some structure), and the language (formal) and the subject matter (serious), any restrictions the poet puts on him or herself are freely chosen.

 

The irregular ode is even more free. We have one on our syllabus. Here’s a sample stanza:

 

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from

Recollections of Early Childhood

 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth and every common sight

          To me did seem

          Appareled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

          Turn whereso’er I may,

          By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

 

You’ll notice that words like “celestial” (heavenly) and “yore” are very formal. The tone of the poem is serious, but the line length varies quite a lot—more even than it seems to from looking at it. The long lines are not all the same length nor are the short lines. (If you scan this yourself you will see this. The rhyme scheme is also unpredictable: ababa cddc in the first stanza but aabcbcded. (Where does that “e” come from? It’s part of an internal rhyme in line 16: “But yet I know, wher’er I go.”)

 

You’ll also notice that the number of lines within each stanza varies. It’s obvious why it’s called “irregular.”

 

Both the sonnet and the ode are formal poems, but for the most part the ode is a more open form in English than the sonnet. The poet is freer to choose the length and the stanza and the rhyme scheme. (But the poet may have less room for choice in the subject matter or tone.)

 

Ballad: Folk and Literary: Our third form gets us back to the very roots of poetry. One of the oldest reasons that poems have rhyme and meter is that these elements made the poems easier to memorize. We have kept rhyme and meter so long because they are pleasurable in themselves. But preliterate people used them also for their mnemonic value. The ballad is among the oldest forms in English verse. Not only can it be easily remembered, it can easily be set to music and sung. Virtually all ballads have in common the stanzaic form (but not every poem using this form is a ballad). The ballad stanza or ballad quatrain is a four-line stanza that rhymes abcb (or sometimes  abab). It consists of either four lines in iambic tetrameter, or alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. The first is called “eights and eights” because there are eight syllables in each line. The second option is called “eights and sixes.”

 

Eights and eights:

 

O, she is young and she is fair

          With evil eye that longs to roam.

          But she is mine, and so beware

          If e’er into her eye you come.

 

Eights and sixes:

 

               When as King Henry rulde this land,

     The second of that name,

     Besides the queene, he dearly lovde

     A faire and comely dame.

 

Early ballads—one of which is on our syllabus—were meant to be sung in the evening or on holidays to entertain weary hardworking people. They differ from literary ballads in that they have no individual author. They came into being before copyright, and, having no owners, and being easily remembered, were told and retold, written and rewritten over and over. Just about the only language today that circulates like a ballad did in the fourteenth century is a joke. People improved ballads in retelling or just replaced forgotten stanzas with their own. Once they were finally written (and many of course were never written down and have been lost) they very likely were written down in several versions.

 

Aside from their stanza form (they can be any length of course) the one thing they have in common with literary ballads is that they tell a story. Usually it’s a sad story, often a sad love story. Ballads also often have refrains: repeated lines or stanzas.

 

An example of a literary ballad is Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” I want you to notice that this ballad can properly exist in only one form—Keats’ final version. Although its story is quasi-medieval (it seems to tell the kind of story an ancient folk ballad would have told), it’s much more regular in its meter than the folk ballad is. It seems to have been written (as it was) by a self-conscious poet who was very carefully composing a poem, not by a wandering minstrel who is trading entertaining stories for bread. He will not be able to compensate for the imperfections in his meter with his voice. We will have more to say about Keats’ poem during class discussion.

 

Elegy : As with so many words in the study of poetry, this one has a complex history and may designate different things at different time. For the last several hundred years, however, the word has been used almost exclusively to signify mostly mournful poetry lamenting loss, usually through death, of a loved person. Elegies can be either general, as in Grey’s most famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” or specific, as Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” which was written to help the poet overcome the loss of his best friend Arthur Hallam.

 

Epic: One of the most basic and ancient classificatory divisions of all poetry is into the Narrative, Dramatic and Lyric. Although this three-fold distinction is of some use, particularly in understanding the poetry written before the 19^th century, today, when what presents itself as poetry is overwhelmingly lyric poetry, it is no longer the primary rubric through which we learn to understand what poetry is. When it was, epic poetry, a form of narrative poetry was considered the highest form of the art. Narrative poetry, as the name reveals, tells a story. Epic poetry tells a particular type of story. Epic poetry is always long, traditionally 12 or 24 books (similar to chapters). It tells the story of a hero whose heroic deeds define not only heroism but the culture in which those deeds are performed. Achilles and Odysseus stand for the Greek culture that told their stories in the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Adam and Eve stand for the whole Christian West in Milton’s Epic Paradise Lost. Epic poetry defines its culture through a limited view of lost past, a time of heroism and great deeds, when, as they say, giants roamed the earth. Although there have been many attempts to write epics since the 17^th century, most scholars agree that the epic form came to its end at that time. What followed was either epic parodies, such as the “mock epic” form popular in the 18^th century, in which the element of the epic were used to describe and mock ordinary events, and serious longer narratives that lack too many of the qualities or elements that the use of the word to describe them is more suggestive than literal, e.g. Wordworth’s “epic” poem about the development of a poetic mind (The Prelude) or E. B. Browning’s novel-in-verse, Aurora Leigh.  

Dramatic monologue: If epic provides the best example of narrative poetry, dramatic monologue provides at least the most identifiable example of dramatic poetry. Narrative poetry tells a story; dramatic poetry presents a situation. This type of poem was particularly popular in the 19^th century, and the master practitioner is Robert Browning. Browning will allow an imaginary character to speak. And as there was no narrator to help orient the reader into the action, and there is never more than a single speaker whose words are available to us, the reader is compelled to reconstruct what is going on in the scene through the words of this single speaker. Complicating the situation still further is the fact that the tone of the speech is often at odds with the subject. The readers’ reaction is first stalled and then intensified by, for example, a murderer explaining in such a matter-of-fact why how and why he has killed his beloved. The dramatic monologue is often described as a speech from an unwritten play.  

Villanelle: Like so many French forms, the villanelle is complex and difficult to write. Unlike the dramatic monologue, it is defined by form rather than content. In this it resembles the sonnet. It is a great form for showing off. It consists of 19 lines

 

·       five tercets that rhyme aba, and

·       an ending quatrain that rhymes abaa

.

The real distinctive feature of the form, however, is the repetition of the first and third lines of the first stanza in specific places throughout the poem. The first line of the first stanza will be repeated as the last line of the second and fourth stanzas and the third line of the final stanza. The last line of the first stanza will recur as the last line of the third, fifth and final stanzas. In the best examples of the type, the meaning of the lines varies slightly with every iteration though the words do not change at all.

 

Sestina: Yet more complex is the sestina. Like the villanelle, the sestina has no set line length. In fact in the shortest possible version of the form, Lloyd Schwartz has published a sestina containing only six different words, one word per line. Most sestinas are much longer. What matters here is not meter or rhyme but the word that ends each line. The form consists of

 

·       six six-line stanzas and

·       one three-line final stanza (called an envoy).

 

The last word of each of the six lines of the first stanza must be repeated as the last word of each of the six lines of every other stanza before the envoy, in the following invariable order:

 

 

1-2-3-4-5-6 (in stanza one)

6-1-5-2-4-3 (in stanza two),

3-6-4-1-2-5 (in stanza three),

5-3-2-6-1-4 (in stanza four),

4-5-1-3-6-2 (in stanza five), and

2-4-6-5-3-1 (in stanza six).

5-3-2 (in the envoy)

 

You will notice that numbers are used to designate these words rather than letters; this is because there is no requirement that the words rhyme, and overwhelmingly they do not. In addition to the ending words, the envoy incorporates the other three words in the middle of each line in the order 1-4-6.

Forms tend to start as individual poems—nonce forms—whose forms other poets find so intriguing that they wish to repeat them. Hence there are innumerable other forms, many more obscure than these I’ve presented here. And new forms can always be created while old forms fall into disuse until some clever, historically minded poet recovers them. At the same time poets travel the world, or read the world’s books, in order to find and adapt foreign forms, the best example of which is perhaps the use of Japanese Haiku in English, a surprisingly successful transformation given how unlike the two languages are in even their basic understanding of the boundaries of a word.

 

Lecture #11 Women and Poetry (and Power)

 

So far this term we have been mainly discussing the most basic, formal elements of poetry: line, meter, stanza, form. We’ve also discussed a number of poems on a variety of subjects. But we haven’t delved into any subject—except of course the subject of poetic—in detail.

 

Some people find the mathematics of poetry endless fascinating—that the beauty of poetry can be discussed in the sterile language of numbers makes them say “wow!” These are the same sorts of people who like to talk about grammar and math. Others find this sort of thing endlessly boring. Fascinating or boring, at some point in your poetic education, it is necessary to deal with poems in that laboratory fashion. But it would be a shame if that were all we did in our study of poetry. So today we turn the corner and begin to look at poetry in a more focused way in terms of what it says and what it does. Poetry we’ll see is not just an idle entertainment. It is an actor in history. The things it does are sometimes progressive and liberal and sometimes conservative and sometimes reactionary. (We’ll see that all these possibilities exist in this week’s poems.)

 

To review much of what we’ve said already at least once: most English-language poetry is written in standard English sentences. The grammar may sometimes be complex, but it is the same grammar we all have learned in school, or tried to learn. Being written this way, most poetry includes what is known as “paraphrasable content.” (We’ve seen this over and over again as we’ve tried to read the poems on our syllabus.) In other words, it’s possible to look at what the sentences and the poem are actually saying and put that “content” into other words.

 

If this were all we did in reading poetry, if we thought that once we could report what a poem was saying we were through with the poem, we would do a great injustice to poetry. Moreover any number of poems defy, deliberately or not, our ability to paraphrase them. At the same time, it is nearly impossible to feel comfortable with any poem if you don’t have any idea of what it says or what it does. (As Marianne Moore says in her poem “Poetry” “we do not admire what we cannot understand.”) In the rare cases when a poem cannot be paraphrased, knowing that that is so and why that is so will be of a great help in learning to feel comfortable with the poem. If a poem can be paraphrased, doing so will, again, help greatly in reading the poem.

 

Poems have something to say. Poems also have work to do.

 

We have already begun to look at the on-going conversations among poets and poems. Poets are always talking to each other and to the history of poetry. They are also talking to and responding to the society or culture in which they are written. Like newspaper editorials, movies, novels and political speeches, they attempt to affect the course of their contemporary world and therefore also the course of history. Poetry is an actor in history. (The Romantic poet Percy Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”) This remains true even today, despite the waning public awareness of the art.

 

Putting these two aspects of reading together—looking at poems in terms of what they say and do—we will be investigating a series of poems through a particular theme. In future weeks, that theme will be how poetry responds to and helps shape the time in which it was written. This week the subject will trace the representation of women in the history of poetry, including the representation of women by men and the response by women to that representation as well as the opposite: the representation of men by women and the self-representation of women by women—from the medieval time to our time.

 

In other words: what men see when they look at women. What women see when men look at them. What women see when they look back at men. And what women see when they look at themselves.

 

Individual poems on this week’s syllabus make a certain sense read in isolation. But a more comprehensive story emerges when these poems are put into the context of the overarching story they tell. It turns out to be a story about woman and men and power.

 

We’ll start with some observations that will help you enter this centuries-long conversation.

 

The poetry written by women is most often (but not always) progressive, while the poetry by men is most often (but again not always) reactionary. We will see first of all what happens when men have the opportunity to define their “other” while that “other” has no means to respond. This was the case in Medieval poetry and remained more or less true up until the Enlightenment (starting in the late 1600s), with some fascinating exceptions.

 

The overarching story. If we think of these poems as telling a single story, the way a novel tells a story with characters the develop over time, it is a story of a struggle for power. Women have it but can’t keep it. Men desire it but can’t take it. There are really two struggles: first to possess achieve and hold power, second to define the terms of the story itself. 

 

The story for us starts in the later Medieval times (a very long period of English history from which we will take only the smallest sample) because that is when English poetry started taking women seriously as a subject. In the Medieval world few men and even fewer women learned how to read or write. The poetry from this time and place is almost exclusively written by men. We will not be treating this era of English history as fully as the eras that follow—choosing only three poems in fact[§]—partly because of the difficulty of the language, and also because of the limited time we have.

 

But it’s useful to look at the beginnings of the objectification of women in poetry written by men: men looking at women as they would look at any object and conveying in their poems what the object means. It starts with men defining women as the holders of power.

 

The story starts to change in the Renaissance, the age of Shakespeare. This is the time in which what has come to be known as love poetry first comes to be widely written. Love poetry is, however, rarely, if ever, innocent. Love (or, better “desire”) is power. And in the poems, it’s still women who have the power over men. With the poetry of this era, we will be outlining the relationships that emerge between men and women and power. We will be asking the following questions:

·       What is the particular nature of women’s power over men?

·       Where does women’s power lie according to the poems?

·       How do women hold on to power?

·       Under what circumstances do they relinquish their power?

·       What happens if a woman refuses to relinquish power? 

 

Women have all the power. But it’s mostly men who define that power. Though powerful, women remain for the most part silent objects of male desire or commodities that can be consumed in order to transfer power to men. Desire works like money.

 

The next period we will be looking at is known as the Enlightenment. While some women, exclusively noble women, such as Queen Elizabeth and Mary Wroth, had been in a position to write poetry in the Renaissance, more women found their way on to the page in the Enlightenment and for the first time these women—not all of them born to the upper class—began to talk back in significant numbers to the story in which they were depicted. What we will see is that as soon as women achieved a measure of freedom to write, they began to criticize the male version of the story and to provide alternatives to it. This does not mean that the story goes away, however. We will see it persist and, in some cases, intensify. In fact in never really goes away.

 

It is not until the Romantic age that male poets such as Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy join certain female poets in mocking the story of men, women and power that had by that time been told for about 400 years—and actively challenged for at least 300.

 

Finally in the Modernist period, the story gets turned around. But not entirely. Although by this point women are equal partners in defining the story, we will see that not everything changes about women’s power.

 

What we will find through reading all these poems in order is a remarkably coherent slowly developing story about the relations of men and women. It takes place over many centuries and changes only gradually from one in which men have all the power to define both themselves and women—and therefore define women in their image and interests[**]—to one in which women have achieved the cultural status which allows them to speak directly for themselves and to be heard.

 

As we look at the actual poems, here are some things to think about:

 

1) How do men look at women? How do women look at themselves? And how do women look back at men?

 

2) What is the source and nature of women’s power? How is that power attained and maintained? What is the price of maintaining it; what is the price of failing to maintain it? How do the source and nature of this power change through the centuries? (The power Julia has over Robert Herrick is different from the power Lucille Clifton has.)

 

3) Why do men and women not understand one another, and in what ways do they fail to do so?

 

4) What do men need women for? What do women need men for?

 

5) And how to do the socially arranged differences between men and women figure into these questions?

 

These observations should get you started:

 

“Alison.” Here we have the theme of men looking at and longing for women. This longing puts  the men in the women’s power as long as the women remain an object of longing. How does power actually play between the poet and Alison?

 

“To Rosamond.” A man is enslaved to a woman who gives him no encouragement. We see a note of the cruelty of women enter the story. Why would women get a reputation for cruelty? The more power they have, the more cruel they are said to be in the wielding of that power.

 

“In Prais of Wemen.” Praise that includes worship while at the same time maintaining an otherness. Women suffer to produce men. All men should praise women in their role as mothers.

 

Dunbar, “There Is a Lady Sweet and Kind,” here we see again the relationship between love and desire and the perpetuation of desire through denial. But here sex is not accompanied by guilt and resistance is not condemned.

 

“Western Wind.” Women as representation of men’s longing.

 

Elizabeth I, “When I Was Fair and Young.” The woman whose power is most absolute gives an understanding of sexual politics of youth and beauty, which make her a victim. How does she maintain her power and how does she lose it? What’s the price she paid for trying to maintain it?

 

Daniel, “Sonnet 6 [Fair is my love, and cruel…].” The cruelty of the beautiful woman and the man’s inability to understand her cruelty, cf. Montagu. The effects of that cruelty (to be a muse). We see her power over him again, how he finds an outlet for his frustrated sexual urges. Do we believe he does not understand the source of this perceived cruelty? Is there a system that controls sexuality to which both he and she are victims or in which they are pawns?

 

Wroth, From Pamphilia and Amphilanthus. Note particularly in the song the woman’s justification for what the men deem as cruelty. Note the coldness of the tone. Why is that tone necessary? We have a rare look at love from the perspective of a woman of this time. How does Wroth’s poetry differ from the poems written by men?

 

Herrick, “On Julia’s Clothes,” Herrick was a famous looker at Julia, her clothes, her breasts, the nipples of her breasts provide the subjects of three of his most famous poems. What is his attitude toward Julia?

 

Suckling, “Upon My Lady Carlisle’s Walking in Hampton Court Garden.” Suckling imagines a woman disrobing. What is his tone? What is his attitude toward her and toward his imaginative undressing of her?

                           

Marvel, “To His Coy Mistress.” This is by no means the only poem from this time which aims at taking the virginity of the object of a man’s passion. How good, how effective, do you think his argument is? Why don’t we find out what her answer is?  

 

Wortley Montagu, “The Lover: A Ballad.” Another Explanation of women’s coldness. Its effect may be power, but its intent is not the acquisition of power, but protection.

 

Goldsmith, “When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly.” Damned if they do it, damned if they don’t. cf. Elizabeth I. If you give in you lose your power and become unprotected. If you don’t give in, you lose your chance at the humanizing effects of love: you are left cold, you become cold, and lonely. Cf. Marvel.

 

 

 

We start our historical survey of English poetry with the period known as “The English Renaissance,” (or, alternatively, as the “Early Modern Era”). The English spoken and written then is often referred to as “Elizabethan” even though the period begins before the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. It is more accurately called “Early Modern English.” It is the oldest version of English that a competent speaker of today can understand with just a dictionary. It is the language of Shakespeare.

POETRY CHANGES WITH TIME

We study poetry historically because, in many important ways, poetry changes over time. It’s not just the language that changes. The very idea of what a poem is—of what counts as a poem—changes. What is poetry? What is poem? What does a poem do? Different times offer different answers to these questions. Who writes poems, and why do they write them? These things also change with time.

If you see or hear a poem written in 1600, it will look and sound a lot like a poem written in 2000. You’ll know right away that it’s a poem from the look or the rhyme or the meter. But these similarities, though real and important, can hide the differences, and that makes these older poems often harder to read or experience.

At the same time, you should realize that a lot of what we think of as poetry today would be baffling to Shakespeare. The great poet would not have understood as we do the idea that a poem could be “open for interpretation” for example. And he would not have recognized the concept of “open form.” It also never would have occurred to him to call a poem an expression of a feeling or of an idea. And he would have been very puzzled by the idea that poetry exists in its own closed-off realm, in a place where some people read and enjoy it and others avoid or ignore it altogether. Poetry for Shakespeare was not something other than ordinary language, it was ordinary language that was elevated, language that put on its best clothes, sat up straight, and paid attention.

CRAFT BECOMES ART

The Renaissance was a time when the ideas of “art” and “artist” underwent fundamental changes. In the preceding centuries, known as the medieval times or the Middle Ages, creators of poems and paintings were considered to be craftsmen or artisans. Starting in the Renaissance they began to be recognized as something more, as artists. An artist is someone with a special talent which sets him or her apart from ordinary people. A special talent is something more than an advanced skill.

In other words, a medieval poet had been more like a cabinet maker or carpenter. He learned a skill that anyone could learn and applied that skill to writing in the same way that a carpenter learned a skill that anyone could learn and applied it to carpentry. There were certainly good and bad poets, but there were also good and bad carpenters. Nonetheless, just as anyone could learn to wield a hammer, anyone could, in theory, learn to wield a pen. In the medieval world, the arts were not thought of a special brand of human endeavor reserved for people with special talents. One indication of this is that most medieval poetry has no known author just as most people today have no idea who designed or built the house they live in.

Although this idea that anyone could write poems still found expression in Shakespeare’s time, the idea of the artist as something more than a craftsman began to take hold in England in the early sixteenth century. The ability to write poetry was considered an essential part of the achievements of a gentleman. Hence, we see that nobles like Thomas Wyatt and henry Howard and Queen Elizabeth Compositions are still prominent poets of the era. Poetry was a hobby and an obligation. But beside this way of thinking about poetry we have the growing notion of the poet as artis. By the time of Shakespeare (in the late sixteenth century) compositions routinely circulated with the name of the person who wrote them attached.

WHY WERE POEMS WRITTEN?

As there are two current ideas about who writes poems—nobles or artists—so there are, broadly speaking—two kinds of reasons for writing art. For nobles, understanding an ability on poetry to be a mark of a true gentlemen, the writing of a poem was proof of one’s right to one’s title. But that was not enough. A poet needs something to write about and someone to write to. The vast majority of poetry written by this class of poet was written for others of this class. It was about the struggles of lovers, the problems of court life, and the problems of government. It was often based on the experience of this man with this woman (Wyatt with Anne Boleyn for example). This was true even when the poem was an imitation or a translation of a fourteenth century Italian poem. Or it was a warning to an adversary, as in Elizabeth I’s “The Doubt of Future Foes,” which was specifically directed at her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. Court poems were not entirely different from notes passed in a classroom. It was all about the people reading the poems. Most of these poems are lyric poems.

The other kind of poem was written by the artist. Printing was expanding; books were becoming cheaper to produce, and a reading public was developing. Poets who took advantage of this market (or whom this market too advantage of) wrote for a more general reader. These poems, like Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, or Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle, were more likely to be narrative. They told stories. Their observations about love and war and human relationships were based in character, not people. They tended to be more generally applicable. Like poems of today, these poems explored realms of feeling. But the didn’t think of that exploration in exactly the same terms we would use today.

ART AS IMITATION (NOT EXPRESSION)/WRITING AS INVENTION

Today, when we read lines like these from Robert Herrick’s “On Julia’s Clothes”

 

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,

Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows

That liquefaction of her clothes.

we may recognize a poet expressing his profound emotional reaction to a woman. But the poet himself would not have thought of the poem that way. He would have said he was “imitating” the emotion of longing. This may seem like a small difference, but in fact it is not small at all. It determines what an artist does and how he or she does it.

Perhaps the most important word to have in mind when you think of poetry (or any art) is this word “imitation.” Imitation means making a copy or representing a reality in an image. I perceive a complex or abstract thing—“greed” for example—and I make a picture of it so that you can understand it better, as the late-medieval artist Peter Bruegel the Elder did in his illustration of greed:

                        Detail from Breughel’s “Greed,” 1556.

The artist is not trying to express his opinion about greed. He’s trying to convey what greed actually is.

The idea that art imitates reality (the word preferred at the time was “nature”) in fact goes all the way back to the time of the Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle and will continue to be the primary way to think about art right up until the end of the 18^th century.¹ Shakespeare’s Hamlet is reflecting the common thinking about art in his day when he says that the purpose of acting is to “hold a mirror up to nature to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image.” Art as imitation means that it has a moral purpose. We see our own folly and our own virtue in art and, in response, work to reduce the one and increase the other.

You can see why at the time it was impossible for a Renaissance poet or artist to think as we often do of a work of art as “open for interpretation.” It is reality that must be interpreted, and art is the interpretation. If you had to then interpret the art, you’d be undermining its very purpose.

Both Medieval and Renaissance art was based in the idea of imitation.

The second most important word to keep in mind when thinking about art is “invention.” The word, in this context, comes to mean “having something new to say,” or “having a new way of saying things.”² It is a concept that arose in the early English Renaissance and which, when it is combined with “imitation,” marks a fundamental change in the history of art.

Previously there would be no need to “invent” in writing any more than there was a need to invent in painting. Medieval artisans mainly copied existing works of art. Medieval art was overwhelmingly religious and practical. It was used in worship and in education. Illiterate people “read” biblical stories in the paintings and on the stonework of churches and cathedrals. Because the creators didn’t put their names on them or make money off them (except in the way that a factory worker today makes money in manufacturing ), there was no purpose to being original. And since knowledge was something you conveyed, not something you discovered, you had nothing to invent anyway.³ Much medieval art would today be considered plagiarism. But that concept did not exist in the medieval times, and it was only just beginning to be thought of in the time of Shakespeare.⁴

The individuality of the poet, the difference of one poet from another, starts to become important in the Renaissance. Still, poetry, in Renaissance thinking, does not come from the individual, neither from the individual’s feelings nor observations. We saw early in the semester, when we read Pablo Neruda’s twentieth-century poem “Poetry,” that poets even today tend to experience poetry as something that comes to them and through them, and not as something that originates inside them. But at the same time all poets today search for the individual voice that marks their poetry off from all other poetry. Renaissance poets did not think this way. The measure of a good poem was its reflection of the general truth of the outer world (i.e. “nature”), not the cleverness or the individuality of the person who wrote the words down.

This outer world of nature could be the world of the senses—the world as you and I can see it—or it could be the invisible spiritual world, or it could be the emotional world, but it was in that case the emotions we all share and not something unique to the poet. So we can get poems like the sonnets of Shakespeare or Michael Drayton that give us an image of what lovers experience. The job of a poet is to hold a mirror up the world, to reflect it accurately.

This is very important: when your focus is on imitation, the person of the poet is less important to the poetry, or it is important in a very different way. If you focus on imitation, the poet is a craftsman, a mirror maker. But when you add the concept of invention, you take a turn toward valuing the person of the mirror maker. “Invention” takes us beyond following the rules laid down of old for making things. And this is why we begin to see our own ideas of what a poet is or what a poem is taking root at this time in history.

POETRY AS RHETORIC

In the Renaissance, the world was universally believed to have been created and ordered by God. The best imitation of nature must therefore reflect and reveal this order. But while nature often seems disordered, the orderliness of a poem is always visible. Poetry therefore raises to the mind the true order of nature. If we can’t see that order when we look at the storm-shaken, disease-ridden, civil-warring world around us, we can’t help but see it in the carefully wrought poem.

As I said above, poetry at the time had a moral purpose. Although poetry was moving from the realm of craft to that of the newly conceptualized realm of art, it was still classified in the 1500s and 1600s as a branch of rhetoric. That is to say, it had the job of revealing the truth (of nature) to the reader or listener. Because it appealed to the emotions as well as to reason, and because it reflected in its structure the true order of nature, it could be more effective than reason alone.

At the same time, it could also be dangerous, because it made lies more appealing.

WHO WROTE POETRY? HOW DID IT CIRCULATE?

Gentlemen of the age considered the ability to write poetry one mark of a true gentleman. These were also the class of people who had the best education. It’s not surprising then that the wealthiest people of the time were among the greatest poets. Many also considered it a public duty or as an enhancement to their reputation and power to produce poetry. Although this is the first moment in Western culture when it became possible to make money by writing and selling poetry, much of the best poetry of the 1500s was truly amateur. A gentleman would not do anything so vulgar as to accept money for doing his duty. Much of it was meant to be read among friends—other members of the upper class. Very little of this amateur poetry was meant for publication.

This does not mean that poetry was not taken seriously. It is a sign of the new prestige of art that poetry was too important, in these days before writing become an honorable profession, to enmesh oneself or one’s art in the messy business of sales. It’s true that booksellers sold collections of poems and made money from these sales. But no significant portion of this revenue ever found its way to the poet. There was no controversy here among the amateurs of poetry. Sir Walter Ralegh, Henry Howard (the Earl of Surrey), and Thomas Campion were among the most polished representatives of this amateur poetry of the late 1500s. So was Queen Elizabeth I, a rare example of an accomplished woman poet from the time.

But these amateurs were not the only poets of the era. At the same time young men of talent and means could make a name for themselves in the writing of poetry, but not by selling books of poems, at least not directly by the sale of books. Artists of all types made their living in the Renaissance through patronage. Since all noblemen were under an obligation to advance the public good, and since they all had an interest in advancing their own reputations, these same noblemen paid poets and other artists to create works. If you were a poet in England at the time of Shakespeare and you wanted to make a living, you wrote a book of poetry, dedicated it to some nobleman or other, delivered it to a bookseller for publication, and hoped the nobleman to whom you dedicated it approved of your poems and sent you some coin. Better yet, you hoped a patron would pay you to write poetry on the condition that you would dedicate your productions to him. His position in society was enhanced by the number of books written in his honor—which is, of course why he was willing to pay for them. The best patron, of course, was the king or queen.

It is a tidy system when it works. Poets get paid; gentlemen get praised, and readers get often astonishing poetry to read. But it has its drawbacks as well. For one thing it limited what a poet might dare to say. There were, of course, plenty of laws already in existence to do this. There was certainly nothing like the first amendment guarantee of free speech available to protect poets at the time. One would have to support one’s patron, and stay in his good graces; one would have to be the spokesman for his political causes and positions. One would have to have an ear to the troublesome and tenuous political machinations always under way. It helped to be strongly patriotic. The result is that literature tended to be a conservative force. Critical writing was apt to get the writer punished (a drawback but perhaps also a reason for conceiving of writers as authors and giving them names). Only people of independent means could afford to be critical, and they could afford to be so only within certain limits. No matter how rich you might be, you could be put to death for writing a poem in Renaissance England.

In addition to noblemen and the patronized deputies of noblemen, ministers of the Church of England were also common writers of poems. In some cases, as in that of John Donne, a poet who had lost his patronage by offending his patron, became a minister in order to have an income while he was writing his poetry. Others, like George Herbert, forsook the idleness of the court for the ministry and from that position of relative ease wrote poetry.

It wasn’t until the Early 18^th century, (with the 1709 passage of “The Statute of Anne”) that there was the beginning of true copyright law in England. And even then, the Statute of Anne was a weak law, designed more to benefit booksellers than authors. Although copyright was granted in the name of an author, the author sold his work to a printer for a one-time fee and thereafter received no more profit from sales. Before the statute, printers (there was no distinction between bookseller and printer at the time) would sometimes get ahold of the poems of famous lords or even ministers or playwrights and print them without permission. Shakespeare’s sonnets were originally published this way.

WHAT DID POETS WRITE ABOUT? WHAT DID POETRY DO?

As I mentioned above, because it was powerful, poetry could be dangerous when misused. In fact, not surprisingly, not all poets wrote at all times with the idea of spreading the truth about nature or promoting the public good. Poetry in fact was used in all sorts of ways.

Of course there was love poetry. There will probably be love poetry as long as there is love. This is the era Petrarchan poetry, including the Petrarchan sonnet we looked at in an earlier chapter. This love poetry was often directed at a specific woman as an attempt to win her heart. But there was also seduction poetry. Poetry may be used to win a woman’s heart, or just to lie her into bed. Andrew Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress,” and John Donne’s “The Flea” are among the most famous examples of seduction poems ever written.

Poetry among the nobility was often private. It therefore functioned like letters or like social media posts. Thomas Wyatt complains about how nasty the court of Henry VIII is (“Mine Own John Poins”) or about his unfaithful mistress, Anne Boleyn (“They Flee from Me”). Sir Walter Ralegh complains that his secret girlfriend, Queen Elizabeth I, doesn’t love him anymore (“Fortune Hath Taken My Love Away from Me”). Queen Elizabeth writes back to tell him he’s being foolish (“Ah, Sillly Pug”). She then writes a poem threatening to behead anyone who dares attempt a coup (“The Doubt of Future Foes”).

It is no surprise that there was a lot of religious poetry at the time, some of which was the basis for hymns that are still sung in some churches today. Poems were written to praise or worship God just as they had been in the Middle Ages. Poems were also written to explain Christian doctrine, whether by Anglicans like George Herbert, Puritans like Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, or Catholics like Richard Crashaw. Poems were entered into the great religious struggles of the time. Unlike today, in the sixteenth century it was not only not surprising that people waged their political and religious struggles in poetry, it was expected.

Poetry has always been memorial (it literally helps us remember things) and has always conferred immortality in events and people. But in the Renaissance the idea of conferring immortality because an important subject of poetry. It’s no longer just something it does, but is something it talks about. And unlike the immorality of the past, which was granted mainly to real and mythic heroes, poetry now also conferred immortality on lovers, patrons, and the poets themselves.

Because poetry was so powerful and therefore so dangerous, it had its powerful detractors. In one of the most famous essays of the era, Philip Sidney composes a long, pose response to these critics. He concludes his “Defence of Poesie” with a curse for those who do not approve of the art: “while you live, you live in love, and never get favor, for lacking skill of a sonnet, and when you die, [may] your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.” (If you don’t like poetry, may you never find a lover because you don’t know how to write a love poem. And when you die may your memory fade from the world because you don’t have a verse on your tombstone.)

WHAT SORT OF POEMS WERE WRITTEN?

Most of the poetry we’ve studied so far has been lyric poetry, poetry that comes from the point of view of the poet and tells what she or he is thinking or feeling. It was in the Renaissance that lyric poetry started its ascendency on the ladder of prestige that would culminate in the nineteenth century with the works of the Romantic poets. In importance, at this point, lyric poetry, however, remained below narrative poetry. Poems typically told stories. Poems like Shakespeare’s “The Rape of Lucretia” or Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander,” are what come to mind first when people of this era think of serious poetry. Even plays at the time were most often written wholly or in part in verse. Plays were really long poems acted in front of an audience.

This was, as we saw already, also the age of the sonnet. Sonnets can be both lyrical and narrative. If you take any one of Shakespeare’s sonnets by itself, you will have a strong lyrical poem. But if you put them all together, you get a story about a poet and his friend and his mysterious dark mistress.

AND SO…

The Early Modern period is a particularly important period in the development of English language poetry. It marks a transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, the movement from craft to art and from writer as craftsman to writer as artist. We can trace the development in themes and in forms that started at this time throughout the subsequent history. And this will lead us to a deeper understanding of what poetry is today and of how it got to be that way.

A Few Words about John Milton

We can’t leave this chapter without saying a few words about the poet who for centuries was viewed as the greatest, certainly the most formidable poet, in the language, the writer second only to Shakespeare. John Milton brought together religion and politics and enormous learning and was among the first people of England to devote the major work of his life to poetry. His major work, the epic Paradise Lost, is too formidable itself to get more than a mention here. It retells the biblical story of the creation of the world, the Garden of Eden, and the Fall of Adam and Even in the form of a classical epic. It is a suitable poem for looking back at the faith-driven authority of the previous ages and ahead to the classically obsessed poetry of the times that would follow. Although we cannot study such a massive and intimidating work here (the poem so intimidated the poets of the following two centuries that they seemed often almost paralyzed to write for fear their work would be compared to his), we hope that at some point you’ll be moved to read it. But mostly, we think it would be too big an omission to the history of poetry for us not to at least let you know it’s out there.

 

1 At that time, with the start of what is known as “Romanticism,” “imitation” will take a back seat to “expression.” Keep your eyes open for that.

2 The earliest known example of the word “invention” used this way dates from the early 1500s, no more than 50 years before the birth of Shakespeare (Spearing, A. C., Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry, 1985, p. 167).

3 This is not to say that there was no real invention happening in the Middle Ages. There was. But in that time writers and artisans did not care or think much if at all about being original.

4 The earliest reference cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (plagiary) is from 1598.

Video Lecture: The Renaissance and After

Some Poems: 

Thomas Wyatt, “Mine Own John Poins” (Links to an external site.)

Henry Howard, “Wyatt Resteth Here” (Links to an external site.)

Queen Elizabeth I, “The Doubt of Future Foes” (Links to an external site.)

Sir Walter Ralegh, “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage” (Links to an external site.)

“Fortune Hath Taken Thee Away, My Love” (Links to an external site.)

Anne Askew  “The Ballad Which Anne Askewe made and Sang When She Was in Newgate,” (Links to an external site.)

Thomas Campion, “There Is a Garden in Her Face” (Links to an external site.)

John Donne, “The Flea” (Links to an external site.)

Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (Links to an external site.)

George Herbert, “The Altar” (Links to an external site.)

John Milton, Sonnet 19

Anne Bradstreet, “Upon the Burning of our House July 10^th, 1666” (Links to an external site.)

Edward Taylor, “Huswifery”

 

 

 

 

 

Lecture #13: Eighteenth-Century Poetry: The Age of Reason

 

The period that coincides roughly with the Eighteenth century is known by various names: The Enlightenment, The Neo-Classical (or Augustan) Age, and The Age of Reason. Advancing the project of the Renaissance, it was a time that yearned to use logic or reason to raise history out of the darkness of superstition and establish a verifiable knowledge of the world. It is the age of the philosophy of John Locke and the science of Isaac Newton. As we will see however, we will need to understand more than reason to understand the poetry of the era.

 

1. The Rise of Reason

 

Commenting on one of his poems to the young woman who inspired it, Alexander Pope—the premier English poet of the eighteenth century—wrote: “I know how disagreeable it is to make use of hard words before a lady; but ’tis so much the concern of a poet to have his works understood, and particularly by your sex, that you must give me leave to explain two or three difficult terms” (italics added).

 

Once again, we see here how important it is for the poet that his poem not be “open for interpretation.” He’s afraid the lady might not understand his great work properly. And this worries him. So he will condescend to give her the means by which she can better understand what is going on in the poem. This is not at all surprising in the Enlightenment, which was officially sexist and, more importantly for our concerns, devoted to the idea that reason is the primary means though which humanity will lead itself out of error and into truth. If we lived in this era, we’d expect to reason not only about poems but also in poems.

 

This is perhaps the biggest change in poetry from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Poetry was still thought of as elevated language. You could still do all the things in poetry you could do in any kind of language. And there were still love poems, and lyric poems, and narrative poems. Poetry was still thought of as a moral force (or, if misused, as an immoral force). And poets were still thought of as artists—in fact, being an artist was an even bigger deal in the eighteenth century than it had been in the previous two centuries. And poetry was still expected to “imitate nature.” But in the eighteenth century, poetry became more aligned with the humanist project of understanding nature (including human nature) through reason than it ever had been before. It came to be believed in the eighteenth century that nature was best understood through reason, so poetry became more closely aligned to reason.

 

That does not mean that all poems were conceived of as making logical arguments bent on establishing objective truth through reason. As we’ll see below, both sentimental poetry and satire also rose to high prominence at the time, and neither of these makes a direct appeal to reason. But among the most characteristic poetry of the age was the essay poem. Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism,” and “An Essay on Man,” are the two most important examples. In these poems England’s premier poet gave us first an explanation in heroic couplets of what poetry is and how it works, and a philosophical work aimed at “vindicat[ing] the ways of God to man.” In “An Essay on Man,” Pope translates the work of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz into verse.  

 

 

2. Delight, Satire, and the Limits of Reason

 

Reason grew to be more central to poetry than it had ever been. But, as noted above, that was not the whole story. There was then, as always, a debate about the nature and proper use of poetry. The two main poles of the eighteenth-century debate can be characterized by the two words “teach” and “delight.” The question was whether poetry should primarily teach us about the world or give us pleasure. All writers admitted both were important, but which one should be subordinated to the other?  What was the principle end, or purpose, of poetry?

 

Pope’s predecessor John Dryden tried to work out the relationship between teaching and pleasure this way: “Delight is the chief, if not the only end of poetry; instruction can be admitted but in the second place; for poesy only instructs as it delights.” Notice that he is struggling to maintain his preference for pleasure. He starts off by putting all the emphasis on “delight,” but immediately retreats and adds “instruction” and then seems to suggest that “delight” is important because it is necessary for instruction—which suggests that maybe teaching is more important after all.

 

As noted, the two other types of poetry most characteristic of the age are satire and sentimental poetry. Satire is an ancient form of rhetoric that pokes fun at folly or vice with the moral purpose of correcting the error. The problem with folly (accepting things that are not true) and vice (acting in ways that are against one’s own best interests) is that they are unreasonable. Satire however aims at revealing the error of folly and vice not by reason but by mockery.

 

The most famous satire of the age is certainly Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock.” It is a long narrative poem which makes fun of a young woman’s anger at having a lock of her hair cut off by a suitor who is enraged because she has beat him in a card game. Elevating the cutting of a lock of hair to the status of rape and presenting rape in terms of an epic military battle, the poem says, essentially, “aren’t you being irrational to throw away your future wealth and happiness for a lock of hair?”

 

Although satire uses hyperbole and mockery to make its point, the point is still to help the object of the satire laugh herself back onto the path of reason.[†††]

 

The third type of poem that arose and became associated with the age is sentimental verse. Unlike satire, sentimental verse takes us entirely outside of reason. It was not anything Alexander Pope would have written. This, at first glance, may make it seem like an anomaly. Sentimental poetry does not draw on reason but on feeling alone and attempts to wring out of inherently emotional subjects (like pets and babies and motherhood) as much feeling as can be wrung—always more even than the subject rightly calls for. This marks a change from the poetry of previous times. It also becomes of the most roundly rejected aspects of the time by the centuries following the Enlightenment.

 

Whereas for example seventeenth century puritan poetry such as Edward Taylor’s “Upon Marriage and the Death of Children,” attempted to find consolation in the death of children, eighteenth century poetry is more likely to wring the greatest number of tears from the death of a  not merely a child, but even a pet, as in William Cowper’s “Epitaph on a Hare,” or even a field mouse, as in Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse,” which is subtitled “On turning up her nest with the plough, November 1783” and contains such sentiments as:

 

Thou saw the fields laid bare and waste,

And weary Winter comin’ fast,

And cozy here, beneath the blast,

          Thou thought to dwell,

Till crash! the cruel coulter* passed                *plough

          Out through thy cell.

 

That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble

Has cost thee many a weary nibble!

Now thou’s turn’d out, for all thy trouble,

          Both house or hold,

To thole* the Winter’s sleety dribble,           *endure

          An’ cranreuch* cold!                           *frosty

 

A poor, innocent, little mouse has had his home wrecked by the massive, indifferent machinery of a farmer’s plough!

 

After the eighteenth century, sentimental poetry was universally rejected by serious poets because of its cheap effects and it attempt to draw strong emotional reactions from trivial events that do not deserve them. But it’s easy to see how “the Age of Reason” would come to value this type of poem. Reason at the time attempted to divide experience up into the most distinct units possible. In keeping with this, some poets, understanding that human nature includes both reason and feeling attempted to isolate feeling and perfect poetry that appealed only to that part of our being, with no sense of reason at all. Reason cuts up and compartmentalizes reality. Poetry follows suit.

 

3. Poetry of Social Conscience

 

Poetry had more to do in the century however than producing arguments and tears or raising or rescuing individuals from vice and folly. It was assumed at the time that poetry had an effect on the whole of society. It could be used to both conservative and liberal ends. And poets on both sides of the political spectrum did use poetry to advance their political ideologies. And they did so more actively than they had done in previous times and more successfully than they would manage in subsequent times. On the one side, for example, you have conservative verse like this from Dryden:

 

after hearing what our Church can say,

If still our Reason runs another way,

That private Reason ’tis more Just to curb,

Than by Disputes the publick Peace disturb.

 

Here Dryden admits that we as individuals may disagree with the church. But, for the sake of peace (not truth or conscience) we should accept what the church teaches and reject our own thought. Although the stated goal is peace, not truth, the sentiment is not unreasonable. “Private” reason is suspect because it is private. Individuals are very likely to reason badly. The opinion of the many (i.e. the public) therefore reasonably outweighs the opinion of the few.

 

On the liberal side, we have the poetry of social conscience. It is where private reason is made public and therefore can be defended. We should note that “social conscience” is, of course, not confined to poetry. The important thing that it was prominent in poetry as in other forms of writing. The poetry of social conscience is activist, more activist than satire. Satire aims to change the individual, but socially conscious poetry aims to change the world. According to one critic,

 

A social conscience, propagated through poems, periodicals, novels, sermons, and philosophy, bore fruit in the works of welfare—the foundation of charity schools, of dispensaries providing medicine for the poor, and of bodies like the Marine Society.... and the Royal Humane Society… 

 

In fact poetry has always had a sense that part of its job was to do something in the world. Poets such as the American Carolyn Forché think this way even today. As noted, such poetry came to greater prominence in the eighteenth century and probably had the strongest effect it has ever had both because its activist tendencies were felt to be proper to it and because it was so widely read. It was an active part of the larger political conversation.

 

Among the best socially conscious poetry of the time was that of Phillis Wheatley, an African slave living in Boston. In poems like “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and “His Excellency General Washington,” she promoted the dignity of African people and created and enhanced public sentiment in favor of the American Revolution (which was acknowledged by no less a figure than Washington himself).

 

4. How Poetry Circulated

 

Recall that in the Renaissance, poetry was supported by patronage. At the same time, and for the first time in the English-speaking world, it became possible to make money off the sale of printed books. Most of that money went to the printers and booksellers, though authors were often paid a fee for their work. By the end of the eighteenth century, the patronage system had come to an end. Starting in 1709, copyright law gave writers more control and rights over their work. It became increasingly possible for a poet or other writer to make a living as a writer and therefore no longer to depend upon a patron for survival. One way to do this was through the sale of written works just as is done to this day; another was through subscription. Established writers could make advance money from potential readers by having them pay in advance for a work. If the poet got enough advance money, he or she would write the poem. Great poets of significant reputation were very successful in selling their works this way.[‡‡‡]

 

Subscription become possible because literacy exploded in the eighteenth century. This led to a huge increase in the publishing industry. Everyone was reading, and the industry did its best to supply the readers with books. Although poets and other writers were eager to teach and to enforce faith and morality, most readers were reading for mainly for entertainment or pleasure. And what they were reading was, increasingly, novels and other prose works. But the average reader was far more likely also to be reading poetry, the most prestigious of the language arts, than is the case today.

 

 

 

Lecture #14: Romanticism

 

A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to the works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.

                                                            —S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV

 

Poetry is the most important thing in the universe. It is the voice of the universe—the voice of God. Poems are the translation of that voice into words. God does not speak in words. But God is always speaking. God speaks in all things at all times for all people. But only some people can hear him. Those people are poets—or more broadly artists. The job of the poet is therefore to translate God’s voice into words for those of us (the vast majority) who can’t hear it.

 

This is pretty much what you believe if you are a Romantic poet. You are special. You have a gift that sets you above ordinary people, the gift of perceiving and then transferring the voice of God (but Romantics prefer the word “Nature”) in the natural world as well as the gift of translating that sound so we ordinary people can have a sense of it.  

 

How do you know you’re “hearing” the voice of the divine? You know it from the pleasure it gives you. As the Romantic poet Wordsworth says this:

 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 

The earth, and every common sight, 

To me did seem 

Appareled in celestial light, 

The glory and the freshness of a dream. 

 

God speaks in and through Nature. We are part of Nature. But unless we are a poet we get only a dim sense of the divine voice. The poet gets a strong sense, puts what he hears (“feels” becomes “hears” in the translation of the poet), and amplifies our response by writing a poem that we read with pleasure and recognition.

 

This idea will be presented in many images this week in the poems we’ll read.

 

First a warning: In the sense we are using it, the word “Romantic” has nothing to do with love. It does not suggest hearts and flowers and boxes of chocolates and evenings around the fireplace with champagne. You have to forget all that. Applied to poetry—and to art and to all the creative and philosophical productions of the late 18^th and most of the 19^th centuries—known as the “Romantic Era”—it has no specific association with love. It is associated with feeling or emotion, in particular with the feelings and emotions you experience in response to the universe (which is to say “nature”) or to art, but not what we call romantic love.

 

“Romantic” signifies a movement from a primary trust in reason (of the Age of Enlightenment) to a primary trust in feeling as a path to truth.

 

Romance and Science: Scientific knowledge is perfectly valid. Science can prove certain things to be true. But its focus is on physical reality. It can determine the speed of light and the rate of global warming. But it can’t say much about the deepest truths about God and Nature.

 

At the same time, science, even when saying things true, can draw us away from what matters. Romantic poet John Keats famously wrote this (using the word “philosophy” as a synonym for “science”):

 

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine
Unweave a rainbow. 

 

Subjecting nature to scientific enquiry will lead to clipping the wings of angels and unweaving the rainbow, something he accuses Isaac Newton of having done with his prism. Science takes the divine out of Nature.

 

Art as expression: Recall that from the medieval times on poetry has been thought of as “imitation.” A poet’s job has been to observe “reality” and translate what he or she sees into words. That changes in the Romantic era. Art now takes decisive term away from the notion of “imitation” in favor of “expression.” Artists don’t record what they “see” but what they feel—or how what they see makes them feel. This is what Coleridge means when he writes of poetry giving us “pleasure.” Art is no longer aimed at copying “Nature” (which in the previous century Pope had called “the source, and end [i.e. purpose], and test of art.” Now it is mainly about funneling emotions.

 

We need to be careful here. These are not just any emotions. These are the true emotions, felt most deeply by a poet, that connect us to the same sort of truth about the world that previous ages sought to convey by imitating Nature. The idea of poetry as the conductor of truth has not changed. All that has changed is the path to that truth.

 

Romanticism will help us tackle a persistent prejudice about language: the idea that it is by its nature directed primarily at the part of us that thinks: that speaking equals saying something, that words are all about meaning. The language of the mind—which is the focus of 18^th-century language, even 18^th-century poetic language—is not the highest manifestation of language as far as the Romantics are concerned. They are concerned with the language that could be directed toward what they called the sensibilities, that is, the part of us that responds emotionally to the essence of being, the spiritual part of us that experiences the sublime and the beautiful: whether that is in a sunset, or a cloud formation, or mountain, or a poem.

 

This is the language of feeling not of thinking.

 

You can see that poetry at this point in history starts to become more like the thing you probably always thought it was at the start of the term.

 

Poetry as experience: The Romantics make the definitive turn in poetry that persists to this day. Poetry has always been about using the non-semantic aspects of language (the parts that are not directly about meaning—rhythm and sound). But before the Romantic era, these were used mainly in the service of meaning. Readers therefore had been invited to have an experience in conjunction with and as an enhancement of an understanding. The kind of meaning you could put into non-poetic words was always primary. Poetry was praised for its ability to make truth memorable. Pleasure was praised for making truth appealing—so you’d want to read a poem over and over, the way you want to listen to a song over and over today. Now, instead, pleasure is the truth, or the marker of the truth. We experience “Nature” or the divine through poetry, and we know that’s what we are doing because reading the poem gives us pleasure.

 

In the Romantic era, meaning and experience become equal, sometimes indistinguishable. Meaning, when it can be distinguished, is subordinated to experience. Poetry will reach a spiritual peak, will carry us out of the world of not only the conscious mind (deliberate thought) but out of the world of the senses as well. Or at least it will do its best to do so. It will transport us into the world of pure mind, pure feeling. To put it very simply: it will lead us to God, or rather to the world in which God lives. The idea of poetry will now be closer to the idea of music than to the idea of philosophy.

 

Poetry v. Poems. The major poets of the Romantic period reinforce the long-standing distinction between poetry and verse, or poetry and poems. Not all poems succeed; and while some fail better than others, the greatest number fail utterly. The latter may be called poems but they are not poetry. They have no poetry in them.

 

At the same time, at its best, prose may succeed where poems fail. If so, that prose which succeeds where most poems fail is in fact poetry. Coleridge, who was a philosopher as well as a poet, tells us, “poetry of the highest kind may exist without meter, and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem” (Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV); his friend William Wordsworth explains, “not only the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the meter, in no respect differ from that of good prose,” (“Preface to Lyrical Ballads).

 

Another one of Coleridge’s definitions of poetry is among the most simple of all: the best words in the best order.

 

Lyrical Ballads: In 1798 the two men just quoted, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published a volume of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads. At the time, the book did not make a huge splash in the English literary market place. Since then it has come to be seen as a watershed moment in the history of English poetry: the defining moment when the Age of Reason ended and the Romantic Age began.

 

History, of course, does not move like that. Ages—to the extent that they ever exist as such at all—don’t end on any given Monday or with the publication of a single book. But looking back over the history of poetry, it’s clear that something has happened at the dawn of the 19^th century that alters fundamentally and, it seems, permanently our understanding of poetry. The fundamental attitude toward poetry has changed so much that what passed as the highest poetic expression in the 18^th century, something like Pope’s Essay on Man, would seem to miss the point if it were published in the 19^th. We can see the difference in the subject matter of poetry, the theory of poetry (how people talk about poetry, what it is, where it comes from, what its job is in the world), and in the composition of poems.

 

From Craft to Art. To take the middle one first, we’ve not only made the move from intellectual to emotional truth, but we’ve made the decisive turn from craft to art.  

 

This is a point we’ve seen before. Recall that the question of craft v. art first comes up in the Renaissance, when poets were first given names. That was when the notion of “artist” began to rise and “craftsman” began to all.

 

In the Enlightenment, Alexander Pope can confidently say that “True ease in writing comes from Art not Chance,” but at the same time tells poets (and anyone who wants to appreciate poetry) that the first step is to understand the ancient rules by studying the works of the Classic Greek and Roman writers.  “Those rules [of poetry] of old, discovered, not devised, are Nature still [always] but Nature methodized.”   

 

In the Romantic era, finally, the notion of craftsman slipped away almost completely from poetic thinking (though not from practice).  Keats will famously say, Wordsworth responds to Pope-ish thinking by saying, “If poetry come not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” And Wordsworth will add:

 

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife: 

Come, hear the woodland linnet, 

How sweet his music! on my life, 

There's more of wisdom in it. 

 

If you are a poet it is because you are born a poet. You see the world as a poet sees the world. You experience the world through a poet’s eyes, even if you never write an actual poem. In practice, craft remains important (no one studied poetry more arduously than Keats did). But in thinking about poetry, it loses most of its importance.

 

The Poetic Imagination. Poetry comes from a deep source outside the poet, a source which is everywhere but which is not available to all people equally. The poet—a person of special genius—is, like a psychic medium, acutely aware of what the rest of us only dimly see about the true (in Romantic vocabulary the “sublime”) nature of things. The power the poet has in greater abundance than other people is in the imagination and the manifestation of the sublime is in the feelings.

 

In this era what is known as “nature poetry” reaches its highest expression. The poet uses his extraordinary imagination to perceive the sublime power of (or “in”) nature, which he or she drinks into his or her mind and passes back out in his life and in his poetry for the rest of us to experience.

 

The most common image for this process in Romantic poetry is that of the aeolian harp.

 

An aeolian harp is a stringed musical instrument that operates like a wind chime. When you place it in a window casement the wind plays the strings. Similarly, a poet, outdoors among trees and streams, feels in his mind the voice of Nature.

 

The writer of genius has the job of reconnecting the benighted people of this world with the essential and ideal world of nature that is invisible but all around them.[§§§] (In one of his best-known poems, Wordsworth recalls an ancient myth to suggest that this invisible world is the world from which we all came, which we left at birth: “Birth” he says, “is but a sleep and a forgetting”). The poet reveals to us or recalls us to that world. The Romantic poet is the “man of genius”; the Enlightenment poet would be the man of talent.

 

Coleridge distinguishes between genius and talent by saying that genius has the power “to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental no less than of bodily, convalescence” (Biographia Literaria Chap. IV).

                                                                               

Coleridge

The power of genius is the strength of his or her imagination. “Imagination” is a fundamental word in the Romantic vocabulary. Like the word “Romantic” which, in this context, is not to be associated in any way with “love,” the word “imagination” is not to be associated with the ability to envision fairies and elves. It does not mean for the Romantics exactly what it means in common conversation today. 

 

What is the imagination? It is a transcendent power we all have (though we don’t all make full use of it and we don’t all have the same amount of it); it is akin to but beyond all the physical senses and beyond all reason as well. It is the power by which truths are understood intuitively.

The imagination is the power that connects us not just with what is around us in the physical world but also with the invisible world. It is the thing within us that tells us what possess the quality of beauty or sublimity. It is the quality, in other words, that perceives in beautiful or sublime things the connection they have to the essential things. If there were angels walking among it, it would be the power we all have to sense that this is so, and the power by which a rare and gifted person (a poet) could tell on sight which were the angels and which the mere humans. This is because—whether primary or secondary—the poet’s imagination is beyond that of ordinary observers. 

We ordinary people don’t really have imagination. What we have is “fancy.”[****] We can arrange the things we know and experience with our senses. But we can’t get at the higher things of the imagination—unless a poet helps us.

 

Poetry as Knowledge. In Romantic thinking, poets are individuals whose powers of synthesis are the highest. Poetry is not just a means of expression but a form of knowledge—and a form not merely equally valid (with science) but superior to science. Prophecy is an attribute of poetry. In the Renaissance, Philip Sidney had shown that poetry was considered prophetic by the Romans, but had never made the claim that prophecy was a species of poetry.

 

It is interesting to note that as the power and prestige of poetry are beginning to wane in the larger culture in the Romantic era (even as literacy and education in general rise and readers find novels and newspapers more to their liking) the claims for poetry become more inflated. In previous centuries poets and critics thought of poetry as an effect of thinking—putting thought into works. In the Romantic era poet Percy Shelley thought of poetry as thinking itself, the expression of the imagination. Sidney (back in the Renaissance) saw poetry as having a kind of propaganda value; Shelley sees poetry as the best lens to the most profound truth. The truth of poetry is truth itself.

 

Poetic form in the Romantic Era. For Romantic poets then this process of imaginative response to being becomes the most significant subject matter of their poems. Romantic poets would not think of putting a philosophical essay on man (as Pope does) into the form of poetry. Nor are they attracted to the heroic couplet, a mechanical verse form that requires nothing more than meticulous study of poetic figures and verbal effects. As we’ve seen, Romantic poets perceived poetry as coming organically to them from the world outside. Although it took a while, eventually Romantic poetry broke profoundly with traditional poetic forms. This is where the Americans enter the picture.  

 

AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

 

Every poet mentioned so far has been an English poet of the early 19^th Century. These were the poets who established the theory and practice of Romantic poetry in English. But they were read and studied by American poets. American Romanticism flowered a few decades later than English Romanticism. It is associated with poets such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose essays on nature and other Romantic subjects, along with his poetry, influenced the great American poets). Whitman and Dickinson added to Romantic thinking innovative poetics and verse forms.

 

We’ve already seen several examples of Whitman’s long, unmetered lines. His poetic forms seem to expand organically. He is a creator of verse so original that William Dean Howells, a prominent literary critic of the time who was impressed by Whitman’s writing, could not bring himself to call what he wrote poems at all.

 

Dickinson, another poet we’ve often read, wrote in short stanzas based on the ballad quatrain. But her strange pauses (marked by long dashes) and aversion to true rhyme were no less innovative than Whitman’s lines.

Both poets explored Romantic ideas, which we can notice and discuss in this week’s discussion. But their greatest contribution to Romanticism may be their innovative poetics. 

 

Lecture #15: 20^Th Century Poetry

 

Probably the easiest truism to make about the poetry of the early twentieth century, a time known by the name Modernism, is that it was boldly experimental. It was more experimental with regard to form and subject than poetry had been in any period in its English-language history. (The only time to rival it occurred in the late middle ages, when syllabic, alliterative verse gave way to meter and rhyme.) In the Modernist period, long-standing conventions of meter and rhyme were swept away, with nothing as definite as syllable or meter to determine the length of a line, and no definite pattern of sound. One of the most prominent and influential poets of the era, the American Ezra Pound, stated at one point that it was his task to “break the back of the iamb”—which, as you learned several weeks to, had been the most prominent feature of poetry since the time of Chaucer.

 

 

 

 

Pound and the Modernists had great success in freeing poetry from the straight jacket of meter. Although traditional forms and meters did not disappear, they no longer dominated poetry. It was a time when it seemed that almost anything was possible. Poems varied from the astonishingly simple verse written by William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Amy Lowell, to the highly allusive, imbricated verse of Pound and T.S. Eliot. Consider the following two examples, the first by Amy Lowell:

Autumn

 

All day I have watched the purple vine leaves

Fall into the water.

And now in the moonlight they still fall,

But each leaf is fringed with silver.

 

 

You’ve read several poems like this one. It may remind you of “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

This next one is by T.S. Eliot.

 

 

 

A Cooking Egg

    En l'an trentiesme de mon age

     Que toutes mes hontes j'ay beues ...

 

Pipit sate upright in her chair

Some distance from where I was sitting;

Views of the Oxford Colleges

Lay on the table, with the knitting.

 

Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,

Her grandfather and great great aunts,

Supported on the mantelpiece

An Invitation to the Dance.

 

. . . . .

 

I shall not want Honour in Heaven

For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney

And have talk with Coriolanus

And other heroes of that kidney.

 

I shall not want Capital in Heaven

For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond:

We two shall lie together, lapt

In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.

 

I shall not want Society in Heaven,

Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;

Her anecdotes will be more amusing

Than Pipit's experience could provide.

 

I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:

Madame Blavatsky will instruct me

In the Seven Sacred Trances;

Piccarda de Donati will conduct me.

 

. . . . .

 

But where is the penny world I bought

To eat with Pipit behind the screen?

The red-eyed scavengers are creeping

From Kentish Town and Golder's Green;

 

Where are the eagles and the trumpets?

 

Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.

Over buttered scones and crumpets

Weeping, weeping multitudes

Droop in a hundred A.B.C.'s

We haven’t read much poetry like this. Could you follow it ? Did you give up before you got to the end ? We wouldn’t blame you.

“Autumn” is about as simple as a poem can get. On the other hand, “A Cooking Egg” leaves you adrift. “Autumn” provides a single image, but says nothing about that image. It leaves you to see in that image what you find appropriate (knowing that you will associate “autumn” with the approaching end of things). “A Cooking Egg,” tells you to work hard and to recognize and translate medieval French (without the help of the internet), and to figure out how the old French poem applies to his. Eliot’s poem leaves readers thinking they’ve missed something. It may be that a lot of poems have left you feeling that way, but for the first time that idea seems to be built into the poem itself.

Having read much of this Modernist poetry, the critic C. S. Lewis, had this to say:

To say that all new poetry was once as difficult as ours is false; to say that any was is an equivocation. Some earlier poetry was difficult, but not in the same way. Alexandrian poetry was difficult because it presupposed a learned reader; as you became learned you found the answers to the puzzles. Skaldic poetry was unintelligible if you did not know the kenningar, but intelligible if you did. And—this is the real point—all Alexandrian men of letters and all skalds would have agreed about the answers. I believe the same to be true of the dark conceits in Donne; there was one correct interpretation of each and Donne could have told it to you. Of course you might misunderstand what Wordsworth was "up to" in Lyrical Ballads; but everyone understood what he said. I do not see in any of these the slightest parallel to the state of affairs disclosed by a recent symposium on Mr. Eliot's [A] Cooking Egg. Here we find seven adults (two of them Cambridge men) whose lives have been specially devoted to the study of poetry discussing a very short poem which has been before the world for thirty-odd years; and there is not the slightest agreement among them as to what, in any sense of the word, it means. (“De Descriptione Temporum”)

Lewis laments that poems no longer convey a single, agreed-upon meaning to all readers. If twentieth- and twenty-first-century students in the English speaking world are quick to take the stand that a poem means whatever the reader thinks it means (a statement that would not have occurred to a living soul between Adam and about 1920), we probably have the Modernists to thank for it. Although there’s no evidence I know of to suggest that Modernists anticipated that state of affairs in which readers confronted with the difficulty of the text simply gave up and declared “It means whatever I want it to mean,”[††††] they perhaps unwittingly invited their readers to do so. The fact is that much of this poetry assumes a reader as adept in poetry and, in fact, in all of literature as the authors were themselves—and sometimes adept in other things as well (Ezra Pound now and then included Chinese characters in his poems even though he did not read or speak Chinese). Modernists often expected their readers to do the necessary research, to struggle through and find out what their writing was all about. (James Joyce, a writer of fiction, once suggested that to understand his work, a reader would have to devote his entire life to studying it.) These works do not imply the knowledge base or reading sophistication of the average 18-year old. And much of this poetry is too open or too associative in its logic to be easily restricted to any single, monolithic understanding.

Much of the literature of the time manifests a desire not to give up on reading but to change the way that we read. If you try to read Eliot’s poetry in the same way that you read Beowulf, Paradise Lost or Lyrical Ballads you will be frustrated. The hierarchy of value has been broken. In that hierarchy allusions support—are subject to—a singular, central meaning. In Modernist poetry, the element of meaning, while still absolutely present, is no longer king; it is limited, but no longer necessarily singular.

In fact, Modernist poetry takes advantage of an aspect of language which poetry would seem to have a natural affinity for: even the simplest, easiest-to-understand utterance is potentially infinite in its meaning—or in its ability to create and become involved with meaning. There’s nothing radical about that claim. For a word to be transferable from any one context to any other context it must be infinitely transferable. Most often actual uses of language—me talking to you, me writing this lecture to you, you talking on the phone to your mother, Shakespeare performing the ghost of Hamlet’s father—work very hard to limit the ways that the words can be taken. But this does not affect the fact that language is in itself illimitable. It is like liquid which must be precisely held in a solid container or it goes everywhere. The container will give it measurable shape. In itself it has no shape but will conform for the moment to whatever shape it finds itself in. Modernist poetry still gives language shape, but it tends to give it a looser shape, shapes that let more of its inherently shapelessness appear.

That’s not to say that all twentieth-century poetry or even all Modernist poetry is this way. In addition to Williams and Eliot and Pound, there is Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and William Butler Yeats—and of course many many others—who work in traditional forms. Eliot himself often rhymes, often writes in iambic pentameter. So does Williams and sometimes even Pound. There’s a lot of experiment going on in Modernist poetry; it involves every aspect of language. Early twentieth-century poetry is characterized more by this experimentation than by its frequent lack of meter or rhyme.

The period of Modernism, with its convolutions and confusions, gave way, inevitably, to a period of reaction. Beginning in the mid-century, a great number of poets came to believe that the work of T. S. Eliot and company was taking poetry away from its ancient base—which it was—denying it the ability to reach ordinary people, those who could not or did not wish to devote weeks, months, or lifetimes to reading a few esoteric lines. Among the best known groups of such poets were the Americans known as the “Beats,” the most prominent example of whom is Allen Ginsburg. Beat poets still wrote in open form, but created a poetry much simpler, much more steeped in immediate experience and emotional intensity that the cerebral poems of the Modernists ever aspired to be. Here, for example, are the first lines of Ginsberg’s famous poem, “Howl,” a poem that hops over the advances of Modernism and returns us to (and updates) the poetics of Walt Whitman:

                                                                   Howl

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind…

 

While not every poet of the mid- to late-twentieth century took Whitman as the model, the poetry of this Postmodern era generally became simpler, easier to read, while it retained the poetic movement away from traditional forms dominated by rhyme and meter. Indeed, during the sixties and seventies it would have been difficult to find a newly published poem that rhymed. At present poetry is doing nothing more profoundly than trying to figure out why it exists in a world in which more and more poetry is published by smaller and smaller presses for fewer and fewer readers, most of them academics, poets, or students. Poetry still has occasional high-profile moments, such as when Maya Angelou read a poem at Bill Clinton’s second inaugural, or when a celebration of poetry was abruptly cancelled at the White House for fear the invited poets would use the platform to protest America’s invasion of Iraq. But at present poetry in the English-speaking world, leads a mostly underground life. It is still everywhere, most people, most of the time, manage to ignore it. 

 

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[*] Here’s an example  

 

Just Be Yourself

 

Life is not a rocket race

Each must run at their own pace

All of us have lots to do.

But what matters when we’re through

Isn’t whether we have money

Or even whether we are funny

But how much love we get and give

Love is how we need to live.

Don’t sell your soul to gather wealth.

Just love your friends and be yourself.

[†] We’ve cut out about half the poem to make the point more obvious. If you want to read the whole poem, you can find it here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180204

 

[‡] The word that defines almost everything that is not a poem is “prose.” It’s an important word; you’ll need to remember it. What you are reading now is written in prose.

[§] We have already read two others that would also qualify this week: “Western Wind” and “Bonny Barbara Allen.”

 

[**] I want to emphasize here that men have this power by virtue of literacy and access to writing. This does not mean that men have all actual power in social or even political life. Queen Elizabeth was among the most powerful people in Europe at this time. But even apart form the Queen, women have never in reality been precisely what men have attempted to make them in their poems.

[††] At that time, with the start of what is known as “Romanticism,” “imitation” will take a back seat to “expression.” Keep your eyes open for that.

[‡‡] The earliest known example of the word “invention” used this way dates from the early 1500s, no more than 50 years before the birth of Shakespeare (Spearing 167).

[§§] This is not to say that there was no real invention happening in the Middle Ages. There was. But in that time writers and artisans did not care or think much if at all about being original.

[***] The earliest reference cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (plagiary) is from 1598.

[†††] It should be pointed out that the proper object of satire is not an individual but a type. The young woman of “The Rape of the Lock” properly represents not a specific young woman, but any young woman—or any person—whose vanity leads her to irrational actions.

[‡‡‡] This practice is the forerunner of a phenomenon happening today in the music industry, whose former model of recording and sales becomes less viable due to easy internet pirating, at such sites as Pledgemusic.com

[§§§] This “ideal world of nature” must be distinguished from the everyday, visible world of nature, that is from trees and rocks, streams and oceans, clouds and rainbows. These visible forms are images of the ideal and invisible world of nature, which exists on a higher plain of reality. It is this “higher plane” that the Romantic poets are ultimately aiming for.

 

[****] It’s useful however to note that other Romantic poets, such as Keats, use the word “fancy” differently than Coleridge does. Keats “fancy” is a synonym for “imagination.” So when he writes “the fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do,” he is referring to the highest power of power.

[††††] There were those, like Wallace Stevens, who said that poetry did not need to have a meaning. But that’s not the same as saying that poetry means whatever you want it to.