Coats, poetic and otherwise
My birthday tomorrow so I’ve been shopping and trying on coats. Why not! And because I’ve been doing so much cramming of my poetry-history books I can’t help thinking about poetic form and content – sorry. ‘Expression is the Dress of Thought’ opined Pope in his eighteenth-century Essay on Criticism (it’s a poem). And so it was considered – the form of your poem clad it in an appropriate dress of formal metre and vocabulary, in neither too much frippery nor inappropriate pace and weight of vocabulary. Then came Romanticism and the idea of organic development of both form and content. The two were interfused rather than one being clad tastefully and suitably in the other. This is still the generally received wisdom when it comes to poetic composition.
Poets at the turn of the century stuck out oddly if they disagreed: thus Thomas Hardy with his rather stiff architectural approach to writing poems: ‘Hardy’s poetry is the opposite of the organic and its corollaries of the unity of feeling and thought, manner and moment. His method instead was to work out verse skeletons, stanzaic patterns with an arbitrary substance that he would use later as a mould into which to pour his poetic content. An abbreviated note confirms that this is how he approached the topic from the start of his writing career:
Lyrical Method. Find a situation from experience. Turn into Lyrics for a form of expression that has been used for a quite different situation. Use it (same situation from experience may be sung in several forms.)’ (Peter Howarth’s observations).
Plenty of Hardy’s contemporaries found flaws in this method. But Modernism was all about breaking up assumptions and that included in some cases the organic concept of writing a poem – Paul Valery famously claimed that all poetic form is little more than an arbitrary choice. Auden disagreed : ‘If [formal restrictions] really were purely arbitrary, then …the experience which every poet has had, of being unable to get on with a poem because he[sic] was trying to use the ‘wrong’ form would be unknown’. Well this is true enough on many occasions. You’d be unlikely to succeed, for example, in writing a serious love poem if you were using the limerick form, with its jolly rhythm and limited length, and the traditional associations of bawdiness and brevity. However Auden himself has a particular reputation for finding out about abstruse forms and using them, surely more for purposes of poetic prowess than anything else – especially with such obscurities as the Old Norse Drottkvaett:
Hushed is the lake of hawks
Bright with our excitement
And all the sky of skulls
Glows with scarlet roses
This quote from Daniel Abright’s essay ‘Modernist Poetic Form’ in my latest purchase among many, the Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century English Poetry.
(In case you’re wondering, in dróttkvætt, pairs of three-stress visuorð are linked by alliteration. Each visuorð should have approximately six syllables with a feminine ending (stress, unstress), and should include regular patterns of internal rhyme.More here )
Then you have the somewhat enigmatic comments of Ezra Pound, arch-Imagist and catalyst for all things disruptive and new in turn of the century British poetry, who wrote in 1912:
I think there is a ‘fluid’ as well as a ‘solid’ content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms can have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms.(part of the Imagist Credo for Harold Munro’s Poetry Review).
Complex in a way, though I think the idea comes through that not all poems must conform to one mode of composition or the other. I rather like this and it corresponds to my own experience of some form as developed appropriately (or inappropriately) as the poem gets written, and others as containing structures into which poetic substance can be poured.
As to the coats – I bought two. So at least I can adopt alternative (though similar) outside forms depending on the needs of both climate and social occasion. Not to mention whatever I feel most like wearing at the time.
Poets at the turn of the century stuck out oddly if they disagreed: thus Thomas Hardy with his rather stiff architectural approach to writing poems: ‘Hardy’s poetry is the opposite of the organic and its corollaries of the unity of feeling and thought, manner and moment. His method instead was to work out verse skeletons, stanzaic patterns with an arbitrary substance that he would use later as a mould into which to pour his poetic content. An abbreviated note confirms that this is how he approached the topic from the start of his writing career:
Lyrical Method. Find a situation from experience. Turn into Lyrics for a form of expression that has been used for a quite different situation. Use it (same situation from experience may be sung in several forms.)’ (Peter Howarth’s observations).
Plenty of Hardy’s contemporaries found flaws in this method. But Modernism was all about breaking up assumptions and that included in some cases the organic concept of writing a poem – Paul Valery famously claimed that all poetic form is little more than an arbitrary choice. Auden disagreed : ‘If [formal restrictions] really were purely arbitrary, then …the experience which every poet has had, of being unable to get on with a poem because he[sic] was trying to use the ‘wrong’ form would be unknown’. Well this is true enough on many occasions. You’d be unlikely to succeed, for example, in writing a serious love poem if you were using the limerick form, with its jolly rhythm and limited length, and the traditional associations of bawdiness and brevity. However Auden himself has a particular reputation for finding out about abstruse forms and using them, surely more for purposes of poetic prowess than anything else – especially with such obscurities as the Old Norse Drottkvaett:
Hushed is the lake of hawks
Bright with our excitement
And all the sky of skulls
Glows with scarlet roses
This quote from Daniel Abright’s essay ‘Modernist Poetic Form’ in my latest purchase among many, the Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century English Poetry.
(In case you’re wondering, in dróttkvætt, pairs of three-stress visuorð are linked by alliteration. Each visuorð should have approximately six syllables with a feminine ending (stress, unstress), and should include regular patterns of internal rhyme.More here )
Then you have the somewhat enigmatic comments of Ezra Pound, arch-Imagist and catalyst for all things disruptive and new in turn of the century British poetry, who wrote in 1912:
I think there is a ‘fluid’ as well as a ‘solid’ content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms can have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms.(part of the Imagist Credo for Harold Munro’s Poetry Review).
Complex in a way, though I think the idea comes through that not all poems must conform to one mode of composition or the other. I rather like this and it corresponds to my own experience of some form as developed appropriately (or inappropriately) as the poem gets written, and others as containing structures into which poetic substance can be poured.
As to the coats – I bought two. So at least I can adopt alternative (though similar) outside forms depending on the needs of both climate and social occasion. Not to mention whatever I feel most like wearing at the time.
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