Assuming Shape: Formal poetry in a Disintegrating culture, or what has rhyme done for me lately?

The Banquet Modern Ed. 3

Dear All and Sundry,

Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Leftovers! Happy Advent!

As befits a holiday known for its banquets, it is fitting to offer a bit more abundantly in this issue. It is fitting too, as I make up for a few lost back issues. You see, dear Sundry, I have another reason to celebrate-the same reason the Banquet has grown silent these last few weeks: my son was born! Earlier this month my sweet wife and I welcomed our littlest one, a bit early. He remains in the NICU for now, completing the great task of assuming shape, little poem that he is.

But in his honor, I did not wish to leave the Banquet without a fitting spread, so for today’s Banquet, we will offer a bit more!

I recently had the pleasure of reviewing a great work on approaching the Great Works, Fr. James Schall’s Another Sort of Learning, for my friends at ClassicalEd Review. Check it out here: Another Sort of Learning - ClassicalEd Review

I even made it onto the Catholic aggregate site New Advent! Hopefully we can get The Banquet on there from time to time.

I also wanted to link a new poem from my Dan the Meter Man site: Excavation

But let’s open up that last can of cranberry sauce and dig in!

• Freedom from forms and norms

• The War to end all…

• Eliot and The Wasteland

• Exploring other options…or, it could be verse?

• Frost and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

We live in a culturally fractured society, one in which a tension exists between our desire for further individuation and our desire to join in a greater community. Writ large, this is played out in the national independence movements (Catalan, Quebec, Venice, Flanders, even the recent vote for Britain to leave the EU) on the one hand, and the pull of globalist associations like NATO, the EU, and the United Nations on the other.

But this is not a political post. This is just to say that the tension between Freedom and Security is one that is nearly universal in our current cultural moment, the desire for one or the other is often inconsistently applied, and ultimately, prioritization of one or the other reflects circumstance and context. We therefore should not be surprised to see that tension affect poetry as well.

Over the last 100 years, the dominant mode in poetry has been away from form, seeking an escape from received traditions and assumptions about what makes a poem a poem, and how meaning in poetry is conveyed. The movement flowed in two waves, each preceded by the destructive force of a world war, and this generational double surge has resulted in pushing the poetry of the last half of the 20th century far from the shores that once gave it identity and impetus.

The first surge was Modernism, building off the countercultural Imagists of the French: Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. Modernism manifested the horror that Western Civilization, for all its refinement of manner, was capable of atrocity—that formal elegance had not prevented an unimaginably ‘savage’ war in Europe, resulting in the horrific deaths of millions.

T. S. Eliot, in his epoch-shaping work The Wasteland, considers the wreckage and mocks the feeble attempts at contextualizing this horror with the cultural tools of the immediate past—keep in mind, the frothy wit of aestheticism, of Oscar Wilde’s art for art’s sake, was the vogue at the end of the 19th century, and what followed, the forced sentimentalism of the Georgian period, did not allow for the spiritual heft necessary to deal with the crisis. It was not possible to react to the world war with a flippant bon mot. The Wasteland was a revolution—it discarded the pretenses of the past. No consistent rhyme or line length, no consistent story or narrative. Fragments only, and images; powerful, but pessimistic, ominous images.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruin”

The Wasteland was difficult to characterize. It proceeded through a pastiche of reference, using multiple voices, with little or no transitions or exposition. This disorientation of point of view was itself a reflection of Modernism. Thrown into the ocean, the drowning man looked desperately for floating debris to cling to. Were there voices from the past that could speak to these concerns? Was there solace to be found? Eliot looked back to the past, to the literature of England, of the West, and more broadly to the world. To get a taste of this, let’s consider the ending; the poem’s fifth section, What The Thunder Said, ends:

                                     I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
                  Shantih     shantih     shantih

Within this brief space, we not only have several languages-English, Italian, French, and Sanskrit, we have references to half a dozen works including The Divine Comedy, a nursery rhyme, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, the book of Isaiah, as well as a Hindu Brahmana. Each is a stone in the rubble, and the modern man, standing in the bombed out remains of culture, grasps one then another, looking to see where he should begin stacking again. Do we first sing, rage, or give some other offering that will make peace with our situation?

Soon the trappings of formality that separated poetry from prose were seen to be not only artifice but artificial, not only gaudy but fraudulent. Stripped of these false pretenses, poetry could recover the true music that had long been hidden. And of course, not all formal considerations were dropped by everyone all at once: there were many starts and attempts. Some reactions didn’t eschew form, but still wrestled with the dilemma of how form could be meaningful in a disintegrating time.

For better or for verse?

e.e. cummings, though he still chose to pattern after traditional forms, dispensed with capital letters, (as you probably noted above, dear Sundry) and made use of punctuation, line endings, and syntactical acrobatics to convey meaning in unprecedented ways. He shifted the weight-bearing work from the center stage words — nouns, verbs, — to the supporting players — prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns, and played with visual cues as well as auditory ones.

Consider one of his most typical performances: this poem makes use of the space on the page to convey its movement, as well as parentheses.

l(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness

It is the word “loneliness” broken up by “a leaf falls”. The effect is disorienting, and ends with ‘iness’, a fragment of a word, but a now apparent distillation of loneliness, a place where the “I” is quintessentially itself. Note how the primary sense is visual not auditory. The formal elements have to do with sight, not sound.

Roy Campbell, a South African poet, turned to a violent, lean, stripped-down aesthetic, which though more traditional in its form, is spare, and striking, shorn of decadence. His poem Autumn, encapsulates his modus operandi:

I love to see, when leaves depart,
The clear anatomy arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive.

Frost, the Vernacular of Place and the Mask of Art.

Robert Frost might seem a strange figure to emerge at this time. He is in many ways our last popular poetic figure, with many well-known and quotable lines, and he is often held up as a defender of form, (he famously quipped that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net). However, he was not immune from the effects of WWI. It is odd to think that so modern a poet as Frost, and so Victorian a poet as Chesterton were exact contemporaries—both born in 1874 (though of course, Frost would outlive Chesterton by several decades, and was a late bloomer).*

But how is Frost modern? As mentioned above, like his contemporaries, he wanted to get past the detritus, the gilt and tinsel and pretty emotions tied up with bows, that seemed not only useless but obscene now, amidst the ruined landscapes of Europe—exploded rubble now covered the confetti. Frost pierced through the layers of fatty tissue until he hit the bone of the vernacular—and exposed the pulse of everyday speech.

However, Frost’s technique, for all its work-a-day, common-man wordsmithing, was meant to be deceptive. The vernacular dialect was rooted in New England because it must be rooted somewhere to be real, and yet it reached for (and attained) the universal, and was more fluent with the deeper currents of philosophy, literature, and the bleak existentialism of his time than is at first apparent. He was a craftsman still—his craft was in making the language seem as effortless as possible, and the wisdom of it as true as when it was found in the living tongue, while also using form to layer deeper, and perhaps more ominous meanings underneath.

Nature, both local in the human heart and abroad, wore a mask, that to peer behind was dangerous. It was the place of Art to make sure that the mask did not slip so far as to stun the mind with horror at its predicament, but also to manufacture its own pleasing masks as well, but not so pleasing that we forgot that they were false. For Frost, the line between a paralyzing terror and a flight from existential angst into empty, and ultimately self-destructive past-times, was to be walked slowly, with poetry for a guiding hand. Poetry was meant to be “a temporary stay against confusion.” A stay in that it controlled and ordered some bit of chaos, but temporary, as it could not in the end solve the crisis, only give relief to some of its daily symptoms.

Let us consider the well-known lyric Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, quoted here in full:

 Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.

Whose woods are these? Do you know?

Let us reflect on another poet who begins a poem wandering in the woods. Yes, the ‘selva oscura’, the dark wood of Dante. Of course, the woods are not his—he is lost in them. But whose woods they are, we all know.

If that sounds like a dark and unlikely reading of this charmingly disarming little snow-globe of a poem, let me assure, dear Sundry, that I base my shake on the rule of three: Once is interesting; Twice is a coincidence, Thrice is a pattern. So what does this poem have to link it to Dante beyond some ‘dark,’ albeit ‘lovely’ woods? Let’s consider the rhyme scheme. Frost is again playful with the form, but there are unmistakably three rhymes forming interlocking stanzas, a sort of New England terza rima, put foursquare in four-lined stanzas. They form a chain, but a looser one than Dante’s, recalling the ‘easy wind and downy flake’—there is nothing difficult here: all is bewitching, enchanting, enthralling. The hardest part is pulling away, (though the horse, with unmistakable horse-sense, knows something is off, something is ‘queer’, about sticking around these woods.)

But the final clue are the strange lines, “Between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year.” Dante’s pilgrimage occurred at Eastertide, a blessedly providential time for an excursion through the afterlife. Frost has no such auspicious day, nor does he have so exalted a destination. His journey is from the wood to the frozen lake, exactly the journey Dante makes in the Inferno. You remember, dear Sundry, for Dante, the bottom of hell is frozen over.

The lure of the wood is unmistakable but is also known to be a mistake. The void beckons, despair’s voice is always soothing and therapeutic. But ultimately, the speaker realizes (as should the reader), that it is in fulfilling promises, passing by temptations and getting on with it, that any kind of ambiguous peace is found. At least that is his hope. But the repeated line smacks more of resignation than resolve. It is based on little except pluck, and in the end, it is this baseless hope, not founded in religious faith or much evidence, that, for Frost, both ennobles man, and makes him a likable fool.

Frost’s writing made his claim for formalism less ambiguously — formal elements need not be thrown out with the tepid scented bathwater. Rhyme and meter were potent tools in their own right in dealing with the crisis of the moment. Frost cleared the way for others, including his students—among them, the young Richard Wilbur, who in the next few decades would take on the prophetic role of John the Baptist, crying out alone in the wilderness, while subsisting on the sweetness of rhymes and the springiness of meter—to reclaim a place for formal elements in the contemporary world.

But what has rhyme and meter done for me lately?

Formal poetry is comfortably back in the mix, along with unrhymed, free verse, and other types that have bubbled up in the intervening years. More poets are discovering the enjoyment of writing in form, and many poets at least dabble with formal elements, even if they don’t take form as their creed. The growing interest in poetry in other languages, has led to a golden age of translation, that in turn has also rekindled a reconsideration of how formal elements can help smuggle poetry from one tongue into another

We still live in a culturally fractured society, but there are shards worth preserving until the time when they will become part of a new culture. The Roman stones of yore became the wall stones of medieval churches and abbeys. So too, we may yet shore these fragments against our own ruin.

On both the larger stage of culture, and the personal stage of our own struggles with life, death, grief, regret and a desire for purpose, rhyme and metrical poetry have a role. Looking to my own life, and looking at the tea leaves for the cultural future, I see an opportunity in formal verse— rhyme, meter, and the full complement of the poet’s toolbelt — to create poetry that uses its incarnate, sensual aspects to manifest meaning in ways analogous to how the human body manifests the soul. An embodied poetry will be the poetry that characterizes the poems of the next age.

____________________________________________________________________

*Frost and Chesterton also both called Beaconsfield home for a few years, from 1912-1914 and it is amusing to think of them meeting on the curbside and exchanging views. There is a short story here, or a poem, or perhaps a play in the tradition of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile for the intrepid writer.