the Poetry Workshop web place

The issue I said I would address in this lesson is that of the relationship between verse and prose. The matter might seem unimportant, but if poetic style is to be discussed at all then this is the knot that needs to be untied. There is a much-quoted truism of Modernism: “Every time there is effort at style there is versification.” The words are Mallarmé’s. They are usually misquoted and incorrectly cited every time they are trundled out. Mallarme spoke them to Jules Huret who published them in L’Echo de Paris of 1892. You can find them on p.876 of the Pléiade (1945) edition of Mallarme’s works. In French, the quote runs “Toutes fois qu’il y a effort au style, il y a versification.’’ Note, the great poet did not say ‘an’ or ‘any,’ effort and he did not say ‘towards.’

The misquotations generally stem from Anthony Hartley’s massively influential Penguin translation of 1965, where he gives no citation at all. (Intro xxxi). It has become the bull-roaring slogan of the free verse movement. What Mallarme meant was that there is no prose. In a world of illusion, the soul knows no reality save the chance-bound possibility of beauty and even happiness. Prose political treaties, business agreements etc, do not exist as only beauty exists. The newspaper cuttings incorporated in Picasso and Braque’s collages take this point of departure; the prosaic caught in the fleeting image of beauty. As poetry mediates beauty; “there is only the alphabet and then verse, more or less graded; more or less diffuse.” (op. cit p 876) Elsewhere he spoke of free verse as a kind of intermission between the orchestral climax of the Alexandrine and its exhaustion. He was speaking for an age that saw verse as being in crisis. For him free verse was a freedom that later poetry would absorb and organise with a new individuality. As my late friend George Mac Beth used to say, it would “fossilise” again.

Now Mallarme was commenting on a change he had not initiated himself. For a man like Walt Whitman the world was gloriously prosaic. He loved the world of technology and commerce that promised so much happiness to people. He was thus the complete opposite to Mallarme. Only the world of prose exists and it rhythms and sounds need to be brought into poetry:

All truths wait in all things
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon.
(Leaves of Grass 30; Song of Myself)

Yet the two immensely great poets are united in denying the reality of the Christian transcendent. Both sought to claim the divine for the aesthetic experience. Mallarme was condescending to Whitman, “Il lit bien les petit journaux.’(“He’s well-read in the tabloids.”) Whitman was more influential. European poets such as Verhaeren, Morice, Mockel followed Whitman. Mallarme praised their work albeit as experiments in Crise de Vers. Later, Stadler in Germany, copied his example as did Mayakovsky in Russia and some Futurists in Italy.

Now another influence on Whitman was the language of the English Bible. Yet it was the Bible of pantheists and Natural Theologians such as William Blake, Swedenborg’s translators and poets such as Martin Tupper, P.J. Bailey and Sydney Dobell. Rejected by British critics, these British writers were very influential in Whitman’s New York. In the 1830s and 40s, they produced long versified tracts, which extolled the virtues of mankind in irregular stanzas of verse which seemed almost heedless of versification.”Outwardly, his unrhymed and unmeasured lines resemble those of Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy; but in no other way are they akin to those colorless platitudes.” so wrote John Townsend Trowbridge in Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, Atlantic Monthly 1902 . Whitman’s concern for the concrete and descriptive pulled him away from the abstract didacticism of his influences.

In 1922, T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land. He was one of the few great writers at that time to have been influenced by both Mallarme and Whitman. In some of the drafts of his poem Eliot sticks very closely to traditional metre. Yet he came to reject this form of parody as too obvious. The poem conveys an atmosphere of post-war fragmentary gloom against a background of syncretic mysticism. Remarkably it still persists as the single most trenchant contribution to Free Verse in the Twentieth Century, despite the fact that many poets influenced by Whitman, such as D.H. Lawrence , William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound were also publishing at the same time.

Later, in Eliot’s Introduction to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound of 1928, Eliot claimed that the iambic pentamenter, especially in its dramatic usage by Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century poets, lay behind both his and Pound’s deployment of free verse. In doing so he explicitly distinguished his technique from Whitman’s. Yet this is a retrospective, academic fiction which justified the diction of so-called “movement” poets such as Larkin. In the early verse the influence of Laforgue (one of the writer’s Mallarme praised) and Whitman is obvious in both poets. If you compare the dull dramatic iambic pentameters of writers following on from 1800, such as Gordon Bottomley and John Drinkwater with Eliot’s early work, almost of the same date, the difference is obvious.

This claim led to a rift between those who followed Pound and Williams in America and those who followed the influence of Eliot in England. Poets such as Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso and Di Prima of the Beat Generation, Olson, Creely and Denise Levertov and “language” poets such as Eigner, of the Black Mountain school, and John Ashbery of the New York School all of whom had their own, differing aesthetic. It was fascinating to attend workshops in London dominated by Movement and Group poets. Poets such as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, Ted Hughes and Edward Lucie-Smith claimed to write in traditional metres, strongly influenced by hardy survivors such as Graves and academics such as Eliot, Leavis and Yvor Winters. Yet their verse was as much a new departure as any being written by J Prynne, for example, who was influenced by Olson and just as difficult to defend.

I have gone into this in detail because I want to refute certain commonplace assumptions about Free Verse. Firstly that Free Verse is the way most people popularly understand verse. This is not true. Most people listen, sing and write popular lyrics which tend to follow rules of formal prosody. Secondly that most poets write in Free Verse. The major Non-English speaking poets of the Twentieth Century, Trakl, Rilke, Blok, Ahkmatova, Apollinaire, Lorca and Machado wrote mostly in traditional forms. Thirdly that Free Verse is easier to read, memorise and understand. Yet some Free Verse is very obscure and few lines from Free Verse have passed into popular consciousness. Fourthly that Free Verse is easier to write. Most great poets, such as William Carlos Williams agonised more over its freedom than took comfort from it. A recent OFSTED report shows it is no easier to teach. Fifthly that Free Verse has always been written by certain poets in the past. I view such phenomena as Traherne’s, “A serious and patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God”, as discontinuous heightened prose.

Lying behind all these misconceptions is the view that there is no clear distinction between verse and prose. In the past prose had its rhetoric, which anyone reading an essay by Bacon would understand was adhered to very closely. It even had rules of prosody as Vinaver’s studies of Malory shows. Yet these rules were slowly abandoned and now it is poetry’s turn. Yet the prose of the city will not march poetry out of its boundaries. The depersonalising, regimenting and materialistic tendencies in modern life have put poetry on the defensive; now more so than ever. The poets I have quoted sought to re-energise the sense of mystery and awe they felt the loss of religious belief had stolen from them. The European tradition of Free Verse wanted to reassert the fundamental poesis of the world; what Mallarme called the “explication Orphique de la terre.” A secular mystery could be stolen back under the very feet of the prosaic world. Meanwhile, the poet experiments. The American tradition wanted to take the heightened prose of religious belief and use it to baptise poetry and make it open to receiving the treasures of the world emptied of their prosaic casing. There is no experiment; the celebration is now.

Since then combinations of the two visions such as the early Eliot have abounded. Most do not stand up as aesthetic beliefs because they still seek to merge the poetic and the prosaic. Some poets such as those I have mentioned and the New Formalists in the USA try to swim back to safety. The way forward is to recognise that Free Verse and Formal verse are here to stay, but that the distinction between verse and prose is also here to stay. Prose is language in action, divided into countless forms which depend on mutual agreement in judgements as we interact with each other. This includes the language of fiction. Poetry is the use of language restricted to the one interaction between speaker and audience. Prose has many rhetorics. In the course of a day a person can answer a phone query, give a speech, tell off an employee, defend a position in a meeting, warn a stranger of danger, comfort a child, clinch a deal and express his love. Each has its own living rhetoric which different styles of prose recognise. As individuals we express a certain uniformity across these styles. Good communicators slip from one to the other with instinctive ease; too much style can get in the way. Shy people are self-conscious stylists.

Poetry in contrast is the use of rhetoric to make a unique communication to its audience, conditioned only by the limitations of the poets’ words and abounding in style. A poet can take any rhetoric into its span and turn it into poetry through irony, ambiguity, bathos etc, but the result is a satire and not a political speech or a legal judgement. The power of verse to steal the surface of living rhetoric and use it to its own ends is made possible because of the strength of the prose-poetry divide. The Prosa Oratio of straight speech is taken into the Oratio Versa and given a unique role. A love poem can be a dud or a gem, but it cannot be insincere, though one could quote it or use it insincerely. This is why too much poetry fails because it simply takes on the form of a diary entry, a political speech, a greeting, a prayer, without wresting style out of a set of rules governing a particular choice of words.
This is why I accept the aesthetics of W.H.Auden, who wrote in both forms. It is also why I reject the construction of false trails such as Dana Goia’s on Charles Causley.

“Taking his inspiration from folk songs, hymns, and especially ballads, Causley belongs–with A. E. Housman, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, John Betjeman, Kingsley Amis, and Philip Larkin–to a conservative countertradition in English letters that stresses the fundamentally national character of its poetry and the essential role of popular forms in its inspiration.”

Take any one of these poets at random and you will find great difficulty in getting them to scan according to the traditions of English metrical verse. De La Mare is notoriously difficult to scan.

“The Listeners’”
Is there anybody there said the traveller
knocking on the moonlit door?

consists of irregular Trochees /U, and Pyrrics UU, which some would scan as a Paeonic base;
U U / U U U / U U / U U
Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
/ U U U / U /
Knocking on the moonlit door;
Others would point out that a very conversational prosody reflects more relative stress.
Is there AN y body there? etc.

Hardy can be unutterably monotonous when writing iambic pentameters. This is from The Dynasts.

Tis not so much to look upon the sun
with eyes that may not lead us where we will etc

Yet Hardy’s late verse is thrilling;
/ U / U / U / U / U
Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost
Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me ?
Try continuing the iambs onto the second line.

Edward Thomas was struggling with Bottomley-type unscannable blank verse
such as
“Like an afterthought that deceives no-body” (King Lear’s Wife p18)

or from Thomas himself:
and the prettiest things on ground are the paths.

… until he met Frost who at that time was a close friend of Pound’s. Frost frequently substitutes trochees for iambs, even at the end of lines.
/ U / U / / U / / U
but I am done with apple-pick ing now
which is a fine line, but breaks the Victorian rules of scansion by introducing the trochee at the end. Thomas follows him;
/ U / U U /
How at once should I know
when stretched in the harvest blue etc
with equal success in breaking conservative tradition.
Robert Graves dabbled in Modernism championing Cummings and Gertrude Stein at one point. His criticisms seem carping now. He seems to be on the list for controversies’ sake. He and Amis are better known as prose writers.

The point is these poets do not make up a coherent counter tradition. Even the rules they are being shop-windowed for, they break. They are popular and they are all unique. The mistake is to assume they are either important or unimportant on the grounds of technique alone. An equal mistake is to ascribe Political or Racial repression to any technique. Unfortunately any gift can be used to evil ends. A tradition speaks for the whole of a poetic culture, not just a part. At the same time a tradition is always a shared belief. It cannot be based on any apparently linguistic laws inherent in a language. We cannot go back, but we do not need to be forced forwards either. There is a continuum between formality and freedom tradition invites you to follow. You have to find your voice on that continuum. Whether it’s Hip Hop, language poems, or modulated iambs, or all three, only the test of time will tell.

Much of what I have had to say has taken the secularisation of the Western world as its backdrop. It is a matter for fascination that the major stylistic debate about poetic technique has the problem of religious belief at its heart. Both Mallarme and Whitman assumed the abandonment of belief in God entailed a revolution in poetry. Yet Atheism is a paradoxical position. It has to catch up with the Spirit to be sure of refuting the right God. The narrow Catholicism of Mallarme’s youth and the Puritanism of Whitman’s America have changed in one essential point. Before it was held that human beings had no natural desire for God. Now, shaped by theologians such as Blondel, Henri De Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, the natural world and our creative gifts are seen as initial paths to our salvation, not as irrelevant distractions in our banishment. This view actually predates Calvin and therefore lay behind both the respective religious repressions of these poets’ times. There is an inherent spirituality to poetic creation. We have the obligation to praise God in the world.

Praise be the fathomless universe
For life and joy, for objects and knowledge curious
and for love, sweet love, praise, praise. praise
for the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

St Francis in a time before theological blunder was able to praise Sister Death. It is a powerful reassurance to those who hope for God.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin praises the forces of convergence that are underlying the apparently tragic surface of our lives. He sees the world being touched by Christ’s tangential energy, which radiates through the lives of people. If we free verse from its formal boundaries it is to be open to new initiatives of style which stimulate the radiating power of tradition.

Read the following two poems. One, by ee cummings (sic) is in free verse

Doveglion www.poemhunter.com/poem/doveglion/ -

Another by Auden is formal

Funeral Blues

W. H. Auden Funeral¨Blues homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/auden.stop.html

Analyse the poems and see if you can list the differences. We will discuss rhyme in the next lesson. Put your list aside. How many features of the poems can you incorporate in the next exercise?

Project Three—Writing in Free Verse

First: select a story, or a report from a newspaper or magazine. Not too long; fifty to a hundred words.

Second: decide what kind of prose rhetoric is being used. Is it a memoire, a biography, a report, a critique, an appeal, a judgement? Don’t choose something you can’t identify. Choose something you can relate to, but be flexible and open.

Third: eliminate any words that are not concrete.

Fourth: eliminate words that are merely informative and replace them with simpler words.

Fifth: eliminate anything that does not create a simple scene or state of affairs.Pare down conjunctions and auxiliaries.

Sixth: follow the rule of the senses in the first lesson. Describe what you see, feel, hear and smell.
Seventh: write out what you feel about the passage, but do not include it with your poem.

Eighth: write out the passage in short lines. Consider ending on hanging words, which move the poem forwards, Consider, repetition, refrains, vowelling and assonance, alliteration (Beware it can be very intrusive) Look at the list you made of the features of the poems in Project Three . Can you use any of them?

Ninth: add details that make the picture more vivid.

Tenth: re-read your opinion about the passage. Does your poem express those feelings? If not re-write it. Remember to show and not say what your feelings are.

(c) Copyright Duncan McGibbon