Free verse goes back a little further than Walt Whitman! William Blake (1757-1827) wrote his epics in free verse, and before him even there was Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart (1722-1771), best remembered now for the lines about his cat Jeffrey ("For when he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness").
But I can't agree that the sonnet was exhausted in Shakespeare's time. Percy Shelley, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, e.e. cummings, and Robinson Jeffers, among others, showed that there was still room for invention in the form. Then there is "The Aeronaut to His Lady":
I
Through
Blue
Sky
Fly
To
You.
Why?
Sweet
Love,
Feet
Move
So
Slow!
(I also think there is a notable use for what Wood regards as training poetry: Both rhyme and meter are tremendous aids to memory, making it much easier to learn a poem by heart and recite it aloud without needing a book to read it from. And doing that greatly enhances one's sense for the language in which a poem is written. I've memorized more English verse than I can easily count, from Wyatt to Thomas, and I consider the body of it a prize possession.)
When it comes to the sonnet, don't forget Edna St. Vincent Millay! (Excuse the periods to keep the double line spacing — Substack seems to want to delete extra line spaces.)
.
Sonnet Number 5
.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain,
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
.
.
But I also think her free verse is brilliant...
.
Spring
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
.
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.
I certainly agree that Millay is a notable writer of sonnets, though I should have thought first of "Euclid alone hath looked on beauty bare." But I'm afraid none of her verse has ever spoken to me enough to get into my memory, either spontaneously or by conscious practice; so when I thought of "poets who wrote sonnets" I thought first of those I had memorized. (For similar reasons, I started with Shelley rather than Wordsworth, though Wordsworth wrote more sonnets!) This is a matter of my personal taste and not of aesthetic judgment; I don't wish to suggest that Millay is a lesser poet.
I wouldn't be able to memorize her "Spring," but then I've never been able to memorize cummings's "She being brand-," a poem I like tremendously.
My mother used to like to say out"Abou Ben Adhem" and "If" (a copy of which hung in the laundry room, oddly, but that's actually a good place to capture attention) and "The Highwayman" (the moon will always and only be a ghostly galleon to me) and "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere". Her own personal "best-loved" sentimental verses. I was captivated by Anne of Green Gables so spent an afternoon memorizing "The Lady of Shalott" so I could declaim it like Anne did; at this point phrases of it occasionally still flit through my head when I am seated in a riparian area, and it rather remains an element of what I consider most "decorative" if ineffable ... In school, we were told to memorize "In Flanders Fields" without being told that it was to do with WW1.
I had to smile when the review quoted Wood on the subject of which newer forms of poetry would in future be heard in "living rooms". As if (the noble example of rap excepted, of course!).
The last time somebody talked poetry at me as a part of regular conversation - "Hail to thee blithe Spirit" upon greeting, or the like - was years ago, and she'd be over ninety by now I should think. The preoccupation of another age.
An art form can fall out of fashion, but it can never be exhausted. That's an excuse made by artists lacking creativity, because being novel is easier than being original.
The 20th century poets really did manage to saw off the branch they sat on. And now it seems like most poets aren't even properly trained at all. They're trained more in criticism and analysis than actually producing and it shows. Especially in their emphasis of ideas (especially correct ideas) over performance or technique.
Twenty first century poets are exceptionally well trained and skilled in both meter and rhyme scheme, and remarkably well paid due to the difficulty of their art. They are, of course, not contemporaneously regarded as poets- but neither was Shakespeare. This may still be the end of an era- I would not be stunned if MF Doom wrote
> One for the money, two for the better green
> 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine
at the peak of human achievement in this art, and from here forward the robots will be the only poets of note.
Yeah, reading this review I couldn't help but think modern "poetry" seems to be bitterly reactionary to the success of the true successor to properly metered and rhymed prose--just about every form of modern music with words--and does everything in its power to be artificially formless and difficult so as to be deliberately exclusionary (which is fine but we're all also free to think of them as pretentious jackasses).
It’s not intentionally exclusive, it’s intentionally inclusive. Bad free verse can be produced by people without a scrap of talent or creativity. That allows a nexus of academia and publishing to promote, hire and sell courses to whomever they want. Rhyme and meter are much more of a barrier to entry, and would never let you give an award to safeguarding-policy woman.
The obvious comparison point is “One for the money, two for the show,” which is BUM ba ba BUM bum, BUM ba ba BUM. “better green” adds two extra syllables and your proposed scan seems to suggest putting emphasis on “for” in addition to “two,” which doesn’t work.
I think we may be taking past each other here, but to try to be more specific: in the common phrase “One for the money / two for the show / three to get ready / and four to go!”, you wouldn’t metrically characterize “one for the money” as “Bum babababum,” because “money” is a trochee - like the initial monosyllable “one,” it’s metrically stressed.
You're looking at the meter incorrectly. Think of it in an ABAB pattern, not an AAAA pattern. There is no correspondence between the first half of a line and the second half, but there is a correspondence between the first half of line 1 and the first half of line 2.
Yeah, I'm constantly surprised that people don't realize rap lyrics are incredibly complex. At least in terms of language use, it's by far the most intellectual of musical genres.
There is a wide range in the practitioners, some of whom are absolutely doing amazing things with the words and the wordplay, and some of whom are doing something else.
IMO Failed attempts at rhyme and meter, or the substition of assonance and slant rhyme for the same, are worse than no attempts: they come across as suggestive that the people making them are simply not conversant with the underlying constraints (or not competent enough to adhere to them, or too lazy to bother) rather than deliberately subverting them.
Rappers tend to group themselves with music. But that said I agree that rap is a vibrant form of poetry. There's some interesting theorycraft around it too. In my ideal world everyone would acknowledge this but there's a lot of snobbery around what poetry is. I really think the entire Spoken Word movement is just "rap but bougie."
I have to agree that rap is a poetic form. In fact it's rather in the spirit of Homer, being a form of verse that invites improvisation. I remember back around 1990, before I had ever heard of "rap," riding the trolley home from work, I heard a young black man inviting a group of marines to bet on the shell game—in very fluent, strongly rhythmic language, that was hard not to get caught up by even when I didn't understand everything he said (too fast and in an unfamiliar accent). And it struck me that I was hearing a living example of oral poetry . . .
I remember that "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" feeling I got when I read about those freak hoes, their stank pussy smelling like Cool Ranch Doritos.
The young rationalists should totally have an old-fashioned poetry recital. Get memorizing!
FWIW, most of the poetry I memorized I either learned as a child, or was written by Tolkien. (My college English teacher said (approx.) "That's just heroic couplets. But it's well done.".)
Also, what lyrics are you quoting above? Supposedly there's a group called "The Young Rationalists"? But DDG and google isn't turning up any results. Am I misunderstanding the thread?
When I pay attention to rap I'm often blown away by the rapper's inventiveness and vindictive passion. The problem is that drugs and money are not very important to me, and currently sex isn't either.
The real thing that killed 20th century poetry is alternative forms. Many people will prefer to play a video (game?) than either to listen to or to write poetry. And now it's in the process of killing off the short story (by killing the magazines) and the novel. I expect if virtual reality is ever common that novels will be totally marginalized.
Popular poetry has remained extremely successful throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. It's just that the kinds of people who talk about "poetry" have decided that the kind of poetry that has remained popular, song lyrics, doesn't count for some reason.
Honestly my favorite review yet, even though it's less ambitious than many others. It's clear, to the point, and educational. I immediately purchased a copy of the book as I've been interested in educating myself on poetry more and this seems like a great resource.
The distinction between knowledge needed for training and knowledge needed for execution is real. I've tried educating myself by reading great and varied poetry, and while it's helped me critically analyze poetry and has been generally edifying, it's been useless in helping me understand how to write poetry.
Wood’s point that rhyming and metered verse are good training reminds me of what T.S. Eliot said, “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.” The best free verse has its own internal requirements: Whitman’s poetry always flows well, always feels somehow structured. I think people run into problems when they just chop up an insipid diary entry into lines.
And then Schoenberg comes and writes the essay, “Brahms, the Progressive” claiming that somehow Brahms was as much a stepping stone to the future as Wagner!
Huh, I never knew so-called "sadistic verses" are international and actually predate their Soviet incarnation (which is certainly post-War). I mean, I read about German "all the children" variety, but it's a bit different from "sadistic verses" in structure, while "Little Willies" seem to be almost exactly the same, only in Russian the hero is nameless, usually just "little boy" (and sometimes it's an old man instead).
It's not playful enough to be by Scott. And Scott often makes transitions by asking questions, then answering them: "So is that the entire explanation -- the hypothalamus manages it?" [Then, new paragraph] "John Bloke argues persuasively that there is much more to it. . . .In a book amusingly entitled . . . "
I thought maybe this re 1917 was intended as a joke? - "... the proletariat really did seem to have some grievances that needed to be resolved by a government more in tune with their best interests." I mean, there was no proletariat to speak of, but perhaps a handful of individuals felt like, finally, you're on my wavelength.
Although they didn't participate in the revolution, the revolution was decided in the cities, which had a normal for the period number of proletariat per capita. (The fact that factory workers only opposed the Bolsheviks when they participated at all renders it all moot, of course. It's a joke relative to propaganda, not the truth.)
Wikipedia on "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking": Shortly after, on January 7, 1860, the Saturday Press published a response to that review titled "All About a Mocking-Bird", celebrating Whitman's poem.[7] This article may have been written by Whitman himself.
I've just finished the review and I'd wager my last wooden nickel that this was Scott. If so, I hope he'll tell us how he ever came by the 1936 Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book. Yard sale? Giveaway table at the library? I kind of want to get it especially so I can read the section on meter, which has always made me cross and I'm not even a poetaster. I want to read the curated selection of bad Browning. But I fear there may be a run on the book, online.
I shall look forward to receiving your wooden nickel, for I will take the other side of that bet. I find the subject matter to be interesting to Scott, but the way it was written doesn't seem like him at all.
I would also be willing to bet against all of your other wooden nickels, not just your last one.
I can only express my appreciation for this review with an aahhh of pleasure, like sliding into a hot bath. Beautifully written, and I appreciate the recommendation.
I agree passionately with Woods' rejection of archaic language. In part, rejecting old language is a process of forcing yourself to have real, original thoughts, rather than just repeating things that others have said. If we can be sure of one thing, it's that 21st century people don't generally yearn, so if that appears in their poems, it definitely doesn't express a true emotional experience.
I’m deeply confused by this claim. I can yearn for a lost love every day and twice on Sunday just as much as any early modern. It seems like a perfectly universally human experience to me. Maybe you just aren’t very comfortable with the word, rather than it being overly archaic.
That debate has made me self conscious every time I use delve, which I've caught myself doing at least 3 times since I came across the debate. The most embarrassing of those times was in a prompt to an LLM!
More broadly I’ve always assumed that everyone of broadly Western cultural background feels everything that’s in Shakespeare, more or less tautologically.
Woah, I definitely disagree with this. I mean... I would agree that Shakespeare's great insight - that we are always in conversation with our own selves, and developing dynamically - has become well-known, and popularised and elaborated through via lots of psychological theories in the 20thC. But there are a zillion details in Shakespeare, and I doubt anyone has all of them in their native basic emotional palette.
Remember Scott's done a bunch of posts on really deep variation in how people experience the world. His example of the guy who didn't realise until adulthood that you could have food preferences is really iconic, but there are lots and lots of similar examples. I mean, colour perception is the one that bends my mind. People love to beard-strokingly ask, does the colour red look the same to you as it does to me? [hammer hitting head emoji] [hammer hitting head emoji] [hammer hitting head emoji] Colour blindness tells us that it can't be. There are obviously about 1/20 people for whom red doesn't look the same.
Now, if many thinkers fail to register the differences in human experience on a level as basic and obvious as the qualia involved in the most well-known pathology/neurodiversity... then it seems to me very likely that many thinkers are also failing to notice all of the more subtle differences in human experience. So, in this case, I'm suggesting that thinker you are failing to notice lots of cases where people don't experience/feel lots of the things that are in Shakespeare.
(I'm embracing a model here where lots of the things that we feel are things that we've learned to feel (been enculturated to feel). I think this is justified. I haven't even read King Lear yet, and I'm putting it off. I'm 43 and I'm not sure I'll get it yet, and I'm not sure I want to get it yet.)
> thinkers fail to register the differences in human experience on a level as basic and obvious as the qualia involved in the most well-known pathology/neurodiversity
I always assumed the qualia question has an implied "not counting obvious physical stuff like colour blindness (and regular blindness, etc)" clause.
Let's hope. But I've met one working academic philosopher who didn't seem to have thought about this (not his field, but he had to study the basics as part of his general courses, and the caveats weren't taught to him, nor did he get round to thinking of them later). And in my intro-to-philosophy classes (taken during high school), the question do-we-all-see-the-same-red was introduced to me without any caveats. It could be that my experience is too low-level to be representative, but check out here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/ The SEP entry on colour vision does not mention colourblindness, only a single reference to one paper.
I think they sort gloss over it around the mention of "Inter-Species Variation":
> A stronger form of this objection is what is called “the Inter-Species Variation”. Allen concedes that this version is much harder to dismiss: Color perception varies much more dramatically across the animal kingdom than it does amongst human perceivers.
If I understand correctly, they don't care about colour blind people, because they're only concerned with "normal observers".
Oh, yeah, I see. And later in the entry it has this:
"Finally, another difficulty...it has become increasingly more difficult to specify normal observers, and standard viewing conditions...we have found that in fact, as things stand, there is a wide range of variation among competent color perceivers."
That is to say, yes, lots of the early theories did have this problem (of ignoring colourblindness and other variation in colour vision), and some philosophers have noticed the problem, too.
It would be reasonable to take a more sanguine view of this than me, but I still see this as an example of armchair philosophising, cut off from empirical evidence, where the philosophers say: Let's first imagine that everyone is normal. By which I mean, obviously, just like me. Now, what follows is... It's a bad mode of thinking, which philosophy is gradually moving away from, but still infects lots of theories.
Anyway, that's just me editorialising far beyond the bounds of what I actually know. What I DO know is this: there exist a whole bunch of philosophical theories of colour that deliberately excluded a really obvious bit of variation that exists all around us. And, colour vision is much more interesting than that! I just read this amazing book by Ed Yong called Immense World, about how animals have different senses, which means that they are negotiating quite different worlds, even when they're in the same physical space. It's great, if you're interested in that kind of thing, you should definitely check it out.
Rejecting old language is as bad as embracing it. Neither is a good idea, and there are contexts where either it the appropriate thing to do. The same for any particular poetic style. Sonnets can be great for describing a rather static form, or for doing a "freeze frame" of something more active. But it's not a form that has much bounce to it. (Saying all the good sonnets have already been written is just lack of imagination...but there are lots of things that sonnets aren't the correct form to talk about with.)
"Rejecting old language is as bad as embracing it."
Haha, nup! I know what you mean, but I don't agree with this. For me, this is a statistical question. If you had a balanced population of old language embracers and old language rejectors, each bubbling with their own pathologies, then yes, I'd say you're right. But in fact, that's not the problem we face.
The problem we face is this. In day-to-day life, people don't use old language. That's just because it's old. When trying to create poetry, people generally make three mistakes. (1) They fail to accurately perceive the things/emotions they want to write about. (2) They use cliched language to describe the things/emotions they want to write about. (3) They try too hard to signal that they are doing Art. All three of these problems in practice lead people to use old-fashioned language in a way that is inauthentic, and generally not good for their writing.
Thus, I remain convinced that cleansing your writing of archaisms is *in practice* an effective way for 99% of writers to get better.
Ha, yeah, fair point. Yearn is definitely still part of the language.
What I mean is that "yearn" is now almost always used as a kind of heightened, poetic language. The metaphors of "tangled fog" and "pulsating yearning" are not exactly day-to-day expressions! So I think that when a writer these days is experiencing a feeling, they're very unlikely to be verbalising their immediate experience in terms of 'yearn'. And one of the things you have to learn to do as a writer is to first just... say what you're thinking/feeling. It's much harder to do than you might imagine! And part of the reason it's hard to do is that people often reach for cliches - like "yearning." If Bojack was to express what he was feeling directly, he might use a word like want, desire, or lust.
(When you do poetry, you might well choose a higher-register or weirder word like yearn. But you should only do that once you've embraced the discipline of being able to express something directly. At least, that's what I think!)
I liked his point about song lyrics. It seems to me that to be a popular poet today, you need to put it to music, like Taylor Swift, perhaps, or Lin-Manuel Miranda. Perhaps that's because music has other things going for it, and is easy enough to distribute today?
I'm not saying the Lord of the Rings necessarily stands on the same level as the Iliad, but the genre's probably the closest approximation IMHO--people like big long stories full of larger-than-life characters. Who knows what we'll be reading in 3000 years? Maybe the great epic hasn't been written yet.
As for the unfinished problem...yeah, it definitely is a big issue. With time, a lot of their names will vanish in the wind.
The Iliad has the advantage of sitting within another set of well known stories and leaving itself unfinished. Perhaps the Odyssey is a better comparison for a story that actually comes to an end? Although it's a bit more of a power/wish fulfilment fantasy than an epic, so it gets away with a simple "kill em all" ending with no repurcussions.
Thank you for the link, now I have another enemy to add to my little list (no, only joking, I don't bother keeping lists of enemies because I'm no good at names - I just have vague cloudy intimations of "that guy who did that dumb thing, grrr").
Many of the favourable recommendations he/she/they gave, I agreed with. Some I went "oh, you didn't like that? why?" and for their Tolkien two thumbs-down I was definitely interested enough to clicky-clicky through to their Goodreads review.
Turns out Our Reviewer is maybe slightly thin-skinned (though I say it as shouldn't), because in response to the very mild push-back on their review of Tolkien, they let loose with:
"Well, you certainly must judge for yourself whether dualistic morality, simplistic character motivations, plot coupons, false nostalgia, xenophobia, technophobia, treacly romance, condescension, and an obsession with arbitrary details that upset the pacing of the story are the attributes of a good book."
Well ackshully, as the kids these days say, I *do*. I thought the romance was enough (as someone who is not interested in long descriptions of romantic sighs and kisses and moping and what have you, much less the "and then he raped her sixteen times that night and got his five servants to rape her afterwards" of GRR Martin), so plainly we have very different metrics for what counts as "successful romance". Xenophobia? Come on now, my friend, are you going to go off on an "Orcs are racist" rant?
I suppose, though, this is best indicated in their No. 1 slot goes to "Gormenghast". I agree that it's worth reading, but the first book is the best, the other two fall off and the third one falls flat on its face and everywhere else. You could easily just read the first volume and skip the other two.
Their list of disappointments is also very informative. Different strokes for different folks, indeed! I agree with them about the Xanth series, and Goodkind, and Jordan. I'm very surprised they didn't like McDonald, but they review "The Wise Woman and other stories" and not the more famous "Phantastes" or "Lilith", so the choice of book is as much to do with it as anything.
I get why Pratchett's jokes were a bit too much for them, but the Discworld series really is a major fantasy series and, when Pratchett got into his stride, exactly the kind of new take on the genre that was needed.
As to Tolkien, well, I've already mentioned it - " (an impressive intellectual exercise, but overall stodgy, unromantic, and convoluted)". For them, there is not the same beauty I found in it. I really, really would like to know their definition of "romance" - are they meaning the sense of Romantic versus Classical, or is it (sigh) "no sex and nudity, where my boobies and ass at?" "The Lord of the Rings" is a war story, in large part, so it's a bit like arguing "Where is all the romance and all the love affairs in 'All Quiet On The Western Front'?"
It's odd, because for many of the capsule reviews, they and I agree (I don't think I've seen recently anyone appreciating the Viriconium stories). Where we differ, we differ profoundly!
He seems to rank GRRM lower than Tolkien, so no I don't think he wanted more rape & boobs in Tolkien. Rather, he seems to blame Tolkien in part for later writers like GRRM. Based on his review of A Game of Thrones, he disapproves of the author writing his barely-disguised-fetishes, and wants "the allegorical romance of epic fantasy" in its ideals rather than grimdark cynicism.
I recently read someone quoting Tolkien about how Lord of the Rings was just the book he wrote where someone could give a greeting in the invented language & world that was his true focus*. I don't think any of Keely's recommended writers approach fantasy that way.
*I can't find the comment now, but Perplexity.ai pointed out this, with the relevant quote at the end:
I think we're getting at the root of the matter here. First, as to allegory, Tolkien was very clear that it was in no way, shape or form an allegory, so that's the first disjunction.
Second, what does Keely mean by the above? What is the "allegorical romance"? He very much likes the Gormenghast trilogy, where I think the first book is the best of the three and contains the most of the fantasy. He also likes E.R. Eddison's Zimiamvian Trilogy and The Worm Ouroboros very much (which I do myself) and I think there we are coming near to it.
If, by "romance", we mean "romantic love", there's not that much of it in The Worm Ouroboros. People may talk about the lack of women in Tolkien, but in TWO, there's only one named female character and she's not a love interest of anyone. So plainly there is a secondary sense of "romance" dong the heavy lifting here, and I think this snippet from the Wikipedia article on TWO is pertinent:
"All the books contain a romantic ethic of fame, fate and eternal recurrence, in which the supreme value is chivalry, both in the sense of heroism and in the sense of idealization of women."
Taking Gormenghast and Zimiamvia, I think that Keely's taste runs more towards a lush, indeed somewhat hot-house, style of fantasy; not the clear Northern spirit in the myths that attracted Lewis, or what Tolkien says about his own mythology:
"It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry."
Zimiamvia is more Mediterranean; the atmosphere is much different (and Gormenghast even more different still, it has the febrile atmosphere of the decaying and decadent great noble families and houses of Poe). I'm going off memory here, but it's that long, golden summer afternoon light that is perpetually kept by magic in a garden of Duke Barganax, where the hours pass without changing.
I think *that's* what Keely is looking for, or prefers; sex, but alluded to rather than overt, and a certain style of romantic approach that I would call rather 'gallantry' than 'chivalry'; larger than life heroes and villains that are outside the constraints of convention; let there be gods, very well, but rather as colourful additions than genuine belief (in TWO characters swear by the gods and refer to the gods, but there's little or no description of any events where the gods matter or affect everyday life; in Zimiamvia, the gods and goddesses are rather aspects or shadows of the Supreme God and Goddess who is the Eternal Feminine). Colour and heat and figures out of Greek tragedy, all heightened emotion and action above the petty common folk who are there only to be servants and subjects. "As for living, our servants will do that for us", as it were.
Tolkien gives short shrift to the Eternal Feminine; Aragorn and Arwen, as Beren and Luthien, are real lovers and real men and women (well, Mortals and Elves) who have a real love that leads to marriage and children, not the Wagnerian Death and Love notion of Zimiamvia.
And LoTR is too caught up with the common folk and their petty concerns, as well.
While I do enjoy and appreciate Zimiamvia, my preference is for Tolkien's world - the clear starry skies of a northwestern winter night, as against the pitiless noonday blaze of the summer sun over the Greek isles or Rome in marble and blood.
That latter eternal summer spoils rather quickly, to take the example that Moorcock explicitly makes in his "Gloriana" about his fantasy version of the Elizabethan Age, where the beginning of the end is when all the glamour curdles into decadence and a new, more sober and realistic, successor era is what brings real chance of happiness to all, including Gloriana herself.
Though I do think it's a bit thick to accuse Tolkien of "xenophobia" when the glory for Zimiamvia and TWO is "eternal war against fitting enemies", and the dead are resurrected at the end of TWO specifically so that the heroes can have their glorious battles all over again (glorious for the nobles and heroes, not so glorious for the foot soldiers and common people, but then the little people don't count in Eddison's world).
EDIT: Also, come on - "an obsession with arbitrary details that upset the pacing of the story" is a flaw of Tolkien? So what about this description of the presence chamber of the lord of Demonland?
"Surely no potentate of earth, not Croesus, not the great King, not Minos in his royal palace in Crete, not all the Pharaohs, not Queen Semiramis, nor all the Kings of Babylon and Nineveh had ever a throne room to compare in glory with that high presence chamber of the lords of Demonland. Its walls and pillars were of snow-white marble, every vein whereof was set with small gems: rubies, corals, garnets, and pink topaz. Seven pillars on either side bore up the shadowy vault of the roof; the roof-tree and the beams were of gold, curiously carved, the roof itself of mother-of-pearl. A side aisle ran behind each row of pillars, and seven paintings on the western side faced seven spacious windows on the east. At the end of the hall upon a dais stood three high seats, the arms of each composed of two hippogriffs wrought in gold, with wings spread, and the legs of the seats the legs of the hippogriffs; but the body of each high seat was a single jewel of monstrous size: the left-hand seat a black opal, asparkle with steel-blue fire, the next a fire-opal, as it were a burning coal, the third seat an alexandrite, purple like wine by night but deep sea-green by day. Ten more pillars stood in semicircle behind the high seats, bearing up above them and the dais a canopy of gold. The benches that ran from end to end of the lofty chamber were of cedar, inlaid with coral and ivory, and so were the tables that stood before the benches. The floor of the chamber was tesselated, of marble and green tourmaline, and on every square of tourmaline was carven the image of a fish: as the dolphin, the conger, the cat-fish, the salmon, the tunny, the squid, and other wonders of the deep. Hangings of tapestry were behind the high seats, worked with flowers, snake’s-head, snapdragon, dragon-mouth, and their kind; and on the dado below the windows were sculptures of birds and beasts and creeping things.
But a great wonder of this chamber, and a marvel to behold, was how the capital of every one of the four-and-twenty pillars was hewn from a single precious stone, carved by the hand of some sculptor of long ago into the living form of a monster: here was a harpy with screaming mouth, so wondrously cut in ochre-tinted jade it was a marvel to hear no scream from her: here in wine-yellow topaz a flying fire-drake: there a cockatrice made of a single ruby: there a star sapphire the colour of moonlight, cut for a cyclops, so that the rays of the star trembled from his single eye: salamanders, mermaids, chimaeras, wild men o’ the woods, leviathans, all hewn from faultless gems, thrice the bulk of a big man’s body, velvet-dark sapphires, chrysolite, beryl, amethyst, and the yellow zircon that is like transparent gold.
To give light to the presence chamber were seven escarbuncles, great as pumpkins, hung in order down the length of it, and nine fair moonstones standing in order on silver pedestals between the pillars on the dais. These jewels, drinking in the sunshine by day, gave it forth during the hours of darkness in a radiance of pink light and a soft effulgence as of moonbeams. And yet another marvel, the nether side of the canopy over the high seats was encrusted with lapis lazuli, and in that feigned dome of heaven burned the twelve signs of the zodiac, every star a diamond that shone with its own light."
It's a wonderfully lush and full description, but it's not getting us to the action any faster, now is it?
Yeah, I don't think it's a matter of "romantic love", but instead fantasy being larger than life and not striving for "realism". Keely doesn't always think of romanticism as a good thing though, since he praises Eddison by saying "unlike [Tolkien and Lewis], he was no sentimental romanticist".
As for being appropriate for different regions, I only read a little of Kipling's "Puck of Pook's Hill" (one of the recommendations) but that's very specifically fantasy for England: with a Germanic god brought over by the Anglo-Saxons shrinking with the rise of Christianity, and mostly being forgotten by the time the Normans conquer it. There's an implication that there was a romance between one of those Norman knights and an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman, but that time of their lives is entirely skipped over between two chapters, as if the audience of children in the story (and presumably an intended audience of children for the book itself) wouldn't care about such grown up things.
My pet theory is that it's not the music, it's the distribution. The printing press killed metrical complexity because no one could successfully perform anything spicier than iambic pentameter from a book, meter died entirely by e. e. cummings because we were so bored of iambs, and then the vinyl record brought meter back in its full glory in the form of modern rap.
> The printing press killed metrical complexity because no one could successfully perform anything spicier than iambic pentameter from a book
This is completely backwards. Meter isn't something you add to the poem for purposes of performance. It's a part of the poem, and if you read the poem aloud, the meter will make itself known. (Or, of course, the poem might be very badly written, but that's not a typical case.)
Here's some poetry in which iambs are not involved:
-----
There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;
and such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;
with a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,
as he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.
Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do,
and I turned my head -- and there watching him was the lady that's known as Lou.
His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,
so the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands -- my God! but that man could play!
The unsongbook link isn't a non-sequitur; Uriel's knock-knock joke in that chapter is taken from the end of Kipling's poem "The Hymn of Breaking Strain":
> “A SPIDER BEING BROKEN, OR BECAUSE OF BEING BROKEN, RISE UP AND BUILD ANEW.”
> In spite of being broken / or because of being broken / rise up and build anew.
No idea about the connection between the Parable of the Talents post and Chesterton, though, unless there's some hidden kabbalistic meaning.
I have to say the meter on this one is pretty janky. The last line is way longer than the opening two, and also not in trimester. Also the first two lines have different types of metrical feet in them (I think, although I'm honestly puzzled as to how precisely they should be read).
Agree about the last line; if you don't insist that it's a limerick the pithiness of the accusation makes it more tolerable.
I didn't have a problem with the first two, though as you say they are not trimeter. I read them with stress on [Holmes, Brown, real, deal] and [Solv, crimes, clues, feel], with "real", "deal" and "feel" sort of stretched to twoish syllables, and as such they seemed a perfectly sound couplet.
Free verse goes back a little further than Walt Whitman! William Blake (1757-1827) wrote his epics in free verse, and before him even there was Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart (1722-1771), best remembered now for the lines about his cat Jeffrey ("For when he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness").
But I can't agree that the sonnet was exhausted in Shakespeare's time. Percy Shelley, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, e.e. cummings, and Robinson Jeffers, among others, showed that there was still room for invention in the form. Then there is "The Aeronaut to His Lady":
I
Through
Blue
Sky
Fly
To
You.
Why?
Sweet
Love,
Feet
Move
So
Slow!
(I also think there is a notable use for what Wood regards as training poetry: Both rhyme and meter are tremendous aids to memory, making it much easier to learn a poem by heart and recite it aloud without needing a book to read it from. And doing that greatly enhances one's sense for the language in which a poem is written. I've memorized more English verse than I can easily count, from Wyatt to Thomas, and I consider the body of it a prize possession.)
When it comes to the sonnet, don't forget Edna St. Vincent Millay! (Excuse the periods to keep the double line spacing — Substack seems to want to delete extra line spaces.)
.
Sonnet Number 5
.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain,
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
.
.
But I also think her free verse is brilliant...
.
Spring
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
.
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.
I certainly agree that Millay is a notable writer of sonnets, though I should have thought first of "Euclid alone hath looked on beauty bare." But I'm afraid none of her verse has ever spoken to me enough to get into my memory, either spontaneously or by conscious practice; so when I thought of "poets who wrote sonnets" I thought first of those I had memorized. (For similar reasons, I started with Shelley rather than Wordsworth, though Wordsworth wrote more sonnets!) This is a matter of my personal taste and not of aesthetic judgment; I don't wish to suggest that Millay is a lesser poet.
I wouldn't be able to memorize her "Spring," but then I've never been able to memorize cummings's "She being brand-," a poem I like tremendously.
Train travel is truly dead then:
My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing;
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going.
My mother used to like to say out"Abou Ben Adhem" and "If" (a copy of which hung in the laundry room, oddly, but that's actually a good place to capture attention) and "The Highwayman" (the moon will always and only be a ghostly galleon to me) and "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere". Her own personal "best-loved" sentimental verses. I was captivated by Anne of Green Gables so spent an afternoon memorizing "The Lady of Shalott" so I could declaim it like Anne did; at this point phrases of it occasionally still flit through my head when I am seated in a riparian area, and it rather remains an element of what I consider most "decorative" if ineffable ... In school, we were told to memorize "In Flanders Fields" without being told that it was to do with WW1.
I had to smile when the review quoted Wood on the subject of which newer forms of poetry would in future be heard in "living rooms". As if (the noble example of rap excepted, of course!).
The last time somebody talked poetry at me as a part of regular conversation - "Hail to thee blithe Spirit" upon greeting, or the like - was years ago, and she'd be over ninety by now I should think. The preoccupation of another age.
Ha! my father hung "If" in our downstairs toilet! (I mean on the wall, not, you know, in the toilet...) I knew it by heart by the time I was ten.
I keep a very cool head doing laundry!
Auden and Merrill both sweated over their sonnets
An art form can fall out of fashion, but it can never be exhausted. That's an excuse made by artists lacking creativity, because being novel is easier than being original.
A+
The 20th century poets really did manage to saw off the branch they sat on. And now it seems like most poets aren't even properly trained at all. They're trained more in criticism and analysis than actually producing and it shows. Especially in their emphasis of ideas (especially correct ideas) over performance or technique.
I recall the phrase"self-licking icecream cone" being used to describe contemporary poetry.
True for a lot of academic "high" literature.
Twenty first century poets are exceptionally well trained and skilled in both meter and rhyme scheme, and remarkably well paid due to the difficulty of their art. They are, of course, not contemporaneously regarded as poets- but neither was Shakespeare. This may still be the end of an era- I would not be stunned if MF Doom wrote
> One for the money, two for the better green
> 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine
at the peak of human achievement in this art, and from here forward the robots will be the only poets of note.
Yeah, reading this review I couldn't help but think modern "poetry" seems to be bitterly reactionary to the success of the true successor to properly metered and rhymed prose--just about every form of modern music with words--and does everything in its power to be artificially formless and difficult so as to be deliberately exclusionary (which is fine but we're all also free to think of them as pretentious jackasses).
It’s not intentionally exclusive, it’s intentionally inclusive. Bad free verse can be produced by people without a scrap of talent or creativity. That allows a nexus of academia and publishing to promote, hire and sell courses to whomever they want. Rhyme and meter are much more of a barrier to entry, and would never let you give an award to safeguarding-policy woman.
I think "Two for the better green" clashes metrically with "one for the money." The 'better' screws up the mellifluousness.
You're just using the wrong metric.
"Bum babababum, BUM BUM babababum"
The obvious comparison point is “One for the money, two for the show,” which is BUM ba ba BUM bum, BUM ba ba BUM. “better green” adds two extra syllables and your proposed scan seems to suggest putting emphasis on “for” in addition to “two,” which doesn’t work.
It absolutely works. Emphasizing and holding 'for' builds drama for what it's for.
(One for the Money Two for the Show is Bum babababum, Bum bababum. No BUMs at all.)
((Maybe I need to learn some musical notation at some point.))
(((I'm linking The Witch's Promise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrGlfeA-JdY
"OOOne for the Mo-ney, Two for The SHOOO-ohohOhohohOOO-OOoh.")))
I think we may be taking past each other here, but to try to be more specific: in the common phrase “One for the money / two for the show / three to get ready / and four to go!”, you wouldn’t metrically characterize “one for the money” as “Bum babababum,” because “money” is a trochee - like the initial monosyllable “one,” it’s metrically stressed.
You're looking at the meter incorrectly. Think of it in an ABAB pattern, not an AAAA pattern. There is no correspondence between the first half of a line and the second half, but there is a correspondence between the first half of line 1 and the first half of line 2.
Yeah, I'm constantly surprised that people don't realize rap lyrics are incredibly complex. At least in terms of language use, it's by far the most intellectual of musical genres.
There is a wide range in the practitioners, some of whom are absolutely doing amazing things with the words and the wordplay, and some of whom are doing something else.
IMO Failed attempts at rhyme and meter, or the substition of assonance and slant rhyme for the same, are worse than no attempts: they come across as suggestive that the people making them are simply not conversant with the underlying constraints (or not competent enough to adhere to them, or too lazy to bother) rather than deliberately subverting them.
Rappers tend to group themselves with music. But that said I agree that rap is a vibrant form of poetry. There's some interesting theorycraft around it too. In my ideal world everyone would acknowledge this but there's a lot of snobbery around what poetry is. I really think the entire Spoken Word movement is just "rap but bougie."
Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that the academics seem to leave rap alone?
I think it's right that they group themselves with music.
OTOH, I'm basically unfamiliar with rap. But from my experience many poetic musicians ARE musicians who write poetry..usually for their own tunes.
But there's rap, which talks about sex, drugs, and money all the time.
I'm not sure what this is a reference to?
It's the heir to the poetic tradition. I'm serious. Rhyme, meter, the disreputable aspects of life.
I agree rap is a form of poetry and one of the few vigorous ones in the US right now.
I have to agree that rap is a poetic form. In fact it's rather in the spirit of Homer, being a form of verse that invites improvisation. I remember back around 1990, before I had ever heard of "rap," riding the trolley home from work, I heard a young black man inviting a group of marines to bet on the shell game—in very fluent, strongly rhythmic language, that was hard not to get caught up by even when I didn't understand everything he said (too fast and in an unfamiliar accent). And it struck me that I was hearing a living example of oral poetry . . .
I remember that "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" feeling I got when I read about those freak hoes, their stank pussy smelling like Cool Ranch Doritos.
The young rationalists should totally have an old-fashioned poetry recital. Get memorizing!
FWIW, most of the poetry I memorized I either learned as a child, or was written by Tolkien. (My college English teacher said (approx.) "That's just heroic couplets. But it's well done.".)
Ah, the patronizingly backhanded approval of the college English teacher!
I just read all the lyrics, thinking I might give it a try. Not much to work with here in Rationalistland though -- main thing is competitiveness
:************
When I monopolize I throw your ass off the boardwark
Fag, you ain't play sports but always at the ball park?
Type of nigga rocking Crocs at the fucking Walmart?
*********
So we'd be doing IQ ambushing:
My forebrain so bulbous use Yudkowski for my hat
Anhyone else got any lines?
> The problem is that drugs and money are not very important to me, and currently sex isn't either.
> I just read all the lyrics, thinking I might give it a try.
I mean, there's definitely alt-hiphop out there that's softer than your typical gangsta rap. E.g. some of the stuff I like to listen to includes:
-- "paperlove" by Chrosky (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fLl2ZoC3wM) (https://genius.com/Chrosky-paperlove-lyrics)
-- "the hobby swapping problem" by Headhaunter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8EEr2jkWvU) (https://genius.com/Headhaunter-the-hobby-swapping-problem-lyrics)
-- "vinyl" by love-sad kid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9TDT7fofL0) (https://genius.com/Love-sadkid-vinyl-lyrics)
Also, what lyrics are you quoting above? Supposedly there's a group called "The Young Rationalists"? But DDG and google isn't turning up any results. Am I misunderstanding the thread?
I don't have anything but I want the next line to end with cat.
Yudkowsky writes the sequences, filling up the room
But people still ain't sure about the AI doom
Scott Alexander stared down the New York Times
But now he's changing diapers so got no time for rhymes
Econ's a good thing, Hanson's a smart guy
But redistributin' ladies is never gonna fly
Yeah it's a thought experiment but the poor clown
Has got that one thing used to take his butt down
Tyler Cowen's good at picking smart people really really fast
But dude's a big feminist, so he can kiss my hat
Aella gets more data cause no IRB to slow
Shares lots of spicy stuff for all of us to know
Scam Bankster Friedman was the crook of the bunch
Stole everyone's crypto, used it to buy his lunch
Roko made a basilisk, or talked about it just the same
Don't help it come to life, universe of pain.
Sneer Club gonna post this, talk shit about my rap
But I don't care cause I got lotsa dough to tap
I ain't gonna sell no double album with Death Row/But I had some fun freestylin', that's all you need to know
PEACE!
Hey fella
I bet you're still livin' in your parents' cellar
Downloadin' pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar
And posting "Me Too" like some brain-dead AOLer
You're just about as useless as JPEGs to Helen Keller
https://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos?si=K-Jfwi0TuRJUhOOJ
Yes, but more broadly, the enormous surge of popular vocal music since mid-19c seized a lot of the traditional territory of poetry
You may have hit the nail on the head there.
When I pay attention to rap I'm often blown away by the rapper's inventiveness and vindictive passion. The problem is that drugs and money are not very important to me, and currently sex isn't either.
That's fair. It is the closest thing to traditional rhymed poetry that's popular now, but that doesn't mean it covers the same themes.
Yeah, back when I was in a relationship they were always more into it than I was. Made for some funny scenes.
The real thing that killed 20th century poetry is alternative forms. Many people will prefer to play a video (game?) than either to listen to or to write poetry. And now it's in the process of killing off the short story (by killing the magazines) and the novel. I expect if virtual reality is ever common that novels will be totally marginalized.
Popular poetry has remained extremely successful throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. It's just that the kinds of people who talk about "poetry" have decided that the kind of poetry that has remained popular, song lyrics, doesn't count for some reason.
Honestly my favorite review yet, even though it's less ambitious than many others. It's clear, to the point, and educational. I immediately purchased a copy of the book as I've been interested in educating myself on poetry more and this seems like a great resource.
The distinction between knowledge needed for training and knowledge needed for execution is real. I've tried educating myself by reading great and varied poetry, and while it's helped me critically analyze poetry and has been generally edifying, it's been useless in helping me understand how to write poetry.
I think this one's by Scott himself.
Wood’s point that rhyming and metered verse are good training reminds me of what T.S. Eliot said, “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.” The best free verse has its own internal requirements: Whitman’s poetry always flows well, always feels somehow structured. I think people run into problems when they just chop up an insipid diary entry into lines.
Loved the line about how free verse is to poetry as free architecture is to sleeping in a ditch.
Free verse is like free solo rock climbing - nothing to catch you if you make a mistake.
Whole thing reminds me of the War Of The Romantics in nineteenth century Germany between supporters of Wagner and supporters of Brahms.
Both camps idolized Beethoven, but the Wagnerians saw him as a stepping stone, while Brahms and his followers saw him as an ideal.
And then Schoenberg comes and writes the essay, “Brahms, the Progressive” claiming that somehow Brahms was as much a stepping stone to the future as Wagner!
Huh, I never knew so-called "sadistic verses" are international and actually predate their Soviet incarnation (which is certainly post-War). I mean, I read about German "all the children" variety, but it's a bit different from "sadistic verses" in structure, while "Little Willies" seem to be almost exactly the same, only in Russian the hero is nameless, usually just "little boy" (and sometimes it's an old man instead).
Johnny was a chemist's son;
Johnny is no more
For what he thought was H2O
Was H2SO4
I enjoyed this very much! And it set my authorial spider sense tingling, calling it now this was (one of) Scott's reviews
I didn't notice it until the comments mentioned it, but this prose is in Scott Meter.
It's not playful enough to be by Scott. And Scott often makes transitions by asking questions, then answering them: "So is that the entire explanation -- the hypothalamus manages it?" [Then, new paragraph] "John Bloke argues persuasively that there is much more to it. . . .In a book amusingly entitled . . . "
I thought maybe this re 1917 was intended as a joke? - "... the proletariat really did seem to have some grievances that needed to be resolved by a government more in tune with their best interests." I mean, there was no proletariat to speak of, but perhaps a handful of individuals felt like, finally, you're on my wavelength.
Although they didn't participate in the revolution, the revolution was decided in the cities, which had a normal for the period number of proletariat per capita. (The fact that factory workers only opposed the Bolsheviks when they participated at all renders it all moot, of course. It's a joke relative to propaganda, not the truth.)
Wikipedia on "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking": Shortly after, on January 7, 1860, the Saturday Press published a response to that review titled "All About a Mocking-Bird", celebrating Whitman's poem.[7] This article may have been written by Whitman himself.
I've just finished the review and I'd wager my last wooden nickel that this was Scott. If so, I hope he'll tell us how he ever came by the 1936 Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book. Yard sale? Giveaway table at the library? I kind of want to get it especially so I can read the section on meter, which has always made me cross and I'm not even a poetaster. I want to read the curated selection of bad Browning. But I fear there may be a run on the book, online.
When I was a child, the elderly used to tell me not to take any wooden nickels.
I think they must have been in greater circulation at one time!
I shall look forward to receiving your wooden nickel, for I will take the other side of that bet. I find the subject matter to be interesting to Scott, but the way it was written doesn't seem like him at all.
I would also be willing to bet against all of your other wooden nickels, not just your last one.
I can only express my appreciation for this review with an aahhh of pleasure, like sliding into a hot bath. Beautifully written, and I appreciate the recommendation.
I agree passionately with Woods' rejection of archaic language. In part, rejecting old language is a process of forcing yourself to have real, original thoughts, rather than just repeating things that others have said. If we can be sure of one thing, it's that 21st century people don't generally yearn, so if that appears in their poems, it definitely doesn't express a true emotional experience.
I’m deeply confused by this claim. I can yearn for a lost love every day and twice on Sunday just as much as any early modern. It seems like a perfectly universally human experience to me. Maybe you just aren’t very comfortable with the word, rather than it being overly archaic.
This reminds me of the twitter debate over whether “delve” is a living word(in context of its overuse by ChatGPT)
Oh-oh, I delve into things a lot, but not into twitter or ChatGPT.
Filth.
That debate has made me self conscious every time I use delve, which I've caught myself doing at least 3 times since I came across the debate. The most embarrassing of those times was in a prompt to an LLM!
Don't be self-conscious. Embrace the fact that you're a dirty delver.
More broadly I’ve always assumed that everyone of broadly Western cultural background feels everything that’s in Shakespeare, more or less tautologically.
Woah, I definitely disagree with this. I mean... I would agree that Shakespeare's great insight - that we are always in conversation with our own selves, and developing dynamically - has become well-known, and popularised and elaborated through via lots of psychological theories in the 20thC. But there are a zillion details in Shakespeare, and I doubt anyone has all of them in their native basic emotional palette.
Remember Scott's done a bunch of posts on really deep variation in how people experience the world. His example of the guy who didn't realise until adulthood that you could have food preferences is really iconic, but there are lots and lots of similar examples. I mean, colour perception is the one that bends my mind. People love to beard-strokingly ask, does the colour red look the same to you as it does to me? [hammer hitting head emoji] [hammer hitting head emoji] [hammer hitting head emoji] Colour blindness tells us that it can't be. There are obviously about 1/20 people for whom red doesn't look the same.
Now, if many thinkers fail to register the differences in human experience on a level as basic and obvious as the qualia involved in the most well-known pathology/neurodiversity... then it seems to me very likely that many thinkers are also failing to notice all of the more subtle differences in human experience. So, in this case, I'm suggesting that thinker you are failing to notice lots of cases where people don't experience/feel lots of the things that are in Shakespeare.
(I'm embracing a model here where lots of the things that we feel are things that we've learned to feel (been enculturated to feel). I think this is justified. I haven't even read King Lear yet, and I'm putting it off. I'm 43 and I'm not sure I'll get it yet, and I'm not sure I want to get it yet.)
> thinkers fail to register the differences in human experience on a level as basic and obvious as the qualia involved in the most well-known pathology/neurodiversity
I always assumed the qualia question has an implied "not counting obvious physical stuff like colour blindness (and regular blindness, etc)" clause.
Let's hope. But I've met one working academic philosopher who didn't seem to have thought about this (not his field, but he had to study the basics as part of his general courses, and the caveats weren't taught to him, nor did he get round to thinking of them later). And in my intro-to-philosophy classes (taken during high school), the question do-we-all-see-the-same-red was introduced to me without any caveats. It could be that my experience is too low-level to be representative, but check out here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/ The SEP entry on colour vision does not mention colourblindness, only a single reference to one paper.
I think they sort gloss over it around the mention of "Inter-Species Variation":
> A stronger form of this objection is what is called “the Inter-Species Variation”. Allen concedes that this version is much harder to dismiss: Color perception varies much more dramatically across the animal kingdom than it does amongst human perceivers.
If I understand correctly, they don't care about colour blind people, because they're only concerned with "normal observers".
Oh, yeah, I see. And later in the entry it has this:
"Finally, another difficulty...it has become increasingly more difficult to specify normal observers, and standard viewing conditions...we have found that in fact, as things stand, there is a wide range of variation among competent color perceivers."
That is to say, yes, lots of the early theories did have this problem (of ignoring colourblindness and other variation in colour vision), and some philosophers have noticed the problem, too.
It would be reasonable to take a more sanguine view of this than me, but I still see this as an example of armchair philosophising, cut off from empirical evidence, where the philosophers say: Let's first imagine that everyone is normal. By which I mean, obviously, just like me. Now, what follows is... It's a bad mode of thinking, which philosophy is gradually moving away from, but still infects lots of theories.
Anyway, that's just me editorialising far beyond the bounds of what I actually know. What I DO know is this: there exist a whole bunch of philosophical theories of colour that deliberately excluded a really obvious bit of variation that exists all around us. And, colour vision is much more interesting than that! I just read this amazing book by Ed Yong called Immense World, about how animals have different senses, which means that they are negotiating quite different worlds, even when they're in the same physical space. It's great, if you're interested in that kind of thing, you should definitely check it out.
Rejecting old language is as bad as embracing it. Neither is a good idea, and there are contexts where either it the appropriate thing to do. The same for any particular poetic style. Sonnets can be great for describing a rather static form, or for doing a "freeze frame" of something more active. But it's not a form that has much bounce to it. (Saying all the good sonnets have already been written is just lack of imagination...but there are lots of things that sonnets aren't the correct form to talk about with.)
"Rejecting old language is as bad as embracing it."
Haha, nup! I know what you mean, but I don't agree with this. For me, this is a statistical question. If you had a balanced population of old language embracers and old language rejectors, each bubbling with their own pathologies, then yes, I'd say you're right. But in fact, that's not the problem we face.
The problem we face is this. In day-to-day life, people don't use old language. That's just because it's old. When trying to create poetry, people generally make three mistakes. (1) They fail to accurately perceive the things/emotions they want to write about. (2) They use cliched language to describe the things/emotions they want to write about. (3) They try too hard to signal that they are doing Art. All three of these problems in practice lead people to use old-fashioned language in a way that is inauthentic, and generally not good for their writing.
Thus, I remain convinced that cleansing your writing of archaisms is *in practice* an effective way for 99% of writers to get better.
Though no poet, I disagree with thee, in that thou shouldst choose words to reflect properly thine intent and flavor. https://xkcd.com/1771/
Thou speakest to me in wordes both archaic and electricke. I christen thy style: Electric Arrkist!
Notable 21st century show Bojack Horseman featured the line "Tangled Fog of Pulsating Yearning in the Shape of a Woman." It's still current.
Ha, yeah, fair point. Yearn is definitely still part of the language.
What I mean is that "yearn" is now almost always used as a kind of heightened, poetic language. The metaphors of "tangled fog" and "pulsating yearning" are not exactly day-to-day expressions! So I think that when a writer these days is experiencing a feeling, they're very unlikely to be verbalising their immediate experience in terms of 'yearn'. And one of the things you have to learn to do as a writer is to first just... say what you're thinking/feeling. It's much harder to do than you might imagine! And part of the reason it's hard to do is that people often reach for cliches - like "yearning." If Bojack was to express what he was feeling directly, he might use a word like want, desire, or lust.
(When you do poetry, you might well choose a higher-register or weirder word like yearn. But you should only do that once you've embraced the discipline of being able to express something directly. At least, that's what I think!)
I liked his point about song lyrics. It seems to me that to be a popular poet today, you need to put it to music, like Taylor Swift, perhaps, or Lin-Manuel Miranda. Perhaps that's because music has other things going for it, and is easy enough to distribute today?
Exactly.
There aren't any more epics, but there are fantasy trilogies. Art forms die off, but something else that fills the same need often pops up.
The focus on making a fantasy trilogy epic results in some of the most famous attempted ones remaining unfinished. Aficionados of the old kind of epics are apt to be left cold by them https://starsbeetlesandfools.blogspot.com/2012/06/suggested-readings-in-fantasy.html
I'm not saying the Lord of the Rings necessarily stands on the same level as the Iliad, but the genre's probably the closest approximation IMHO--people like big long stories full of larger-than-life characters. Who knows what we'll be reading in 3000 years? Maybe the great epic hasn't been written yet.
As for the unfinished problem...yeah, it definitely is a big issue. With time, a lot of their names will vanish in the wind.
The Iliad has the advantage of sitting within another set of well known stories and leaving itself unfinished. Perhaps the Odyssey is a better comparison for a story that actually comes to an end? Although it's a bit more of a power/wish fulfilment fantasy than an epic, so it gets away with a simple "kill em all" ending with no repurcussions.
I'm here in the comments to eventually write a brief comment on Milton, but I'll stop here to say we have a true epic in English. It's Paradise Lost.
Sure, but it was written in 1667.
Thank you for the link, now I have another enemy to add to my little list (no, only joking, I don't bother keeping lists of enemies because I'm no good at names - I just have vague cloudy intimations of "that guy who did that dumb thing, grrr").
Many of the favourable recommendations he/she/they gave, I agreed with. Some I went "oh, you didn't like that? why?" and for their Tolkien two thumbs-down I was definitely interested enough to clicky-clicky through to their Goodreads review.
Turns out Our Reviewer is maybe slightly thin-skinned (though I say it as shouldn't), because in response to the very mild push-back on their review of Tolkien, they let loose with:
"Well, you certainly must judge for yourself whether dualistic morality, simplistic character motivations, plot coupons, false nostalgia, xenophobia, technophobia, treacly romance, condescension, and an obsession with arbitrary details that upset the pacing of the story are the attributes of a good book."
Well ackshully, as the kids these days say, I *do*. I thought the romance was enough (as someone who is not interested in long descriptions of romantic sighs and kisses and moping and what have you, much less the "and then he raped her sixteen times that night and got his five servants to rape her afterwards" of GRR Martin), so plainly we have very different metrics for what counts as "successful romance". Xenophobia? Come on now, my friend, are you going to go off on an "Orcs are racist" rant?
I suppose, though, this is best indicated in their No. 1 slot goes to "Gormenghast". I agree that it's worth reading, but the first book is the best, the other two fall off and the third one falls flat on its face and everywhere else. You could easily just read the first volume and skip the other two.
Their list of disappointments is also very informative. Different strokes for different folks, indeed! I agree with them about the Xanth series, and Goodkind, and Jordan. I'm very surprised they didn't like McDonald, but they review "The Wise Woman and other stories" and not the more famous "Phantastes" or "Lilith", so the choice of book is as much to do with it as anything.
I get why Pratchett's jokes were a bit too much for them, but the Discworld series really is a major fantasy series and, when Pratchett got into his stride, exactly the kind of new take on the genre that was needed.
As to Tolkien, well, I've already mentioned it - " (an impressive intellectual exercise, but overall stodgy, unromantic, and convoluted)". For them, there is not the same beauty I found in it. I really, really would like to know their definition of "romance" - are they meaning the sense of Romantic versus Classical, or is it (sigh) "no sex and nudity, where my boobies and ass at?" "The Lord of the Rings" is a war story, in large part, so it's a bit like arguing "Where is all the romance and all the love affairs in 'All Quiet On The Western Front'?"
It's odd, because for many of the capsule reviews, they and I agree (I don't think I've seen recently anyone appreciating the Viriconium stories). Where we differ, we differ profoundly!
He seems to rank GRRM lower than Tolkien, so no I don't think he wanted more rape & boobs in Tolkien. Rather, he seems to blame Tolkien in part for later writers like GRRM. Based on his review of A Game of Thrones, he disapproves of the author writing his barely-disguised-fetishes, and wants "the allegorical romance of epic fantasy" in its ideals rather than grimdark cynicism.
I recently read someone quoting Tolkien about how Lord of the Rings was just the book he wrote where someone could give a greeting in the invented language & world that was his true focus*. I don't think any of Keely's recommended writers approach fantasy that way.
*I can't find the comment now, but Perplexity.ai pointed out this, with the relevant quote at the end:
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/tolkien-on-language-invention/
"the allegorical romance of epic fantasy"
I think we're getting at the root of the matter here. First, as to allegory, Tolkien was very clear that it was in no way, shape or form an allegory, so that's the first disjunction.
Second, what does Keely mean by the above? What is the "allegorical romance"? He very much likes the Gormenghast trilogy, where I think the first book is the best of the three and contains the most of the fantasy. He also likes E.R. Eddison's Zimiamvian Trilogy and The Worm Ouroboros very much (which I do myself) and I think there we are coming near to it.
If, by "romance", we mean "romantic love", there's not that much of it in The Worm Ouroboros. People may talk about the lack of women in Tolkien, but in TWO, there's only one named female character and she's not a love interest of anyone. So plainly there is a secondary sense of "romance" dong the heavy lifting here, and I think this snippet from the Wikipedia article on TWO is pertinent:
"All the books contain a romantic ethic of fame, fate and eternal recurrence, in which the supreme value is chivalry, both in the sense of heroism and in the sense of idealization of women."
Taking Gormenghast and Zimiamvia, I think that Keely's taste runs more towards a lush, indeed somewhat hot-house, style of fantasy; not the clear Northern spirit in the myths that attracted Lewis, or what Tolkien says about his own mythology:
"It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry."
Zimiamvia is more Mediterranean; the atmosphere is much different (and Gormenghast even more different still, it has the febrile atmosphere of the decaying and decadent great noble families and houses of Poe). I'm going off memory here, but it's that long, golden summer afternoon light that is perpetually kept by magic in a garden of Duke Barganax, where the hours pass without changing.
I think *that's* what Keely is looking for, or prefers; sex, but alluded to rather than overt, and a certain style of romantic approach that I would call rather 'gallantry' than 'chivalry'; larger than life heroes and villains that are outside the constraints of convention; let there be gods, very well, but rather as colourful additions than genuine belief (in TWO characters swear by the gods and refer to the gods, but there's little or no description of any events where the gods matter or affect everyday life; in Zimiamvia, the gods and goddesses are rather aspects or shadows of the Supreme God and Goddess who is the Eternal Feminine). Colour and heat and figures out of Greek tragedy, all heightened emotion and action above the petty common folk who are there only to be servants and subjects. "As for living, our servants will do that for us", as it were.
Tolkien gives short shrift to the Eternal Feminine; Aragorn and Arwen, as Beren and Luthien, are real lovers and real men and women (well, Mortals and Elves) who have a real love that leads to marriage and children, not the Wagnerian Death and Love notion of Zimiamvia.
And LoTR is too caught up with the common folk and their petty concerns, as well.
While I do enjoy and appreciate Zimiamvia, my preference is for Tolkien's world - the clear starry skies of a northwestern winter night, as against the pitiless noonday blaze of the summer sun over the Greek isles or Rome in marble and blood.
That latter eternal summer spoils rather quickly, to take the example that Moorcock explicitly makes in his "Gloriana" about his fantasy version of the Elizabethan Age, where the beginning of the end is when all the glamour curdles into decadence and a new, more sober and realistic, successor era is what brings real chance of happiness to all, including Gloriana herself.
Though I do think it's a bit thick to accuse Tolkien of "xenophobia" when the glory for Zimiamvia and TWO is "eternal war against fitting enemies", and the dead are resurrected at the end of TWO specifically so that the heroes can have their glorious battles all over again (glorious for the nobles and heroes, not so glorious for the foot soldiers and common people, but then the little people don't count in Eddison's world).
EDIT: Also, come on - "an obsession with arbitrary details that upset the pacing of the story" is a flaw of Tolkien? So what about this description of the presence chamber of the lord of Demonland?
"Surely no potentate of earth, not Croesus, not the great King, not Minos in his royal palace in Crete, not all the Pharaohs, not Queen Semiramis, nor all the Kings of Babylon and Nineveh had ever a throne room to compare in glory with that high presence chamber of the lords of Demonland. Its walls and pillars were of snow-white marble, every vein whereof was set with small gems: rubies, corals, garnets, and pink topaz. Seven pillars on either side bore up the shadowy vault of the roof; the roof-tree and the beams were of gold, curiously carved, the roof itself of mother-of-pearl. A side aisle ran behind each row of pillars, and seven paintings on the western side faced seven spacious windows on the east. At the end of the hall upon a dais stood three high seats, the arms of each composed of two hippogriffs wrought in gold, with wings spread, and the legs of the seats the legs of the hippogriffs; but the body of each high seat was a single jewel of monstrous size: the left-hand seat a black opal, asparkle with steel-blue fire, the next a fire-opal, as it were a burning coal, the third seat an alexandrite, purple like wine by night but deep sea-green by day. Ten more pillars stood in semicircle behind the high seats, bearing up above them and the dais a canopy of gold. The benches that ran from end to end of the lofty chamber were of cedar, inlaid with coral and ivory, and so were the tables that stood before the benches. The floor of the chamber was tesselated, of marble and green tourmaline, and on every square of tourmaline was carven the image of a fish: as the dolphin, the conger, the cat-fish, the salmon, the tunny, the squid, and other wonders of the deep. Hangings of tapestry were behind the high seats, worked with flowers, snake’s-head, snapdragon, dragon-mouth, and their kind; and on the dado below the windows were sculptures of birds and beasts and creeping things.
But a great wonder of this chamber, and a marvel to behold, was how the capital of every one of the four-and-twenty pillars was hewn from a single precious stone, carved by the hand of some sculptor of long ago into the living form of a monster: here was a harpy with screaming mouth, so wondrously cut in ochre-tinted jade it was a marvel to hear no scream from her: here in wine-yellow topaz a flying fire-drake: there a cockatrice made of a single ruby: there a star sapphire the colour of moonlight, cut for a cyclops, so that the rays of the star trembled from his single eye: salamanders, mermaids, chimaeras, wild men o’ the woods, leviathans, all hewn from faultless gems, thrice the bulk of a big man’s body, velvet-dark sapphires, chrysolite, beryl, amethyst, and the yellow zircon that is like transparent gold.
To give light to the presence chamber were seven escarbuncles, great as pumpkins, hung in order down the length of it, and nine fair moonstones standing in order on silver pedestals between the pillars on the dais. These jewels, drinking in the sunshine by day, gave it forth during the hours of darkness in a radiance of pink light and a soft effulgence as of moonbeams. And yet another marvel, the nether side of the canopy over the high seats was encrusted with lapis lazuli, and in that feigned dome of heaven burned the twelve signs of the zodiac, every star a diamond that shone with its own light."
It's a wonderfully lush and full description, but it's not getting us to the action any faster, now is it?
Yeah, I don't think it's a matter of "romantic love", but instead fantasy being larger than life and not striving for "realism". Keely doesn't always think of romanticism as a good thing though, since he praises Eddison by saying "unlike [Tolkien and Lewis], he was no sentimental romanticist".
As for being appropriate for different regions, I only read a little of Kipling's "Puck of Pook's Hill" (one of the recommendations) but that's very specifically fantasy for England: with a Germanic god brought over by the Anglo-Saxons shrinking with the rise of Christianity, and mostly being forgotten by the time the Normans conquer it. There's an implication that there was a romance between one of those Norman knights and an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman, but that time of their lives is entirely skipped over between two chapters, as if the audience of children in the story (and presumably an intended audience of children for the book itself) wouldn't care about such grown up things.
My pet theory is that it's not the music, it's the distribution. The printing press killed metrical complexity because no one could successfully perform anything spicier than iambic pentameter from a book, meter died entirely by e. e. cummings because we were so bored of iambs, and then the vinyl record brought meter back in its full glory in the form of modern rap.
> The printing press killed metrical complexity because no one could successfully perform anything spicier than iambic pentameter from a book
This is completely backwards. Meter isn't something you add to the poem for purposes of performance. It's a part of the poem, and if you read the poem aloud, the meter will make itself known. (Or, of course, the poem might be very badly written, but that's not a typical case.)
Here's some poetry in which iambs are not involved:
-----
There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;
and such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;
with a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,
as he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.
Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do,
and I turned my head -- and there watching him was the lady that's known as Lou.
His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,
so the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands -- my God! but that man could play!
I love the irony of ending with
> Will the blight kill the chestnut?
as a hopeful message.
Definitely a sad irony to leave us with!
Frost's poem was hopeful, it just happened to be totally incorrect.
Great review.
tanquam ex ungue leonem
You think so? I liked the review, but I didn't think this was him.
EDIT: Upon reflection, yeah, maybe. I can kinda see it.
EDIT 2: There are seemingly non sequitur links to unsongbook and slatestarcodex. Yeah, it's him, and he's not even trying too hard to hide it.
That's not a cloak; it's Bernoulli's highly recognizable neckerchief, and it covers almost nothing. I don't think a denial would be plausible.
dude, you're such a physicist
My official guess is that it isn't him.
This one isn't an option yet, but see: https://manifold.markets/TimothyJohnson5c16/were-any-of-the-2024-acx-book-revie
The unsongbook link isn't a non-sequitur; Uriel's knock-knock joke in that chapter is taken from the end of Kipling's poem "The Hymn of Breaking Strain":
> “A SPIDER BEING BROKEN, OR BECAUSE OF BEING BROKEN, RISE UP AND BUILD ANEW.”
> In spite of being broken / or because of being broken / rise up and build anew.
No idea about the connection between the Parable of the Talents post and Chesterton, though, unless there's some hidden kabbalistic meaning.
I can remember Harry Graham from my childhood, particularly
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes;
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven’t the heart to poke poor Billy.
Huh, so that's where the Gashlycrumb Tinies came from
My version was a bit crasser
Little Willy dressed in sashes
Fell in the fire and burned to ashes
After a while the room grew chilly
No one there to stir up Willy.
The printed version I saw had the different last line:
"But no one cared to poke up Willy."
Really interesting to read this right after the Marvel Comics review talking about innovation in storytelling structures.
That Chesterton limerick was rather clunky. By way of substitution, here’s a combined Arthur Conan Doyle/Chesterton limerick.
Holmes and Brown were the real deal,
Solving crimes by clues and feel,
Their writers however,
Who weren’t quite as clever
Thought Dreyfus was guilty and fairies were real
I have to say the meter on this one is pretty janky. The last line is way longer than the opening two, and also not in trimester. Also the first two lines have different types of metrical feet in them (I think, although I'm honestly puzzled as to how precisely they should be read).
Agree about the last line; if you don't insist that it's a limerick the pithiness of the accusation makes it more tolerable.
I didn't have a problem with the first two, though as you say they are not trimeter. I read them with stress on [Holmes, Brown, real, deal] and [Solv, crimes, clues, feel], with "real", "deal" and "feel" sort of stretched to twoish syllables, and as such they seemed a perfectly sound couplet.
IANAP though.