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.
The most popular poet of our age (songwriter Max Martin) has a very different view regarding << switching an ‘and’ for a ‘but’ in the refrain of a ballade is “unforgiveable” >>.
From https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/blank-space-what-kind-of-genius-is-max-martin : They are more inclined to fit the syllables to the sounds—a working method that Martin calls “melodic math”—and not worry too much about whether the resulting lines make sense. (The verses in “I Want It That Way,” for example, completely contradict the meaning of the chorus lines.)
"I Want It That Way" does indeed have word salad lyrics, but it seems to be possible to extract a consistent meaning: the singer clearly doesn't want to break up with his girlfriend, but he's being forced to (perhaps because one of them has to move far away), and in the chorus he says that it's okay if she tells him that their relationship was in fact "nothing but a heartbreak... nothing but a mistake", he's begging her not to tell him that she *wants* their relationship to have been doomed all along.
Do we think it's a coincidence that the decline in poetry in the "living room," as that quote says, coincides with the rise of widely sharable recordings of music? A lot of poetic structures of rhyme and rhythm survive there and get played with in many ways, some similar and some different. Before good quality recordings poems would have been much easier to share and distribute than music, but thereafter music has a richer medium for expression. There's just more variables to play with.
Side note: Even in the 1990s Alanis Morissette got some pushback for writing songs that didn't rhyme, as silly as that seems.
But yeah, I'd guess poetry's shifts in the 20th century were partly due to trying to remain relevant and distinct from music. After all, there's no musical equivalent to something like the works of e. e. cummings
Just like the invention of writing shifted poetry away from the more formulaic epics of oral tradition.
Or how painting shifted away from realism after the invention of the camera.
Really interesting point! And it rhymes with one I was thinking about yesterday, about how the rise of deepfakes and text-to-image generators like Dall-E, and whatever sort of generative AI ever comes around for music and video, will shift what people in the more traditional media of the early 21st century are doing.
I love the passage leading up to the line “ A few decades later, both Russia and poetry were unrecognizable.”
I also really liked how the few selections included here gave me a taste of both the history and development of poetry, and a way in to understand what line breaks might be doing in free verse, that I’ve never really understood, even though a few of my friends are contemporary poets.
> ...getting us to think about prose rhythms as well as verse ones.
There's definitely a case to be made that being aware of poetic meter can make your prose more enjoyable; I recently watched a documentary about an obscure video game challenge in which the video creator described a "frame-perfect punch-cancel pause-buffer dive method" (
https://youtu.be/pd5iofvLrIU?t=1331), and he mentioned in the comments that it was the most satisfying string of syllables he'd ever written. One of the replies correctly pointed out that the phrase was satisfying because it was, by accident, perfect dactyllic tetrameter.
Having a sense for the meter of words probably helps one to write better, and come up with words and phrases that are just a little bit more satisfying than their alternatives would have been.
Is that how it's spoken? Just reading it I should have guessed that all four feet were amphibrachs rather than dactyls. But none of those phrases is part of my vocabulary.
Aside from 'dive method', which is perhaps an ambiphrach, the stress is definitely on the first syllable of each pair of words the way Bismuth says it in the video (22:11); granted it's not part of my normal vocabulary either - or indeed, part of most people's - but I'd say 'dactyllic tetrameter' is a fair discription.
It wouldn't actually make a difference to the meter if they were all amphibrachs; you'd still have four beats separated by two weak syllables each.
The amphibrach analysis would notionally leave some fuzz at the beginning/ending of the line, but that's not unusual in poetry, even fairly rigid poetry.
I don't think that's valid. I mean, you could say that dactylic and anapestic are both strong beats separated by two weak beats, but a limerick is still anapestic, not dactylic.
"There once was a man from Nantucket" is in perfect amphibrachs, if you're counting that way.
The rest of that particular limerick is in irregular meter, again assuming you want to divide it into named feet:
.-..-..-.
.-..-..-.
.-..-
..-..-
..-..-..-.
You might notice that the only regularity here is that beats are separated by two weak syllables. (And, I guess, that a line must begin with at least one weak syllable. The two short lines here both end strong, and the long lines all end weak, but we know from other limericks that long lines don't necessarily end weak - and if they did, you'd have a hell of a time arguing that limericks are inherently anapestic. It may be a rule that short lines must end strong.)
I'm not sure what you'd classify as "contemporary poetry". Are you calling contemporary poetry anything written after rhyme and meter went out of fashion? Or are you limiting contemporary to 21st-century poetry? I can defend anything up to Flarf. Post-Flarf, I became a poetic reactionary. ;-)
Well, I might be an old man shouting at the sky, but...
I believe that a poem is a literary device for encapsulating moments of consciousness in ways that allow them to be shared with others. Meter and rhyme are secondary to this primary function, and they can either enhance or interfere with it depending on the skill of the poet.
I should clarify, that I'm talking about lyric poetry — a form of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings. Epic poetry is a whole different kettle of fish — but epic poems have mostly gone out of fashion. Of course, Derek Walcott tried to tackle the epic form (with mixed success IMHO) in his epic poem, *Homeros*.
Poems are like snapshots of the poet's inner life that either reflect on the external world or the poet's inner experience. Certainly, other genres of poems do not serve this purpose. For example, limericks are purely vehicles for conveying humor and have nothing to do with a poet's inner life. So, I'll admit that poetry doesn't *have* to be serious. But when we talk of the poet's art, we're mostly talking about the art of lyric poetry. A lyric poem doesn't necessarily have to be in the first person, nor does it need to convey just a single 'snapshot' of consciousness. It can convey a series of snapshots like a short film. It *can* be didactic, but generally, the rule is show, don't tell (though poets like Pablo Neruda and Czesław Miłosz managed to write didactic poems that are lyrical). But ultimately a lyric poem has no utilitarian purpose as would an essay or a great novel. But compactness of thought, phrase, and image, go a long way towards suggesting rather than explaining. Haiku takes this to the extreme, but I think it best shows what I'm talking about.
.
In this world
We walk on the roof of hell
Gazing at flowers
― Kobayashi Issa
.
I told you that to tell you this. Flarf isn't about conveying a poet's inner life to others. Flarf is about wordplay. Dan Hoy described it as "the first recognizable movement of the 21st century, as an in-joke among an elite clique, as a marketing strategy, and as offering a new way of reading creative writing. The act of writing flarf has been described as collaborating with the culture via the Web, as an imperialist or colonialist gesture, as an unexamined projection of self into others, as the conscious erasure of self or ego." Hmmm.
Here is an award-winning, highly-praised example of Flarf. I don't get anything from it. Maybe others would, but it's so outside the wavelength of my consciousness that it seems alien to me. But that's me.
.
The Led Zeppelin Experience
by K. Silem Mohammad
what are you retarted making fun of dead people?
if your popin shit like that i don't even know you
man I swear I would kick you're a$$ if I ever saw you
you or knew who the f*ck you are cuz no play?
you can't even make sense when I'm REALLY drunk
are you retarted serious question
not doing homework, thats for sure
go to a library! just look up Henry James duh
re: Dumb & Dumber: are you retarted, that movie was great
you sound excited about it. . . .
do you wanna see me puke? What are you retarted?
no (than whats your fucking problem)
well unless you are retarted like this dumb ho
then you know what napster is
so here is a list of some hot songs:
fuck i don't know any songs. . . .
you are an anus mouth , are you retarted
this has damage bonus fruitcake
fuck up u are obviously have some kind of obsesion wit me
it's a wonder why your husband left you and you're all alone
you venture into my valley and you then ask for your life??
Well, Victorian and Edwardian nonsense poems make sense on a certain level. And limericks make sense in that they're telling a joke. I find that lacking in Flarf.
For instance, Lewis Carrol's *Jabberwocky* makes sense despite the made-up words — or rather it makes sense *because* of the made-up words. And Lear's *The Owl and the Pussycat* makes sense as a narrative despite the unlikely scenario of an owl and a cat in a beautiful pea-green boat.
While individual lines of a Flarf poem may make sense, the random text sources munged together make it difficult (at least for me) to derive any greater meaning — emotional or textual — from the poem. But the escape from meaning predated Flarf. John Ashbery and some of the other poets of the New York School were trying to apply the principles of Abstract Expression to poetry. I think they largely failed because AE is all about conveying raw emotion without images. OTOH, words arranged to subvert imagery can't (in my view) convey anything to a reader. I'll say. this for Ashbery: he writes in an extremely concise style, and one gets the feeling that meaning is eluding you before you grasp it. His stuff has a strange beauty to it...
.
The Tennis Court Oath
by John Ashbery
.
What had you been thinking about
the face studiously bloodied
heaven blotted region
I go on loving you like water but
there is a terrible breath in the way all of this
You were not elected president, yet won the race
All the way through fog and drizzle
When you read it was sincere the coasts
stammered with unintentional villages the
horse strains fatigued I guess . . . the calls . . .
I worry
.
the water beetle head
why of course reflecting all
then you redid you were breathing
I thought going down to mail this
of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard
you come through but
are incomparable the lovely tent
mystery you don’t want surrounded the real
you dance
in the spring there was clouds
...
.
Flarf has been compared to Dada, but despite its borderline nonsense, Dada can convey impressions through the mental associations that it provokes in a reader.
.
An Anna Blume (for Anna Flower)
by Kurt Schwitters
.
O you, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I
love you! – You your you you, I you, you me.
– We?
This (by the way) does not belong here.
Who are you, uncounted female? You are
– – are you? – The people say you were – let
them say, they don't know how the steeple stands.
You wear the hat on your feet and wander on
the hands, on your hands you wander.
Hello, your red dresses, sawed up in white folds.
Red I love Anna Flower, red I love you! – You
your you you, I you, you me. – We?
This (by the way) belongs in the cold embers.
Red flower, red Anna Flower, how do the people say?
Prize question:
1. Anna Flower has a bird
2. Anna Flower is red.
3. What color is the bird?
Blue is the color of your yellow hair.
Red is the coo of your green bird.
You plain girl in everyday wear, you dear green
animal, I love you! – You your you you, I you, you
me, – We?
This (by the way) belongs in the box of embers.
Anna Flower! Anna, a-n-n-a, I trickle your
name. Your name drips like soft beef tallow.
Do you know, Anna, do you know yet?
One can read you backward, too, and you, you
most marvelous of all, you're the same, forwards and backward:
The contemporary poets I knew (about a decade ago now) were largely into very traditional forms...from all over the world. I'm not sure how accurate their modeling was, but some were very effective. I still regret not hearing "The Flute of Aki Moro" often enough to memorize it. But you needed to stress the lines appropriately to get the right effect.
My favorite two were Paul Edwin Zimmer and Paladin. Both, however, are dead now, so perhaps they're no longer contemporary. In both cases performance, i.e. style of reading, was a big element, as when I've heard others reading the same works they didn't impress me.
This review was...fine? No glaring issues, average writing, adequate summary that tells me What's It All About. Not incredibly engaging, although at least I wasn't masochistically struggling to reach the end (appreciate the brevity too, thanks). I've got epsilon interest in poetry, but it did interest me to learn a little about the history of free verse: that tiny epsilon is firmly for Classic <s>Rock</s> Poetry, with Real Rhymes and Meters. Free verse is to poetry what mumblerap is to oldschool hip-hop. I feel like this also carries over into other modern permutations of art, like current high fashion, music, or painting. That is, I might not be particularly interested in The Classics of [artform/genre], yet can at least appreciate what they're aiming for and why they've stuck around as Important...but the current instantiations are incomprehensibly alienating. If it takes a literal university course to understand art, that's just Not For Me. (Always weird to contrast to, say, classical music too, which ended up with an unfortunate elitist reputation despite being eminently accessible to the musical-neophyte masses.)
I also really liked the digression into Why Books, Not Internet? Curation is a vastly underrated form of utility. Wikipedia has a vast trove of useful information on sundry topics (unless David Gerard touched it)...too vast though, and oriented towards encyclopaedic completeness rather than layman accessibility. Good books that perform such distillation and enunciation are highly valuable for it, even if their "knowledge cutoff" date necessarily limits comprehensiveness. Could write a whole article on the tension between these two competing axioms. (And I very much appreciate resisting the too-obvious bait to shoehorn in something about how This Is Just Like LLMs, which is left as an exercise for the reader.)
I like that. Interesting that it has such regular rhyme and meter, might even qualify as the dreaded category “verse”. Given that he seemed to think versification was only for apprenticeship work.
There was a lot of interest in Anglo-Saxon prosody in the 30s. The reviewer is right that this is a key hinge moment for the social history of poetry. (And its strange death.)
"Wikipedia could tell you the difference between masculine, feminine, and triple rhymes (rhyming pairs of words ending in zero, one, or two stressed syllables, respectively). "
That should be "zero, one, or two UNstressed syllables".
I wanted to do a quick sanity check on the article's claim that "assonance and consonance are at least as common as true rhymes" in contemporary music in most genres, and I checked one song by Taylor Swift ("pop") and one by Matthew Ebel ("nerd music").
There was indeed a lot of rhyme-by-assonance, much more so in Swift than in Ebel. But what was more interesting was that the Swift song used a flawed rhyme that didn't belong to any of the categories of flawed rhyme mentioned in this piece.
𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦, 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸, 𝘣𝘢𝘣𝘺-𝘺?
𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘮𝘦-𝘦
The problem here is that while "-by" and "me" are perfect rhymes insofar as they share identical vowels (and end in those vowels), -by is not the rhyme-relevant part of "baby" because "baby" is stressed on the first syllable.
This flaw in the (broadly-construed) meter actually leads to a musical flaw as the melody, which is (naturally enough) synched to the rhyme scheme, forces stress to fall on the weak syllable of "baby".
> My sole opinion on free verse came from a pithy G.K. Chesterton quote (“Free verse? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch ‘free architecture’.”), but reading this book showed me how and why someone might hypothetically like it, and what someone might hypothetically get out of reading it. He didn’t convince me to like it. But I can’t quite sneer like I used to.
Of course, you can't reveal your name, but for the others who might hold this opinion, what do you think of this free verse poem? It may not quite be free verse, though, because Thomas inserts sprung rhythm into lines 2, 3, and 5 of each stanza — but he allows the natural rhythm of the English language to drive this the poem like pile driver, but without the annoying meter of a pile driver.
.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
by Dylan Thomas
.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Or what do you think of W.S. Merwin's *The Sound of the Light*? This is the freest of free verse without any punctuation, and the lines purposely wrap about line breaks to make this poem run inexorably until its finish. Reading it out loud the only place to catch your breath is between the the stanzas, but the long sentence of this poem runs across the stanzas. This formless form gives a breathless dreamy feeling of an inner monologue of memories...
.
I hear sheep running on the path of broken limestone
through brown curled leaves fallen early from walnut limbs
at the end of the summer how light the bony
flutter of their passage I can
hear their coughing their calling and their wheezing even the warm
greased wool rubbing on the worn walls I hear them
passing passing in the hollow lane and there is still time
.
the shuffle of black shoes of women climbing
stone ledges to church keeps flowing up the dazzling hill
around the grassy rustle of voices
on the far side of a slatted shutter
and the small waves go on whispering on the shingle
in the heat of an hour without wind it is Sunday
none of the sentences begins or ends there is time
.
again the unbroken rumble of trucks and the hiss
of brakes roll upward out of the avenue
I forget what season they are exploding through
what year the drill on the sidewalk is smashing
it is the year in which you are sitting there as you are
in the morning speaking to me and I hear
you through the burning day and I touch you
to be sure and there is still time there is still time
Thomas always wrote in meter, as far as I know. That poem is in iambic (de-DUM), with each verse containing lines of 5, 5, 2, 5, 5 feet.
For example, a line where the meter is perfect:
The HAND that WHIRLS the WATer IN the POOL - ten syllables, every second syllable stressed, perfect iambic pentameter.
English verse has always allowed a bit of variation in our meters, particularly in iambic meter. So many of the lines have an extra syllable, or a shift around, like this one:
The LIPS of TIME LEECH to the FOUNTain HEAD - see how the third foot got turned around? That's very acceptable. Shakespeare did it all the time.
The Merwin is a bit looser, but it's still got fixed pulses per line: 5, 5, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5. The meter is important: it pays off at the end of the poem, in the last three lines, where all of those "I"s and "you"s are stressed. We know they're stressed because of the rhythm that's been established in the previous stanzas, so suddenly the speed of the language slows down, and the I and you are highlighted, and it starts to become clear what the poem is about: a relationship between two people that he's holding onto. This meter is an element of the poem's meaning!
The placement of stresses is more fluid in this poem, but I'd put them like this:
I hear SHEEP RUNning on the PATH of BROKen LIMEstone
through BROWN curled LEAVES fallen EARly from WALnut LIMBS
at the END of the SUMmer how LIGHT the BOny
...then at the end, it gets much more plaintive:
YOU through the BURNing DAY and I touch YOU
to be SURE and there is STILL time there IS STILL TIME
Yes! Not to pile on, but I think it’s worth saying that Thomas’s strong classical prosody is a large part of why his work continues to move readers. The rhyme scheme, too, is loose but powerful, with Dickinson-style slant rhymes: flower destroyer fever; rocks wax sucks; pool sail: head blood; sores stars; etc.
Yeah. Absolutely not to pile on, because I've recently discovered just how *taught* all of this stuff is. I teach English in China to young children, and one of the tools I use as I'm teaching is rhyme. It helps right at the beginning, as they're learning phonics (hat, rhymes with bat, yes, they sound the same); and then it helps much more as they're moving beyond phonics into the wilds of English spelling (too rhymes with dew rhymes with through). What shocked me was that 7 year olds - who have already learned lots of Chinese poems at school - had never learned even the Chinese word for *rhyme* or understood the concept.
To help them understand, I read a Chinese poem but change the last word, the equivalent of "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to come." It was a real surprise to me how difficult it was for them to identify what the problem was. They can all tell me, "that's wrong", but surprisingly few can even vaguely point to why. Ut turns out that an idea as basic as rhyme really has to be taught.
And so with these poems, where the meter is a little more subtle, I now see that someone who hasn't been taught how to look for it wouldn't spot it. And these days, teachers might well choose not to teach those patterns...Which must make the whole argument over free verse absolutely mystifying to a large chunk of the popluation! Being of a fairly liberal mindset, I can't work up the energy to bloviate about how terrible it is that teachers are failing to pass on our precious cultural heritage. But I do think it's a shame if they're not teaching something. Like, if schools encouraged more kids to rap, that would also be great (mystifiying to me, because I don't understand flow at all). But so far as I can tell, they don't.
Yet classical Chinese poetry was written in rhymes and was meant to be sung or recited to music. These poems (generally) no longer rhyme in modern Chinese. And the meter of the classical poems has changed as the pronunciation (tones) of the words changed. Yet Chinese students are taught to recite the famous poems of Li Bai and Du Fu. Maybe rhyme and meter matter less than you think?
For instance, I can appreciate classical Chinese poetry by image alone without the accouterments of rhyme and meter — and if I tried to convey the original rhyme scheme in English the poem would be clunky and awkward. And translating the rhythm of monosyllabic Middle Chinese would be impossible in English without reference to the tones. My translation of Du Mu's *Egrets*...
.
EGRETS
by Du Mu (杜牧)
.
snow-clad in snow feathers — black jade beaks
a flock of them stab their reflections — catch the little fish
alarmed they fly away — bright against the blue-green hills
Fascinating to learn that Classical Chinese poetry rhymed originally but no longer does due to phonic changes, am I understanding that right? And is it the case that the original idiographic text can be read in Cantonese or any other Chinese language and even Japanese, reading their own utterly different words for the shared characters?
It is certainly not free verse. The basic rhythm is iambic throughout: The FORCE that THROUGHT the GREEN fuse DRIVES the FLOWer. Until the last line, which is—I think dactylic, with the accents falling three syllables apart. The lines that start with "Drives" are trochaic in the first feet, and STIRS the QUICKsand seems to start with two trochees, but that sort of variation in iambic verse has been around for centuries in English. And there's a regular pattern of five, five, two, five, and five feet.
There isn't any rhyme, but a lot of verses have slant rhyme, like flower/destroyer/fever or rocks/wax/suchs.
Thomas was actually skilled in the traditional forms; consider for example "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," a perfect villanelle.
My problem with manuals of poetic meters is that they all divide up English words into stressed and unstressed syllables. To my ear, there are at least *three* and possibly *four* distinct stresses in spoken English. This becomes apparent when one enunciates words that have more than two syllables. For instance, the word *certificate* seems to have four levels of stress. If we were to list the stress levels as 1 to 4, with 4 being the highest stress, certificate sounds like this: cer2-tif4-i1-cate3. Being a short vowel the *i* in the 3rd syllable is least stressed. The 1st syllable has a greater stress than the 3rd syllable because it's voiced longer. The highest stress is on the second syllable. The final syllable has more stress than either the 1st or 3rd, but not as much as 2nd. Sure, if we lump the two lowest stresses together and call them unstressed, and we lump the two highest stresses together and call them stressed, we can claim that the word *certificate* is made of two iambic feet. But what we're really doing is trying to fit English into meters that originated in languages which had much more regular stress patterns.
This idea is not original to me. It was pointed out to me by a native Mandarin speaker for whom English was a second language—but she was quite fluent in English. She said she could hear four "tones" in English. She said they were different from Mandarin — but, in order to learn English pronunciation, she found it useful to classify the different stress levels as tones. Once she pointed it out to me, I couldn't unhear it.
.
Shakespeare is considered to be the master of iambic verse. But when I read...
Sometimes the differences in stresses change the meaning of a phrase
without changing the meaning of any of the words in it. A1- soft2- ma2- chine4 is a machine that’s soft. A1 soft4 ma1-chine2 is a machine that makes softs.
i hear your numbers 1-4. i think your numbers are the sum or product of emphasis that’s built in to the pronunciation of each word, plus other emphasis added to words or parts of them to tweak the meaning a bit, express emotion, that sort of thing. it’s the music of spoken language.
The internal structure of a phrase determines what kind of prosody can or must be applied to it. There's lots of literature on this, though I can't point you to any of it.
(I should note that you didn't properly substantiate "without changing the meaning of any of the words in it" - in your first example, 𝘴𝘰𝘧𝘵 is an adjective meaning "opposite of hard" or "opposite of rough", but in the second example, 𝘴𝘰𝘧𝘵 is a noun. We can't know the meaning of 𝘴𝘰𝘧𝘵 in the second example, but it is definitely not the same as in the first example.)
You are right, *soft* doesn't mean the same thing in the 2 sentences, and I get that grammatical structure and other things also determines the prosody. So normally we say " a *fat* man," stessing the word *fat*, but if we had been discussing fat females and now wanted to contrast the situation of fat males, we might instead stress the last word, and say "a fat *man*." So the task for the good writer is to arrange words and sentences so that the music doesn't jangle.
There are hidden "true rules" that underpin iambic meter. These "true rules" can be extrapolated form the body of traditional poetry and can be described in many different ways that add up to the same result, or very similar results. But they are always much more complicated than "English has two stress levels and every foot must sound like ta-TA".
I learned Italian meter before I learned English meter. The two metrical traditions are not identical, but they're much more alike than the simplified way in which they're respectively described suggests. In both cases there are "true rules" that are more complicated than the surface ones, and when you explore them you'll discover surprising similarities between the two systems.
My personal way to describe the most important "true rule" of English iambic meter (again, my way is not the only way to understand it!) is that the first syllable in each foot is allowed to be stronger than one of its adjacent syllables, but is not allowed to be stronger than both of them.
There are a few cases where this principle breaks down. The main one is at the start of the line, or right after a pause in the middle of the line. Then there are other rules you can follow to decide when it's appropriate to put a "stress" there (that is, a syllable stronger than the one that follows). Different poets follow different rules there.
Another problem is, what if two adjacent syllables are equally strong? As far as I can tell that happens only in a British accent, never in an American accent (at least not with the strongest stress level, which you call "4"). If two succeeding syllables are truly equal in stress, a poet will be free to choose one of the two as the dominant one.
There are more rules, but I don't have time to explain them right now.
Nabokov wrote a wonderful book about poetry called "On Prosody." When he talks about lines that depart a bit from the established meter, he says that the words that fall on a stressed spot in the rhyme scheme, but are not stressed, nevertheless know that the stressed spot in the path is there. That seems right.
I'm very skeptical that in "compare thee", "thee" is no weaker than "pare". I don't think any poet would ever put "compare thee" in a position where "pare" is at the start of a foot in iambic meter.
Iit's like "compare you", the "you" is weaker.
Would you still read it that way after replacing "thee" with "you" ?
I'm also very skeptical that "thou art" has the strongest stress levels on "art". That doesn't sound like a natural way of pronouncing the line.
Hmmm. I hear you as being less stressed than thee. At least for me, I hold the thee longer than you, and in modern American spoken English we often shorten the oo in you to an ah.
And, yes, I would definitely stress the art more than the thou. OTOH, I would reverse with you are — with my natural inclination to pronounce it YOU-er.
Of course, your mileage may vary. I speak mostly with the Inland North north accent of American English but with some annoying Western New England speech habits (the obnoxious swamp Yankee nasal a sound, and placing glottal stops in words like Britain -- i.e. Brih-in).
Also, I didn't make it clear in my previous comment, the view that English has multiple stress levels is fairly common. Your Chinese friend probably didn't come up with that, she probably heard it somewhere.
It's a great way to analyze English meter.
But you can derive a functionally similar set of rules without that insight.
The fallacy of two grades. The ancients recognized only longs and shorts though there are really many gradations of length of syllables. In the same way most of the moderns, while recognizing that stress is the most important thing in modern metres, speak of two grades only, calling everything weak that is not strong. But in reality there are infinite gradations of stress, from the most penetrating scream to the faintest whisper; but in most instances it will be sufficient for our purposes to recognize four degrees which we may simply designate by the first four numbers:
4 strong
3 half-strong
2 half-weak
1 weak.
It is not always easy to apply these numbers to actually occurring syllables, and it is particularly difficult in many instances to distinguish between 3 and 2. Unfortunately we have no means of measuring stress objectively by instruments; we have nothing to go by except our ears; but then it is a kind of consolation that the poets themselves, whose lines we try to analyse, have been guided by nothing else but their ears-and after all, the human ear is a wonderfully delicate apparatus.
I personally see English as a language in which two succeeding syllables are always in a relationship of rising, falling, or equal stress. This is like thinking in terms of stress levels, with the advantage that you don't have to take a stand on how many stress levels exist.
I don't see that that's relevant. The structure of iambic verse, for example, is a series of weak-STRONG-weak-STRONG-weak-STRONG-weak-STRONG-weak-STRONG feet; but there's nothing in that description that requires all the weak feet to be equally week, or all the strong ones to be equally strong. Indeed a reading with only two stress levels is traditionally denigrated as "sing-song" and is stereotyped as a childish way of reading. Part of learning to write verse, or even of learning to read it, is developing sensitivity to the varied weakness or strength within the alternating pattern. But there IS that alternating pattern.
I don't hear the first line of Shakespeare's 18th sonnet the same way you do: To me the first foot seems to be a trochee, with the emphasis on SHALL (and thus on the asking of a question), but the third to be an iamb, with the emphasis on TO (and thus on the prepositional phrase that it introduces). Emphasizing THEE seems wrong, because it suggest "Shall I compare thee [rather than some other person]," which I don't think is the point Shakespeare is making (nor for that matter is he emphasizing "I," which would suggest [rather that someone else making the comparison]).
I might even suggest that the use of iambic rhythm to suggest putting the stress on TO is artful in that it brings the whole prepositional phrase into the foreground, and thus implies "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day [rather than to some other thing]?"
If you want iambic verse that seriously strains at the metrical skeleton, take a look for example at Wyatt's "They Flee from Me," with such lines as "With NAked FOOT STALKing IN my CHAMber" ...
There are definitely some cases in which different levels of stress are relevant.
Look at the following two lines:
(1) Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife
(2) With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear
They both sound like iambic pentameter (with so called "metric variations")
How about:
(3) Doth with a bare bodkin their fardels bear
Which has exactly the same stress pattern as (1) if you think in simplistic terms of strong-weak. Even the words are of the same length.
Then how come it sounds metrically wrong? How come (1) is fine, but If you put (3) in the middle of a poem in iambic pentameter it would ruin it. To my ears at least.
Insofar as there is a difference, I would attribute it to the grammatical structure. In (1), the structure is [Doth][with their death][bury][their parents' strife]; the word "death" is the end of a prepositional phrase with modifies "Doth" (that is, it's adverbial in force), so a brief pause there is natural. In (3), [Doth][with a bare bodkin][their fardels][bear] has a prepositional phrase that extends across the second and third feet, and pausing in the middle of such a phrase is unnatural (it's not [Doth][with a bare][bodkin]). An accented syllable immediately after a pause works, but if you don't have a pause, it's more natural to carry forward the alternation of wSwS. But it would be strange to say DOTH with a BARE bodKIN their FARdels BEAR.
I'll agree that you COULD read it as DOTH with a BARE BODkin their FARdels BEAR, but you really need a caesura between the two strong syllables, and that makes the sentence harder to parse, because "bodkin their fardels bear" isn't a meaningful grammatical structure. I think that's what produces the awkwardness you refer to.
I think I would suggest that the subtler variations of stress within the basic wSwSwSwSwS are largely products of English syntax and its effect on the flow of speech.
Of course we lose all that if we read the verse on the page without reciting it aloud. My feeling is that the shift to silent reading is part of what has helped to kill poetry.
(A somewhat similar thing seems to have happened in French. There is a traditional way of reading French verse, in which more letters are sounded and thus there are more syllables. But I lately listened to a recording of a francophone reading "Le Bateau ivre" that didn't do that, giving the first line, for example, as "Comme je déscendais des fleuves impassible" rather than "Com-me je déscendais des fleu-ves impassi-bles," and it just sounded wrong: it was no longer in hexameter and it just sounded like prose, without the steady sweep of syllables carrying the listener along like Rimbaud's boat.)
No, "doth with their death bury their parents' strife" can't be interpreted in iambs because "death" is immediately followed by another stressed syllable. This causes a very prominent caesura in the line.
You could call the weak-weak-strong sequence in "bury their parents'" "metrical variation", but I would say you're applying the wrong paradigm in that case. It's common in English poetry to have very free variation in how many weak syllables may appear between beats, though not so free that you can have zero where more than zero would normally appear. But in that case, do the analysis in terms of beats, not in terms of rigid feet.
My natural reading of the line goes more like -..--..-.- . "Doth" and "with" are both naturally weak, so it's not really clear where the poetic stress should fall.
"My natural reading of the line goes more like -..--..-.-"
Mine too, I mean it sounds like iambic pentameter in the sense that it would sound good if it were in the middle of a poem in iambic pentameter, not in the sense that every foot is an iamb.
I'm not sure I follow your comment; are you denying the existence of feet?
I don't think it makes sense to describe the situation in "doth with their death bury their parents' strife" as "free variation in how many weak syllables may appear between beats", because the syllable that has been "stolen" from the interval between "death" and "bury", magically reappears in the space between "bury" and "parents". This is no coincidence; you will very, very rarely find a line in early modern poetry in which the total number of syllables is "wrong".
Consider the line:
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
How many syllables are there? some would say 11, but there are only 10, obviously for Milton "disobedience" here has four syllables, something like dis-o-beed-yance, so the line has ten syllables as you'd expect.
Early modern era iambic pentameter nearly always has the correct number of syllables and therefore it makes sense to break it into 5 feet of 2 syllables, each of which is not always ta-TA. In 99% of cases in which a line apparently has the wrong number of syllables it's because the author doesn't count syllables in the same way as the person who makes that claim.
Syllables disappear even across words, for example a little further down in the same book:
To adore the Conqueror, who now beholds
obviously "to adore" is pronounced as two syllables, where "to" and the first syllable in "adore" are merged in pronunciation. So the foot still has two syllables and the line has ten.
The point is, in iambic pentameter the number of syllables is very regular, and therefore it makes a lot of sense to analyze the line as five feet each with 2 syllables. That to me is the "true" structure of the line.
Which, by the way, makes sense if you see poetry as related to song lyrics, as others pointed out in this thread. The poet is working with a fixed number of musical notes.
> I'm not sure I follow your comment; are you denying the existence of feet?
Feet are not a natural fit for English poetry, modern or ancient. The concept comes from studying the poetry of other languages.
> Which, by the way, makes sense if you see poetry as related to song lyrics, as others pointed out in this thread. The poet is working with a fixed number of musical notes.
Try listening to some songs before you make claims like this. Here are some lyrics to "Skip to my Lou", all set to the same music, obeying the same rhythm:
Lou, Lou, skip to my Lou,
Lou, Lou, skip to my Lou,
Lou, Lou, skip to my Lou,
Skip to my Lou my darling
Lost my partner, what'll I do?
Lost my partner, what'll I do?
Lost my partner, what'll I do?
Skip to my Lou my darling
I'll get another one, prettier than you
I'll get another one, prettier than you
I'll get another one, prettier than you
Skip to my Lou my darling
Fly's in the buttermilk, shoo fly shoo
Fly's in the buttermilk, shoo fly shoo
Fly's in the buttermilk, shoo fly shoo
Skip to my Lou my darling
It doesn't get a lot simpler than this. There are only two line structures, and one of those structures is required to consist of the words "Skip to my Lou my darling". The other line has fixed melody and rhythm, but, obviously, it does not have a fixed syllable count. In these four verses, the line appears with 6, 8, 11, and 9 syllables. This is because syllable count is generally not significant in English verse; rather, as you need weak syllables, you fit them in where the meter allows.
>No, "doth with their death bury their parents' strife" can't be interpreted in iambs because "death" is immediately followed by another stressed syllable.
Is it? I read it as “doth WITH their DEATH bur-Y their PAR-ents STRIFE”
Born and raised, though I admit I’ve never fully grokked stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. When I think of iambic pentameter I think of it as telling me, the reader, which syllables should be stressed and which shouldn’t: absent that guidance I can imagine stressing either syllable of bury equally well, or stressing both, or neither.
I guess I could read it either way. Emphasizing the I seems to make it more personal (?). I'm not sure how Shakespeare would have read it, though. I was looking for a version of Sonnet 18 read in Shakespeare's original pronunciation, and I couldn't find an example.
Ben Crystal does a lot of readings of Shakespeare in OP, though. Interesting to listen to...
Sometimes it's felicitous to depart from the meter. For instance, "The Rape of the Lock," is in iambic pentamter, but look at this pair of lines, where the first 2 syllables reverse the expected pattern of the beat:
Favors to none, to all she smiles extends
Oft she rejects, but never once offends.
It seems to me that the departure of the meter from the way it "should" be mimics the heroine's behavior, which is frustrating to her suitors yet does not make enemies of them.
I think you make a good point. I would argue that the slight disjunct between the inherent rhythm of speech and the expected rhythm of meter, in a given poem, is what makes it musical. If English stresses were perfectly aligned to the meter, the poetry would be boring.
I think you make a good point. I would argue that the slight disjunct between the inherent rhythm of speech and the expected rhythm of meter, in a given poem, is what makes it musical. If English stresses were perfectly aligned to the meter, the poetry would be boring.
In college I had a professor who believed that good free verse was a descendent of the essays of the 19th century prose masters. The sentences of the latter are far longer than those in most modern prose, but are surprising easy, and in fact delightful, to understand because they have a second substructure in addition to grammar: prose music. Here’s some Ruskin:
The deep of air that surrounds the earth enters into union with the earth at its surface, and with its waters, so as to be the apparent cause of their ascending into life. First, it warms them, and shades, at once, staying the heat of the sun's rays in its own body, but warding their force with its clouds. It warms and cools at once, with traffic of balm and frost; so that the white wreaths are withdrawn from the field of the Swiss peasant by the glow of Libyan rock. It gives its own strength to the sea; forms and fills every cell of its foam; sustains the precipices, and designs the valleys of its waves; gives the gleam to their moving under the night, and the white fire to their plains under sunrise; lifts their voices along the rocks, bears above them the spray of birds, pencils through them the dimpling of unfooted sands. It gathers out of them a portion in the hollow of its hand: dyes, with that, the hills into dark blue, and their glaciers with dying rose; inlays with that, for sapphire, the dome in which it has to set the cloud; shapes out of that the heavenly flocks: divides them, numbers, cherishes, bears them on its bosom, calls them to their journeys, waits by their rest; feeds from them the brooks that cease not, and strews with them the dews that cease. It spins and weaves their fleece into wild tapestry, rends it, and renews; and flits and flames, and whispers, among the golden threads, thrilling them with a plectrum of strange fire that traverses them to and fro, and is enclosed in them like life.
It enters into the surface of the earth, subdues it, and falls together with it into fruitful dust, from which can be moulded flesh; it joins itself, in dew, to the substance of adamant, and becomes the green leaf out of the dry ground; it enters into the separated shapes of the earth it has tempered, commands the ebb and flow of the current of their life, fills their limbs with its own lightness, measures their existence by its indwelling pulse, moulds upon their lips the words by which one soul can be known to another; is to them the hearing of the ear, and the beating of the heart; and, passing away, leaves them to the peace that hears and moves no more.
This was the Athena of the greatest people of the days of old.
> This idea is not original to me. It was pointed out to me by a native Mandarin speaker for whom English was a second language—but she was quite fluent in English. She said she could hear four "tones" in English. She said they were different from Mandarin — but, in order to learn English pronunciation, she found it useful to classify the different stress levels as tones.
The Chinese refer to most speech-related phenomena as "tones". I've been informed that the difference between voiced /d/ and unvoiced /t/ is "a kind of tone". This isn't true, but it's what they say in China. If a Chinese person says "tone", you may be better off hearing "kind of sound".
(If you're wondering why I mentioned voiced /d/ at all when Mandarin doesn't have voiced stops, it's because we were talking about Shanghainese.)
I should also note that the idea is not original to your friend, either; English dictionaries routinely indicate primary and secondary stress on words that are long enough to have two stressed syllables. The distinction isn't relevant to English poetry, though.
I love this idea. You're right, the binary division into stressed and unstressed is 100% made up, a theoretical construct that is forced onto the language.
(I mean, it's a really *good* theoretical construct - one that matches the way English is spoken extremely well for its level of complexity. But still a construct.)
And yeah, it could definitely be rejected or developed to new levels. If you wanted to build a prosody with more than two levels, you can.
(There's a book someone sent me, Shakespeare's Metrical Art, on how Shakespeare kinda does this: on the basis of the simplistic iambic pentameter, he weaves much more nuanced and detailed levels of prosody into his verse. I haven't read the book yet, but it comes highly recommended.)
As others have pointed out above, the more complex a system is, the less likely that you can get all speakers of English to agree. There are lots of variations between regional accents and different individual speakers, so if you set up a syllable weight system that works for you, but doesn't work for 50% of other speakers, then it might well not be accepted. That's the kind of trade-off that exists on these systems.
I don't think it is realistically possible that the author of this review indeed believes that poetry first appeared in the English language, but his opening sentence implies exactly that: "Suppose you were a newcomer to English literature, and having heard of this artistic device called ‘poetry’, wondered what it was all about and where it came from".
I wouldn't bother mentioning it, but we are talking about language here, so.
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.
If "real" is pronounced as one syllable, "reel", to rhyme with "deal" and "feel", the meter's a little better.
You could also shorten the last line by dropping "was" and "were":
"Thought Dreyfus guilty and fairies real."
And I don't know if this is an improvement, but I'd read it shortening "however" and "clever" by a syllable each (to "howe'er" and "cle'er").
Chesterton actually seems to have switched from being a Dreyfusard to saying he was unable to determine whether he was guilty or not, only that the English press suppressed evidence against him. https://simonmayers.com/2013/09/04/g-k-chesterton-and-the-dreyfus-affair/
Setting aside its versification, I like this a lot! I like the juxtaposition of Dreyfus and fairies
The most popular poet of our age (songwriter Max Martin) has a very different view regarding << switching an ‘and’ for a ‘but’ in the refrain of a ballade is “unforgiveable” >>.
From https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/blank-space-what-kind-of-genius-is-max-martin : They are more inclined to fit the syllables to the sounds—a working method that Martin calls “melodic math”—and not worry too much about whether the resulting lines make sense. (The verses in “I Want It That Way,” for example, completely contradict the meaning of the chorus lines.)
"I Want It That Way" does indeed have word salad lyrics, but it seems to be possible to extract a consistent meaning: the singer clearly doesn't want to break up with his girlfriend, but he's being forced to (perhaps because one of them has to move far away), and in the chorus he says that it's okay if she tells him that their relationship was in fact "nothing but a heartbreak... nothing but a mistake", he's begging her not to tell him that she *wants* their relationship to have been doomed all along.
Do we think it's a coincidence that the decline in poetry in the "living room," as that quote says, coincides with the rise of widely sharable recordings of music? A lot of poetic structures of rhyme and rhythm survive there and get played with in many ways, some similar and some different. Before good quality recordings poems would have been much easier to share and distribute than music, but thereafter music has a richer medium for expression. There's just more variables to play with.
Side note: Even in the 1990s Alanis Morissette got some pushback for writing songs that didn't rhyme, as silly as that seems.
But yeah, I'd guess poetry's shifts in the 20th century were partly due to trying to remain relevant and distinct from music. After all, there's no musical equivalent to something like the works of e. e. cummings
Just like the invention of writing shifted poetry away from the more formulaic epics of oral tradition.
Or how painting shifted away from realism after the invention of the camera.
Really interesting point! And it rhymes with one I was thinking about yesterday, about how the rise of deepfakes and text-to-image generators like Dall-E, and whatever sort of generative AI ever comes around for music and video, will shift what people in the more traditional media of the early 21st century are doing.
That... makes perfect sense, actually.
I love the passage leading up to the line “ A few decades later, both Russia and poetry were unrecognizable.”
I also really liked how the few selections included here gave me a taste of both the history and development of poetry, and a way in to understand what line breaks might be doing in free verse, that I’ve never really understood, even though a few of my friends are contemporary poets.
I think this one might be by SA. A thoughtful and constructive review, getting us to think about prose rhythms as well as verse ones.
> ...getting us to think about prose rhythms as well as verse ones.
There's definitely a case to be made that being aware of poetic meter can make your prose more enjoyable; I recently watched a documentary about an obscure video game challenge in which the video creator described a "frame-perfect punch-cancel pause-buffer dive method" (
https://youtu.be/pd5iofvLrIU?t=1331), and he mentioned in the comments that it was the most satisfying string of syllables he'd ever written. One of the replies correctly pointed out that the phrase was satisfying because it was, by accident, perfect dactyllic tetrameter.
Having a sense for the meter of words probably helps one to write better, and come up with words and phrases that are just a little bit more satisfying than their alternatives would have been.
Is that how it's spoken? Just reading it I should have guessed that all four feet were amphibrachs rather than dactyls. But none of those phrases is part of my vocabulary.
Aside from 'dive method', which is perhaps an ambiphrach, the stress is definitely on the first syllable of each pair of words the way Bismuth says it in the video (22:11); granted it's not part of my normal vocabulary either - or indeed, part of most people's - but I'd say 'dactyllic tetrameter' is a fair discription.
It wouldn't actually make a difference to the meter if they were all amphibrachs; you'd still have four beats separated by two weak syllables each.
The amphibrach analysis would notionally leave some fuzz at the beginning/ending of the line, but that's not unusual in poetry, even fairly rigid poetry.
I don't think that's valid. I mean, you could say that dactylic and anapestic are both strong beats separated by two weak beats, but a limerick is still anapestic, not dactylic.
"There once was a man from Nantucket" is in perfect amphibrachs, if you're counting that way.
The rest of that particular limerick is in irregular meter, again assuming you want to divide it into named feet:
.-..-..-.
.-..-..-.
.-..-
..-..-
..-..-..-.
You might notice that the only regularity here is that beats are separated by two weak syllables. (And, I guess, that a line must begin with at least one weak syllable. The two short lines here both end strong, and the long lines all end weak, but we know from other limericks that long lines don't necessarily end weak - and if they did, you'd have a hell of a time arguing that limericks are inherently anapestic. It may be a rule that short lines must end strong.)
It would be interesting to read some comments by people who are actually into contemporary poetry
I'm not sure what you'd classify as "contemporary poetry". Are you calling contemporary poetry anything written after rhyme and meter went out of fashion? Or are you limiting contemporary to 21st-century poetry? I can defend anything up to Flarf. Post-Flarf, I became a poetic reactionary. ;-)
I’d love to read your take on what changed with Flarf!
Well, I might be an old man shouting at the sky, but...
I believe that a poem is a literary device for encapsulating moments of consciousness in ways that allow them to be shared with others. Meter and rhyme are secondary to this primary function, and they can either enhance or interfere with it depending on the skill of the poet.
I should clarify, that I'm talking about lyric poetry — a form of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings. Epic poetry is a whole different kettle of fish — but epic poems have mostly gone out of fashion. Of course, Derek Walcott tried to tackle the epic form (with mixed success IMHO) in his epic poem, *Homeros*.
Poems are like snapshots of the poet's inner life that either reflect on the external world or the poet's inner experience. Certainly, other genres of poems do not serve this purpose. For example, limericks are purely vehicles for conveying humor and have nothing to do with a poet's inner life. So, I'll admit that poetry doesn't *have* to be serious. But when we talk of the poet's art, we're mostly talking about the art of lyric poetry. A lyric poem doesn't necessarily have to be in the first person, nor does it need to convey just a single 'snapshot' of consciousness. It can convey a series of snapshots like a short film. It *can* be didactic, but generally, the rule is show, don't tell (though poets like Pablo Neruda and Czesław Miłosz managed to write didactic poems that are lyrical). But ultimately a lyric poem has no utilitarian purpose as would an essay or a great novel. But compactness of thought, phrase, and image, go a long way towards suggesting rather than explaining. Haiku takes this to the extreme, but I think it best shows what I'm talking about.
.
In this world
We walk on the roof of hell
Gazing at flowers
― Kobayashi Issa
.
I told you that to tell you this. Flarf isn't about conveying a poet's inner life to others. Flarf is about wordplay. Dan Hoy described it as "the first recognizable movement of the 21st century, as an in-joke among an elite clique, as a marketing strategy, and as offering a new way of reading creative writing. The act of writing flarf has been described as collaborating with the culture via the Web, as an imperialist or colonialist gesture, as an unexamined projection of self into others, as the conscious erasure of self or ego." Hmmm.
Here is an award-winning, highly-praised example of Flarf. I don't get anything from it. Maybe others would, but it's so outside the wavelength of my consciousness that it seems alien to me. But that's me.
.
The Led Zeppelin Experience
by K. Silem Mohammad
what are you retarted making fun of dead people?
if your popin shit like that i don't even know you
man I swear I would kick you're a$$ if I ever saw you
you or knew who the f*ck you are cuz no play?
you can't even make sense when I'm REALLY drunk
are you retarted serious question
not doing homework, thats for sure
go to a library! just look up Henry James duh
re: Dumb & Dumber: are you retarted, that movie was great
you sound excited about it. . . .
do you wanna see me puke? What are you retarted?
no (than whats your fucking problem)
well unless you are retarted like this dumb ho
then you know what napster is
so here is a list of some hot songs:
fuck i don't know any songs. . . .
you are an anus mouth , are you retarted
this has damage bonus fruitcake
fuck up u are obviously have some kind of obsesion wit me
it's a wonder why your husband left you and you're all alone
you venture into my valley and you then ask for your life??
you will not leave this valley alive little dwarf
This is helpful! Would you say that flarf is in the tradition of “light” poetry, early limericks, and Lear’s nonsense verse?
Well, Victorian and Edwardian nonsense poems make sense on a certain level. And limericks make sense in that they're telling a joke. I find that lacking in Flarf.
For instance, Lewis Carrol's *Jabberwocky* makes sense despite the made-up words — or rather it makes sense *because* of the made-up words. And Lear's *The Owl and the Pussycat* makes sense as a narrative despite the unlikely scenario of an owl and a cat in a beautiful pea-green boat.
While individual lines of a Flarf poem may make sense, the random text sources munged together make it difficult (at least for me) to derive any greater meaning — emotional or textual — from the poem. But the escape from meaning predated Flarf. John Ashbery and some of the other poets of the New York School were trying to apply the principles of Abstract Expression to poetry. I think they largely failed because AE is all about conveying raw emotion without images. OTOH, words arranged to subvert imagery can't (in my view) convey anything to a reader. I'll say. this for Ashbery: he writes in an extremely concise style, and one gets the feeling that meaning is eluding you before you grasp it. His stuff has a strange beauty to it...
.
The Tennis Court Oath
by John Ashbery
.
What had you been thinking about
the face studiously bloodied
heaven blotted region
I go on loving you like water but
there is a terrible breath in the way all of this
You were not elected president, yet won the race
All the way through fog and drizzle
When you read it was sincere the coasts
stammered with unintentional villages the
horse strains fatigued I guess . . . the calls . . .
I worry
.
the water beetle head
why of course reflecting all
then you redid you were breathing
I thought going down to mail this
of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard
you come through but
are incomparable the lovely tent
mystery you don’t want surrounded the real
you dance
in the spring there was clouds
...
.
Flarf has been compared to Dada, but despite its borderline nonsense, Dada can convey impressions through the mental associations that it provokes in a reader.
.
An Anna Blume (for Anna Flower)
by Kurt Schwitters
.
O you, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I
love you! – You your you you, I you, you me.
– We?
This (by the way) does not belong here.
Who are you, uncounted female? You are
– – are you? – The people say you were – let
them say, they don't know how the steeple stands.
You wear the hat on your feet and wander on
the hands, on your hands you wander.
Hello, your red dresses, sawed up in white folds.
Red I love Anna Flower, red I love you! – You
your you you, I you, you me. – We?
This (by the way) belongs in the cold embers.
Red flower, red Anna Flower, how do the people say?
Prize question:
1. Anna Flower has a bird
2. Anna Flower is red.
3. What color is the bird?
Blue is the color of your yellow hair.
Red is the coo of your green bird.
You plain girl in everyday wear, you dear green
animal, I love you! – You your you you, I you, you
me, – We?
This (by the way) belongs in the box of embers.
Anna Flower! Anna, a-n-n-a, I trickle your
name. Your name drips like soft beef tallow.
Do you know, Anna, do you know yet?
One can read you backward, too, and you, you
most marvelous of all, you're the same, forwards and backward:
"a-n-n-a".
Beef tallow trickles caress my back.
Anna Flower, you drippy animal
I ----- love ----- you!
The contemporary poets I knew (about a decade ago now) were largely into very traditional forms...from all over the world. I'm not sure how accurate their modeling was, but some were very effective. I still regret not hearing "The Flute of Aki Moro" often enough to memorize it. But you needed to stress the lines appropriately to get the right effect.
Who are your favorite contemporary poets?
My favorite two were Paul Edwin Zimmer and Paladin. Both, however, are dead now, so perhaps they're no longer contemporary. In both cases performance, i.e. style of reading, was a big element, as when I've heard others reading the same works they didn't impress me.
Bach and My Father,
by Paul Zimmer
.
Six days a week my father sold shoes
to support our family through depression and war,
nursed his wife through years of Parkinson’s,
loved nominal cigars, manhattans, long jokes,
never kissed me, but always shook my hand.
.
Once he came to visit me when a Brandenburg
was on the stereo. He listened with care—
brisk melodies, symmetry, civility, and passion.
When it finished, he asked to hear it again,
moving his right hand in time. He would have
risen to dance if he had known how.
.
“Beautiful,” he said when it was done,
my father, who’d never heard a Brandenburg.
Eighty years old, bent, and scuffed all over,
just in time he said, “That’s beautiful.”
Sometime ago I kicked off a discussion about modern poetry that drew some pretty good comments from people who like it: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/fake-tradition-is-traditional?utm_source=direct&r=7caj1&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=59564909
the child protection policy poem kinda ate where do they have more
This is an excellent review.
This review was...fine? No glaring issues, average writing, adequate summary that tells me What's It All About. Not incredibly engaging, although at least I wasn't masochistically struggling to reach the end (appreciate the brevity too, thanks). I've got epsilon interest in poetry, but it did interest me to learn a little about the history of free verse: that tiny epsilon is firmly for Classic <s>Rock</s> Poetry, with Real Rhymes and Meters. Free verse is to poetry what mumblerap is to oldschool hip-hop. I feel like this also carries over into other modern permutations of art, like current high fashion, music, or painting. That is, I might not be particularly interested in The Classics of [artform/genre], yet can at least appreciate what they're aiming for and why they've stuck around as Important...but the current instantiations are incomprehensibly alienating. If it takes a literal university course to understand art, that's just Not For Me. (Always weird to contrast to, say, classical music too, which ended up with an unfortunate elitist reputation despite being eminently accessible to the musical-neophyte masses.)
I also really liked the digression into Why Books, Not Internet? Curation is a vastly underrated form of utility. Wikipedia has a vast trove of useful information on sundry topics (unless David Gerard touched it)...too vast though, and oriented towards encyclopaedic completeness rather than layman accessibility. Good books that perform such distillation and enunciation are highly valuable for it, even if their "knowledge cutoff" date necessarily limits comprehensiveness. Could write a whole article on the tension between these two competing axioms. (And I very much appreciate resisting the too-obvious bait to shoehorn in something about how This Is Just Like LLMs, which is left as an exercise for the reader.)
It's a wonderful book. I had two copies, and learned a lot from studying it.
The author of this fine review does not mention that Wood was quite interested in accent verse, which he considered the true root of English poetry.
I could never find a poem by Wood that seemed at all compelling except this one:
I Pass a Lighted Window
by Clement Wood
I pass a lighted window
And a closed door—
And I am not troubled
Any more.
Though the road is murky,
I am not afraid,
For a shadow passes
On the lighted shade.
Once I knew the sesame
To the closed door;
Now I shall not enter
Any more;
Nor will people passing
By the lit place,
See our shadows marry
In a gray embrace.
Strange a passing shadow
Has a long spell!
What can matter, knowing
She does well?
How can life annoy me
Any more?
Life: a lighted window
And a closed door.
I like that. Interesting that it has such regular rhyme and meter, might even qualify as the dreaded category “verse”. Given that he seemed to think versification was only for apprenticeship work.
There was a lot of interest in Anglo-Saxon prosody in the 30s. The reviewer is right that this is a key hinge moment for the social history of poetry. (And its strange death.)
I hereby nominate Eminem for the BLAP, Best Living American Poet.
"Wikipedia could tell you the difference between masculine, feminine, and triple rhymes (rhyming pairs of words ending in zero, one, or two stressed syllables, respectively). "
That should be "zero, one, or two UNstressed syllables".
I wanted to do a quick sanity check on the article's claim that "assonance and consonance are at least as common as true rhymes" in contemporary music in most genres, and I checked one song by Taylor Swift ("pop") and one by Matthew Ebel ("nerd music").
There was indeed a lot of rhyme-by-assonance, much more so in Swift than in Ebel. But what was more interesting was that the Swift song used a flawed rhyme that didn't belong to any of the categories of flawed rhyme mentioned in this piece.
𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦, 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸, 𝘣𝘢𝘣𝘺-𝘺?
𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘮𝘦-𝘦
The problem here is that while "-by" and "me" are perfect rhymes insofar as they share identical vowels (and end in those vowels), -by is not the rhyme-relevant part of "baby" because "baby" is stressed on the first syllable.
This flaw in the (broadly-construed) meter actually leads to a musical flaw as the melody, which is (naturally enough) synched to the rhyme scheme, forces stress to fall on the weak syllable of "baby".
> My sole opinion on free verse came from a pithy G.K. Chesterton quote (“Free verse? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch ‘free architecture’.”), but reading this book showed me how and why someone might hypothetically like it, and what someone might hypothetically get out of reading it. He didn’t convince me to like it. But I can’t quite sneer like I used to.
Of course, you can't reveal your name, but for the others who might hold this opinion, what do you think of this free verse poem? It may not quite be free verse, though, because Thomas inserts sprung rhythm into lines 2, 3, and 5 of each stanza — but he allows the natural rhythm of the English language to drive this the poem like pile driver, but without the annoying meter of a pile driver.
.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
by Dylan Thomas
.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
Or what do you think of W.S. Merwin's *The Sound of the Light*? This is the freest of free verse without any punctuation, and the lines purposely wrap about line breaks to make this poem run inexorably until its finish. Reading it out loud the only place to catch your breath is between the the stanzas, but the long sentence of this poem runs across the stanzas. This formless form gives a breathless dreamy feeling of an inner monologue of memories...
.
I hear sheep running on the path of broken limestone
through brown curled leaves fallen early from walnut limbs
at the end of the summer how light the bony
flutter of their passage I can
hear their coughing their calling and their wheezing even the warm
greased wool rubbing on the worn walls I hear them
passing passing in the hollow lane and there is still time
.
the shuffle of black shoes of women climbing
stone ledges to church keeps flowing up the dazzling hill
around the grassy rustle of voices
on the far side of a slatted shutter
and the small waves go on whispering on the shingle
in the heat of an hour without wind it is Sunday
none of the sentences begins or ends there is time
.
again the unbroken rumble of trucks and the hiss
of brakes roll upward out of the avenue
I forget what season they are exploding through
what year the drill on the sidewalk is smashing
it is the year in which you are sitting there as you are
in the morning speaking to me and I hear
you through the burning day and I touch you
to be sure and there is still time there is still time
Both of these poems are in very strong meter!
Thomas always wrote in meter, as far as I know. That poem is in iambic (de-DUM), with each verse containing lines of 5, 5, 2, 5, 5 feet.
For example, a line where the meter is perfect:
The HAND that WHIRLS the WATer IN the POOL - ten syllables, every second syllable stressed, perfect iambic pentameter.
English verse has always allowed a bit of variation in our meters, particularly in iambic meter. So many of the lines have an extra syllable, or a shift around, like this one:
The LIPS of TIME LEECH to the FOUNTain HEAD - see how the third foot got turned around? That's very acceptable. Shakespeare did it all the time.
The Merwin is a bit looser, but it's still got fixed pulses per line: 5, 5, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5. The meter is important: it pays off at the end of the poem, in the last three lines, where all of those "I"s and "you"s are stressed. We know they're stressed because of the rhythm that's been established in the previous stanzas, so suddenly the speed of the language slows down, and the I and you are highlighted, and it starts to become clear what the poem is about: a relationship between two people that he's holding onto. This meter is an element of the poem's meaning!
The placement of stresses is more fluid in this poem, but I'd put them like this:
I hear SHEEP RUNning on the PATH of BROKen LIMEstone
through BROWN curled LEAVES fallen EARly from WALnut LIMBS
at the END of the SUMmer how LIGHT the BOny
...then at the end, it gets much more plaintive:
YOU through the BURNing DAY and I touch YOU
to be SURE and there is STILL time there IS STILL TIME
Yes! Not to pile on, but I think it’s worth saying that Thomas’s strong classical prosody is a large part of why his work continues to move readers. The rhyme scheme, too, is loose but powerful, with Dickinson-style slant rhymes: flower destroyer fever; rocks wax sucks; pool sail: head blood; sores stars; etc.
Yeah. Absolutely not to pile on, because I've recently discovered just how *taught* all of this stuff is. I teach English in China to young children, and one of the tools I use as I'm teaching is rhyme. It helps right at the beginning, as they're learning phonics (hat, rhymes with bat, yes, they sound the same); and then it helps much more as they're moving beyond phonics into the wilds of English spelling (too rhymes with dew rhymes with through). What shocked me was that 7 year olds - who have already learned lots of Chinese poems at school - had never learned even the Chinese word for *rhyme* or understood the concept.
To help them understand, I read a Chinese poem but change the last word, the equivalent of "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to come." It was a real surprise to me how difficult it was for them to identify what the problem was. They can all tell me, "that's wrong", but surprisingly few can even vaguely point to why. Ut turns out that an idea as basic as rhyme really has to be taught.
And so with these poems, where the meter is a little more subtle, I now see that someone who hasn't been taught how to look for it wouldn't spot it. And these days, teachers might well choose not to teach those patterns...Which must make the whole argument over free verse absolutely mystifying to a large chunk of the popluation! Being of a fairly liberal mindset, I can't work up the energy to bloviate about how terrible it is that teachers are failing to pass on our precious cultural heritage. But I do think it's a shame if they're not teaching something. Like, if schools encouraged more kids to rap, that would also be great (mystifiying to me, because I don't understand flow at all). But so far as I can tell, they don't.
Yet classical Chinese poetry was written in rhymes and was meant to be sung or recited to music. These poems (generally) no longer rhyme in modern Chinese. And the meter of the classical poems has changed as the pronunciation (tones) of the words changed. Yet Chinese students are taught to recite the famous poems of Li Bai and Du Fu. Maybe rhyme and meter matter less than you think?
For instance, I can appreciate classical Chinese poetry by image alone without the accouterments of rhyme and meter — and if I tried to convey the original rhyme scheme in English the poem would be clunky and awkward. And translating the rhythm of monosyllabic Middle Chinese would be impossible in English without reference to the tones. My translation of Du Mu's *Egrets*...
.
EGRETS
by Du Mu (杜牧)
.
snow-clad in snow feathers — black jade beaks
a flock of them stab their reflections — catch the little fish
alarmed they fly away — bright against the blue-green hills
a pear tree blossom falls — on the evening breeze
.
鹭鸶
杜牧
.
雪衣雪发青玉嘴，群捕鱼儿溪影中。
惊飞远映碧山去，一树梨花落晚风。
I like it!
Fascinating to learn that Classical Chinese poetry rhymed originally but no longer does due to phonic changes, am I understanding that right? And is it the case that the original idiographic text can be read in Cantonese or any other Chinese language and even Japanese, reading their own utterly different words for the shared characters?
It is certainly not free verse. The basic rhythm is iambic throughout: The FORCE that THROUGHT the GREEN fuse DRIVES the FLOWer. Until the last line, which is—I think dactylic, with the accents falling three syllables apart. The lines that start with "Drives" are trochaic in the first feet, and STIRS the QUICKsand seems to start with two trochees, but that sort of variation in iambic verse has been around for centuries in English. And there's a regular pattern of five, five, two, five, and five feet.
There isn't any rhyme, but a lot of verses have slant rhyme, like flower/destroyer/fever or rocks/wax/suchs.
Thomas was actually skilled in the traditional forms; consider for example "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," a perfect villanelle.
My problem with manuals of poetic meters is that they all divide up English words into stressed and unstressed syllables. To my ear, there are at least *three* and possibly *four* distinct stresses in spoken English. This becomes apparent when one enunciates words that have more than two syllables. For instance, the word *certificate* seems to have four levels of stress. If we were to list the stress levels as 1 to 4, with 4 being the highest stress, certificate sounds like this: cer2-tif4-i1-cate3. Being a short vowel the *i* in the 3rd syllable is least stressed. The 1st syllable has a greater stress than the 3rd syllable because it's voiced longer. The highest stress is on the second syllable. The final syllable has more stress than either the 1st or 3rd, but not as much as 2nd. Sure, if we lump the two lowest stresses together and call them unstressed, and we lump the two highest stresses together and call them stressed, we can claim that the word *certificate* is made of two iambic feet. But what we're really doing is trying to fit English into meters that originated in languages which had much more regular stress patterns.
This idea is not original to me. It was pointed out to me by a native Mandarin speaker for whom English was a second language—but she was quite fluent in English. She said she could hear four "tones" in English. She said they were different from Mandarin — but, in order to learn English pronunciation, she found it useful to classify the different stress levels as tones. Once she pointed it out to me, I couldn't unhear it.
.
Shakespeare is considered to be the master of iambic verse. But when I read...
.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
.
I hear it spoken thusly...
.
Shall3 I4 com2-pare3 thee3 to2 a1 sum4-mer’s2 day?4
Thou3 art4 more2 love4-ly1 and3 more3 temp-4er1-ate3.
Thoughts?
Sometimes the differences in stresses change the meaning of a phrase
without changing the meaning of any of the words in it. A1- soft2- ma2- chine4 is a machine that’s soft. A1 soft4 ma1-chine2 is a machine that makes softs.
i hear your numbers 1-4. i think your numbers are the sum or product of emphasis that’s built in to the pronunciation of each word, plus other emphasis added to words or parts of them to tweak the meaning a bit, express emotion, that sort of thing. it’s the music of spoken language.
The internal structure of a phrase determines what kind of prosody can or must be applied to it. There's lots of literature on this, though I can't point you to any of it.
(I should note that you didn't properly substantiate "without changing the meaning of any of the words in it" - in your first example, 𝘴𝘰𝘧𝘵 is an adjective meaning "opposite of hard" or "opposite of rough", but in the second example, 𝘴𝘰𝘧𝘵 is a noun. We can't know the meaning of 𝘴𝘰𝘧𝘵 in the second example, but it is definitely not the same as in the first example.)
You are right, *soft* doesn't mean the same thing in the 2 sentences, and I get that grammatical structure and other things also determines the prosody. So normally we say " a *fat* man," stessing the word *fat*, but if we had been discussing fat females and now wanted to contrast the situation of fat males, we might instead stress the last word, and say "a fat *man*." So the task for the good writer is to arrange words and sentences so that the music doesn't jangle.
There are hidden "true rules" that underpin iambic meter. These "true rules" can be extrapolated form the body of traditional poetry and can be described in many different ways that add up to the same result, or very similar results. But they are always much more complicated than "English has two stress levels and every foot must sound like ta-TA".
I learned Italian meter before I learned English meter. The two metrical traditions are not identical, but they're much more alike than the simplified way in which they're respectively described suggests. In both cases there are "true rules" that are more complicated than the surface ones, and when you explore them you'll discover surprising similarities between the two systems.
My personal way to describe the most important "true rule" of English iambic meter (again, my way is not the only way to understand it!) is that the first syllable in each foot is allowed to be stronger than one of its adjacent syllables, but is not allowed to be stronger than both of them.
There are a few cases where this principle breaks down. The main one is at the start of the line, or right after a pause in the middle of the line. Then there are other rules you can follow to decide when it's appropriate to put a "stress" there (that is, a syllable stronger than the one that follows). Different poets follow different rules there.
Another problem is, what if two adjacent syllables are equally strong? As far as I can tell that happens only in a British accent, never in an American accent (at least not with the strongest stress level, which you call "4"). If two succeeding syllables are truly equal in stress, a poet will be free to choose one of the two as the dominant one.
There are more rules, but I don't have time to explain them right now.
I have never heard these hidden rules, but after reading your post and mulling it over, I think you are correct. Where did you come across these?
Nabokov wrote a wonderful book about poetry called "On Prosody." When he talks about lines that depart a bit from the established meter, he says that the words that fall on a stressed spot in the rhyme scheme, but are not stressed, nevertheless know that the stressed spot in the path is there. That seems right.
I'm very skeptical that in "compare thee", "thee" is no weaker than "pare". I don't think any poet would ever put "compare thee" in a position where "pare" is at the start of a foot in iambic meter.
Iit's like "compare you", the "you" is weaker.
Would you still read it that way after replacing "thee" with "you" ?
I'm also very skeptical that "thou art" has the strongest stress levels on "art". That doesn't sound like a natural way of pronouncing the line.
Remember, "thou art" is just "you are".
Hmmm. I hear you as being less stressed than thee. At least for me, I hold the thee longer than you, and in modern American spoken English we often shorten the oo in you to an ah.
And, yes, I would definitely stress the art more than the thou. OTOH, I would reverse with you are — with my natural inclination to pronounce it YOU-er.
Of course, your mileage may vary. I speak mostly with the Inland North north accent of American English but with some annoying Western New England speech habits (the obnoxious swamp Yankee nasal a sound, and placing glottal stops in words like Britain -- i.e. Brih-in).
Also, I didn't make it clear in my previous comment, the view that English has multiple stress levels is fairly common. Your Chinese friend probably didn't come up with that, she probably heard it somewhere.
It's a great way to analyze English meter.
But you can derive a functionally similar set of rules without that insight.
https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/251metrics/papers/Jespersen1933NotesOnMetre.pdf
(Quote):
The fallacy of two grades. The ancients recognized only longs and shorts though there are really many gradations of length of syllables. In the same way most of the moderns, while recognizing that stress is the most important thing in modern metres, speak of two grades only, calling everything weak that is not strong. But in reality there are infinite gradations of stress, from the most penetrating scream to the faintest whisper; but in most instances it will be sufficient for our purposes to recognize four degrees which we may simply designate by the first four numbers:
4 strong
3 half-strong
2 half-weak
1 weak.
It is not always easy to apply these numbers to actually occurring syllables, and it is particularly difficult in many instances to distinguish between 3 and 2. Unfortunately we have no means of measuring stress objectively by instruments; we have nothing to go by except our ears; but then it is a kind of consolation that the poets themselves, whose lines we try to analyse, have been guided by nothing else but their ears-and after all, the human ear is a wonderfully delicate apparatus.
(End of quote)
I personally see English as a language in which two succeeding syllables are always in a relationship of rising, falling, or equal stress. This is like thinking in terms of stress levels, with the advantage that you don't have to take a stand on how many stress levels exist.
I don't see that that's relevant. The structure of iambic verse, for example, is a series of weak-STRONG-weak-STRONG-weak-STRONG-weak-STRONG-weak-STRONG feet; but there's nothing in that description that requires all the weak feet to be equally week, or all the strong ones to be equally strong. Indeed a reading with only two stress levels is traditionally denigrated as "sing-song" and is stereotyped as a childish way of reading. Part of learning to write verse, or even of learning to read it, is developing sensitivity to the varied weakness or strength within the alternating pattern. But there IS that alternating pattern.
I don't hear the first line of Shakespeare's 18th sonnet the same way you do: To me the first foot seems to be a trochee, with the emphasis on SHALL (and thus on the asking of a question), but the third to be an iamb, with the emphasis on TO (and thus on the prepositional phrase that it introduces). Emphasizing THEE seems wrong, because it suggest "Shall I compare thee [rather than some other person]," which I don't think is the point Shakespeare is making (nor for that matter is he emphasizing "I," which would suggest [rather that someone else making the comparison]).
I might even suggest that the use of iambic rhythm to suggest putting the stress on TO is artful in that it brings the whole prepositional phrase into the foreground, and thus implies "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day [rather than to some other thing]?"
If you want iambic verse that seriously strains at the metrical skeleton, take a look for example at Wyatt's "They Flee from Me," with such lines as "With NAked FOOT STALKing IN my CHAMber" ...
There are definitely some cases in which different levels of stress are relevant.
Look at the following two lines:
(1) Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife
(2) With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear
They both sound like iambic pentameter (with so called "metric variations")
How about:
(3) Doth with a bare bodkin their fardels bear
Which has exactly the same stress pattern as (1) if you think in simplistic terms of strong-weak. Even the words are of the same length.
Then how come it sounds metrically wrong? How come (1) is fine, but If you put (3) in the middle of a poem in iambic pentameter it would ruin it. To my ears at least.
Multiple levels of stress can explain it.
Insofar as there is a difference, I would attribute it to the grammatical structure. In (1), the structure is [Doth][with their death][bury][their parents' strife]; the word "death" is the end of a prepositional phrase with modifies "Doth" (that is, it's adverbial in force), so a brief pause there is natural. In (3), [Doth][with a bare bodkin][their fardels][bear] has a prepositional phrase that extends across the second and third feet, and pausing in the middle of such a phrase is unnatural (it's not [Doth][with a bare][bodkin]). An accented syllable immediately after a pause works, but if you don't have a pause, it's more natural to carry forward the alternation of wSwS. But it would be strange to say DOTH with a BARE bodKIN their FARdels BEAR.
I'll agree that you COULD read it as DOTH with a BARE BODkin their FARdels BEAR, but you really need a caesura between the two strong syllables, and that makes the sentence harder to parse, because "bodkin their fardels bear" isn't a meaningful grammatical structure. I think that's what produces the awkwardness you refer to.
I think I would suggest that the subtler variations of stress within the basic wSwSwSwSwS are largely products of English syntax and its effect on the flow of speech.
Of course we lose all that if we read the verse on the page without reciting it aloud. My feeling is that the shift to silent reading is part of what has helped to kill poetry.
(A somewhat similar thing seems to have happened in French. There is a traditional way of reading French verse, in which more letters are sounded and thus there are more syllables. But I lately listened to a recording of a francophone reading "Le Bateau ivre" that didn't do that, giving the first line, for example, as "Comme je déscendais des fleuves impassible" rather than "Com-me je déscendais des fleu-ves impassi-bles," and it just sounded wrong: it was no longer in hexameter and it just sounded like prose, without the steady sweep of syllables carrying the listener along like Rimbaud's boat.)
> They both sound like iambic pentameter
No, "doth with their death bury their parents' strife" can't be interpreted in iambs because "death" is immediately followed by another stressed syllable. This causes a very prominent caesura in the line.
You could call the weak-weak-strong sequence in "bury their parents'" "metrical variation", but I would say you're applying the wrong paradigm in that case. It's common in English poetry to have very free variation in how many weak syllables may appear between beats, though not so free that you can have zero where more than zero would normally appear. But in that case, do the analysis in terms of beats, not in terms of rigid feet.
My natural reading of the line goes more like -..--..-.- . "Doth" and "with" are both naturally weak, so it's not really clear where the poetic stress should fall.
"My natural reading of the line goes more like -..--..-.-"
Mine too, I mean it sounds like iambic pentameter in the sense that it would sound good if it were in the middle of a poem in iambic pentameter, not in the sense that every foot is an iamb.
I'm not sure I follow your comment; are you denying the existence of feet?
I don't think it makes sense to describe the situation in "doth with their death bury their parents' strife" as "free variation in how many weak syllables may appear between beats", because the syllable that has been "stolen" from the interval between "death" and "bury", magically reappears in the space between "bury" and "parents". This is no coincidence; you will very, very rarely find a line in early modern poetry in which the total number of syllables is "wrong".
Consider the line:
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
How many syllables are there? some would say 11, but there are only 10, obviously for Milton "disobedience" here has four syllables, something like dis-o-beed-yance, so the line has ten syllables as you'd expect.
Early modern era iambic pentameter nearly always has the correct number of syllables and therefore it makes sense to break it into 5 feet of 2 syllables, each of which is not always ta-TA. In 99% of cases in which a line apparently has the wrong number of syllables it's because the author doesn't count syllables in the same way as the person who makes that claim.
Syllables disappear even across words, for example a little further down in the same book:
To adore the Conqueror, who now beholds
obviously "to adore" is pronounced as two syllables, where "to" and the first syllable in "adore" are merged in pronunciation. So the foot still has two syllables and the line has ten.
The point is, in iambic pentameter the number of syllables is very regular, and therefore it makes a lot of sense to analyze the line as five feet each with 2 syllables. That to me is the "true" structure of the line.
Which, by the way, makes sense if you see poetry as related to song lyrics, as others pointed out in this thread. The poet is working with a fixed number of musical notes.
> I'm not sure I follow your comment; are you denying the existence of feet?
Feet are not a natural fit for English poetry, modern or ancient. The concept comes from studying the poetry of other languages.
> Which, by the way, makes sense if you see poetry as related to song lyrics, as others pointed out in this thread. The poet is working with a fixed number of musical notes.
Try listening to some songs before you make claims like this. Here are some lyrics to "Skip to my Lou", all set to the same music, obeying the same rhythm:
Lou, Lou, skip to my Lou,
Lou, Lou, skip to my Lou,
Lou, Lou, skip to my Lou,
Skip to my Lou my darling
Lost my partner, what'll I do?
Lost my partner, what'll I do?
Lost my partner, what'll I do?
Skip to my Lou my darling
I'll get another one, prettier than you
I'll get another one, prettier than you
I'll get another one, prettier than you
Skip to my Lou my darling
Fly's in the buttermilk, shoo fly shoo
Fly's in the buttermilk, shoo fly shoo
Fly's in the buttermilk, shoo fly shoo
Skip to my Lou my darling
It doesn't get a lot simpler than this. There are only two line structures, and one of those structures is required to consist of the words "Skip to my Lou my darling". The other line has fixed melody and rhythm, but, obviously, it does not have a fixed syllable count. In these four verses, the line appears with 6, 8, 11, and 9 syllables. This is because syllable count is generally not significant in English verse; rather, as you need weak syllables, you fit them in where the meter allows.
>No, "doth with their death bury their parents' strife" can't be interpreted in iambs because "death" is immediately followed by another stressed syllable.
Is it? I read it as “doth WITH their DEATH bur-Y their PAR-ents STRIFE”
Are you a native speaker? Ultimate stress on "bury" is not a possibility.
Born and raised, though I admit I’ve never fully grokked stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. When I think of iambic pentameter I think of it as telling me, the reader, which syllables should be stressed and which shouldn’t: absent that guidance I can imagine stressing either syllable of bury equally well, or stressing both, or neither.
I agree that "SHALL" should be more emphasized than "I" in that line.
I guess I could read it either way. Emphasizing the I seems to make it more personal (?). I'm not sure how Shakespeare would have read it, though. I was looking for a version of Sonnet 18 read in Shakespeare's original pronunciation, and I couldn't find an example.
Ben Crystal does a lot of readings of Shakespeare in OP, though. Interesting to listen to...
https://youtu.be/YiblRSqhL04?t=88
Sometimes it's felicitous to depart from the meter. For instance, "The Rape of the Lock," is in iambic pentamter, but look at this pair of lines, where the first 2 syllables reverse the expected pattern of the beat:
Favors to none, to all she smiles extends
Oft she rejects, but never once offends.
It seems to me that the departure of the meter from the way it "should" be mimics the heroine's behavior, which is frustrating to her suitors yet does not make enemies of them.
I think you make a good point. I would argue that the slight disjunct between the inherent rhythm of speech and the expected rhythm of meter, in a given poem, is what makes it musical. If English stresses were perfectly aligned to the meter, the poetry would be boring.
People LOVE poetry that naturally aligns to its meter. It's uncommon because it's hard to do.
I think you make a good point. I would argue that the slight disjunct between the inherent rhythm of speech and the expected rhythm of meter, in a given poem, is what makes it musical. If English stresses were perfectly aligned to the meter, the poetry would be boring.
In college I had a professor who believed that good free verse was a descendent of the essays of the 19th century prose masters. The sentences of the latter are far longer than those in most modern prose, but are surprising easy, and in fact delightful, to understand because they have a second substructure in addition to grammar: prose music. Here’s some Ruskin:
The deep of air that surrounds the earth enters into union with the earth at its surface, and with its waters, so as to be the apparent cause of their ascending into life. First, it warms them, and shades, at once, staying the heat of the sun's rays in its own body, but warding their force with its clouds. It warms and cools at once, with traffic of balm and frost; so that the white wreaths are withdrawn from the field of the Swiss peasant by the glow of Libyan rock. It gives its own strength to the sea; forms and fills every cell of its foam; sustains the precipices, and designs the valleys of its waves; gives the gleam to their moving under the night, and the white fire to their plains under sunrise; lifts their voices along the rocks, bears above them the spray of birds, pencils through them the dimpling of unfooted sands. It gathers out of them a portion in the hollow of its hand: dyes, with that, the hills into dark blue, and their glaciers with dying rose; inlays with that, for sapphire, the dome in which it has to set the cloud; shapes out of that the heavenly flocks: divides them, numbers, cherishes, bears them on its bosom, calls them to their journeys, waits by their rest; feeds from them the brooks that cease not, and strews with them the dews that cease. It spins and weaves their fleece into wild tapestry, rends it, and renews; and flits and flames, and whispers, among the golden threads, thrilling them with a plectrum of strange fire that traverses them to and fro, and is enclosed in them like life.
It enters into the surface of the earth, subdues it, and falls together with it into fruitful dust, from which can be moulded flesh; it joins itself, in dew, to the substance of adamant, and becomes the green leaf out of the dry ground; it enters into the separated shapes of the earth it has tempered, commands the ebb and flow of the current of their life, fills their limbs with its own lightness, measures their existence by its indwelling pulse, moulds upon their lips the words by which one soul can be known to another; is to them the hearing of the ear, and the beating of the heart; and, passing away, leaves them to the peace that hears and moves no more.
This was the Athena of the greatest people of the days of old.
> This idea is not original to me. It was pointed out to me by a native Mandarin speaker for whom English was a second language—but she was quite fluent in English. She said she could hear four "tones" in English. She said they were different from Mandarin — but, in order to learn English pronunciation, she found it useful to classify the different stress levels as tones.
The Chinese refer to most speech-related phenomena as "tones". I've been informed that the difference between voiced /d/ and unvoiced /t/ is "a kind of tone". This isn't true, but it's what they say in China. If a Chinese person says "tone", you may be better off hearing "kind of sound".
(If you're wondering why I mentioned voiced /d/ at all when Mandarin doesn't have voiced stops, it's because we were talking about Shanghainese.)
I should also note that the idea is not original to your friend, either; English dictionaries routinely indicate primary and secondary stress on words that are long enough to have two stressed syllables. The distinction isn't relevant to English poetry, though.
I love this idea. You're right, the binary division into stressed and unstressed is 100% made up, a theoretical construct that is forced onto the language.
(I mean, it's a really *good* theoretical construct - one that matches the way English is spoken extremely well for its level of complexity. But still a construct.)
And yeah, it could definitely be rejected or developed to new levels. If you wanted to build a prosody with more than two levels, you can.
(There's a book someone sent me, Shakespeare's Metrical Art, on how Shakespeare kinda does this: on the basis of the simplistic iambic pentameter, he weaves much more nuanced and detailed levels of prosody into his verse. I haven't read the book yet, but it comes highly recommended.)
As others have pointed out above, the more complex a system is, the less likely that you can get all speakers of English to agree. There are lots of variations between regional accents and different individual speakers, so if you set up a syllable weight system that works for you, but doesn't work for 50% of other speakers, then it might well not be accepted. That's the kind of trade-off that exists on these systems.
I don't think it is realistically possible that the author of this review indeed believes that poetry first appeared in the English language, but his opening sentence implies exactly that: "Suppose you were a newcomer to English literature, and having heard of this artistic device called ‘poetry’, wondered what it was all about and where it came from".
I wouldn't bother mentioning it, but we are talking about language here, so.