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THE ART OF POETRY

This article is an excerption from book "An Introduction to Poetry" by Louis Simpson, 1986.

A poem has an organic unity. Each part‑imagery, rhythm, structure, the choice and arrangement of language‑contributes to the effect of the whole. This chapter is a general introduction to the subject. There follows a discussion of how the elements work together in several poems from different periods and in different modes ("Reading the Poem"), and finally a description of the tech­nique of verse ("Meter, Rhyme, Stanza, and Sound").

Images and Metaphors

Poets embody their thought in images, words that appeal to the senses, for, as John Locke said, "There is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses." The first task of the poet is to make the reader "feel" the thought.

While visual imagery is frequent, poetry may also lead us to imagine that we can touch, smell, or taste a thing. And often how the words of a poem sound is as important as what they say. The following lines from Keats's ode "To Au­tumn," for example, appeal to the auditory as well as the visual imagination:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
       Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,­
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
       And touch the stubble‑plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
       Among the river sallows, borne aloft
                 Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies . . .

Metaphor omits like and as, speaking of one thing as though it were another:

The swell foams where they float and crawl,
A catherine wheel of arm and hand . . .
          Seamus Heaney, "Girls Bathing, Galway 1965"

A girl's arm revolving in the water becomes a catherine wheel, the fireworks device named after the saint, martyred on a wheel, who is the patron saint of young women.

Metaphor is translation and, in fact, used to be called translatio. An object or action, A, is presented in terms of another object or action, B, that has vivid associations. In this way our sense of A is enlarged and enhanced. This is particularly useful when we are trying to explain ideas. "An idea," said Remy de Gourmont, "is an image that has faded." But we may reverse the process and give new life to an idea by turning it into an image. Consider Hamlet's soliloquy:

To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.

Mental suffering is translated into the image of a man being shot at with stones and arrows. The second metaphor translates suffering into the image of a man fighting with the sea. Ideas have been translated into scene and drama. Now suppose Hamlet said: To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The insults and misfortunes of our life,
Or make a strenuous effort to resist,
And by opposing end them.

How dull this is! All the life has gone out of it. We do not see the man being shot at and fighting the sea, and we do not feel what it would be like to be in his situation.

Besides presenting ideas in terms that may be perceived through the senses, metaphors unify our perceptions. The critic Owen Barfield has written that primitive people continually saw relations between objects and reported them in metaphors. But as we have grown sophisticated and distanced ourselves from nature we have lost the ability to see connections. "To primitive men and children, everything is infused with the same life. But we have lost the ability to perceive the unity of things." And now "it is the language of poets, in so far as they create true metaphors, which must restore this unity conceptually, after it has been lost from perception" (Poetic Diction, 1928).

"The greatest thing for a poet," Aristotle said, "is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars."

( In contradiction to Aristotle some poets have attempted to eliminate similes and metaphors from their writing. It can be argued that the habit of comparing one thing with another pre vents one from seeing what is actually there. As for unifying our perceptions, the very idea of unifying them ensures that they are conceived as separate and distinct. William Carlos Williams and the Objectivist poets who followed in his steps used few if any similes or metaphors as the basis of their imagery. See the poems by Williams and the discussion of Williams's "Nantucket" on pages 25-26.)

Rhythm

           (See the Glossary for fuller explanations of technical terms, and also the section titled "Meter, Rhyme, Stanza, and Sound.")

Rhythm, repeated stress, is essential in poetry. We expect the stress to come again, and so we keep listening.

It is easy to see the pattern of rhythm when poetry is in meter, a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The following lines are in meter:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er?sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
            William Shakespeare, Sonnet 65

To see the pattern of meter, lines are divided into feet. A foot is a unit of stressed and unstressed syllables. The foot being used here is the iamb - an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed . The first line therefore may be scanned as follows:

Since brass, | nor stone, | nor earth, | nor bound | less sea

The second line also is regular. In the third line, however, there is a substitution: at the start of the line a trochee is substituted for the iamb:

How with

In any use of meter there will occasionally be substitutions where the need to accent syllables for meaning (the rhetorical accent) comes in conflict with the stress of the prevailing meter.

In this sonnet by Shakespeare, the iambic feet are moving like the thought, at a steady pace from one thing to another: "brass . . . earth . . . mortality . . . rage . . . beauty . . . flower." The meter is well-suited to the thought, which is meditative. Indeed, to some extent the meter is the thought, for a different meter would make for a different mood. Rhythm is not everything; there are other elements in poetry; but rhythm is essential.

In free verse, on the other hand, it is not easy to see the pattern of the rhythm, for it is irregular:

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
             William Carlos Williams, "The Great Figure"

This poem does not have a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet there is a rhythm - of cadences, an irregular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The measurable unit is not the foot but the phrase. In "The Great Figure" the phrase may have as many as six syllables or only one or two.

In this poem each phrase is written as a separate line; this enables us to see the phrase. But in free verse there may be several phrases to the line, as in this line by Whitman:

Whitman's phrases could be written as separate lines, as Williams writes his; or Williams's poem could be written as one long line.

In some of his later poems Williams would arrange phrases in three steps across the page. The phrase, he said, was a "variable foot"; it was to be counted as a single stress. The three steps formed a kind of trimeter. If "The Great Fig ure" had been written later, it might have looked like this:

Among the rain
                     and lights
                                I saw the figure 5
in gold
         on a red
                    firetruck . . .

Free verse, as I have said, is written in cadences. To follow the cadences, we must follow the movement of the thought, we must understand what the poet intends at every moment. Only in this way can we tell where the stress falls and where the phrase ends. Reading in a sing-song won't do. In reading "The Great Figure" we have to pay attention to exactly what is said, and seen, and heard: "the figure 5," the clanging gong, the rumbling wheels. We have to con centrate on these things as the speaker in the poem is concentrating.

Indeed, the objects in the poem seem to be compelling the observer to pay attention to them. They seem to be determining the language, the phrases, the rhythm. The rhythm of the poem depends upon what the poem is about - far more, it might be argued, than if the poem were in meter.

There are readers of poetry who find it difficult to read free verse. They want a poem to be written in meter - regular feet, and so many feet to the line. Also, they would like a regular pattern of rhymes. Free verse strikes them as un poetic. What, they ask, makes it different from prose ? One possible answer is that the difference is a matter of degree: in free verse there is a greater concen tration of thought, selectivity in the use of words, intensity through the use of images. But though these are certainly qualities of free verse, they can also be found in prose. Then, perhaps, the difference is in rhythm. Perhaps rhythm plays a greater part in free verse than it does in prose.

So important is rhythm in poetry that in the first edition of this book I said that poetry was "thought expressed in rhythm," and that in poetry rhythm was essential to the meaning, while in prose it was not. Some readers objected, say ing that there are passages of prose - "John Donne's Meditation XVII, for example" - in which rhythm is essential. They may have been right. In any case, as a poem consists of several elements, it is not possible to isolate one ele ment and show that this is what poetry consists of; and we cannot say exactly what the difference is between poetry and prose, for they have several elements in common. Many people have tried to define poetry - there are eleven in stances in the Glossary - but no definition seems conclusive. The reason for life in the poem, as in the human being, eludes analysis. This should not prevent us, however, from understanding how the parts work, separately and together.

Structure

Just as there is rhythm in the lines of a poem, there is a rhythm of the poem as a whole. This is evident where the poem is written in stanzas, groups of lines recurring in the same pattern:

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
"By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin,
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din."

The pattern here is of ballad stanzas, tetrameters and trimeters rhyming a b c b. (These terms are explained in the Glossary.)

Structure does not consist only of rhythmic patterns such as stanzas; there may be a pattern of symbols, or a structure of language. And there may be two or more structures in combination; indeed, as there are so many patterns in the use of words, syntax, plot, and symbolism, it would be hard to imagine a poem that had only a single, discernible structure.

Some twentieth-century poets have said that they are writing poetry without a structure, imitating a flow of experience, with no beginning, middle, or end. When we read some of these poems we really do have the impression of a mind moving freely:

Three gas lamps lighted
The boss has T.B.
When you've finished we'll play backgammon
A conductor who has a sore throat . . .
                 Guillaume Apollinaire, "Lundi Rue Christine"

But there is a structure in this poetry, though it is hidden. Everything that comes into the mind takes on a kind of structure; and though poets may not be aware of it, everything they write gives back a pattern of the mind.

The poem by William Carlos Williams that we have seen, "The Great Figure," has the structure of a narrative: "I saw this, I heard that." Narrative poems and songs go back to the beginnings of history; it seems that people always wanted to sing a song or tell a story, and patterns of song and story were given to poetry from the start. But I shall not try to describe all the patterns that can be found in poems. This would be tedious and not in keeping with the purpose of this book. There is more to be learned from reading poems and discovering what is in the individual poem than from any amount of generalization. As an example, however, let us consider one passage of poetry in order to see the structure, and also the use of rhythm and images, the elements of poetry touched on so far. The passage is taken from The Prelude, Wordsworth's autobiographical poem:

      So feeling comes in aid
Of feeling, and diversity of strength
Attends us, if but once we have been strong.
Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man's power
Open I would approach them, but they close.
I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all; and I would give,
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
Substance and life to what I feel, enshrining,
Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past
For future restoration.

In The Prelude, Wordsworth undertakes to trace "the growth of a poet's mind." The poem ranges from scene and incident to passages in which he attempts to describe the workings of his mind at certain times and explain how this contributed to his development as a poet. It is admirable to see how he manages to give passages of explanation a forward movement. When poets undertake to argue and explain they often fall into prose, but these lines have a deepening excitement.

How does Wordsworth accomplish this? Not by the weight of his ideas, though they are profound. The poetry comes of his skill in writing verse and of what Aristotle called mastery of metaphor. For at the center of this passage of explanation there is a powerful and original metaphor, the vision of the "hidingplaces of man's power" opening and closing. This lifts the passage above the level of rational argument, toward a place where truths are seen in a flash. The image is vague, but so is a mystery; the poet is describing mysterious and aweinspiring things, glimpsed only to be hidden again.

A vision can hardly be analyzed. The technique of verse is more understandable. When we scan the passage, we find that Wordsworth has broken the lines, unrhymed iambic pentameters (blank verse), into shorter units. Several of the lines are divided with a pause (caesura), and phrases run from the middle of a line to the middle of the next, running past the end of the pentameter as though there were an urgency, a thought too pressing to be contained within the five-foot measure:

Ohl mystery of man, | | from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. | | I am lost, but see
In simple childhood | | something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; | | but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, | | that thou must give,
Else never canst receive.| | The days gone by . . .

This overriding of the line by the sentence makes the idea in the sentence seem irresistible. So the argument moves forward and carries us with it.

Toward the end Wordsworth makes parenthetical remarks. This is what he has to say: "I would give substance and life to what I feel, enshrining the spirit of the Past for future restoration." In the course of saying it, however, he makes these digressions: "While yet we may, as far as words can give . . . Such is my hope." These interruptions make us impatient to see to the end of the thought; we are not just drawn forward, we push forward to the end ourselves. The purpose of this delaying, keeping us in suspense, is to involve us more. Of course, a writer cannot digress too much, otherwise the reader may be confused or lose interest. Wordsworth has a lively sense of the drama of a sentence, what must be said right away and what may be delayed.

Moreover, there is an ingenious structure in the passage that we have not yet seen. By repeating a word, or by following a word with another that the first word has led us to expect, Wordsworth sets up a pattern of anticipation and reward. Then, suddenly, at the image of the "hiding-places," anticipation is disappointed: the "hiding-places" suddenly "close" rather than remain "open." This is a stroke of genius in sentence structure. Just as rhythm may contribute essentially to the effect of a poem, so may sentence structure. The syntax corresponds to, indeed helps to create, the idea:

                                 feeling . . . feeling
                                 strength . . . strong
                                 give . . . receive
[but the hiding-places] open . . . close
                                 see by glimpses . . . scarcely see
[then, resoundingly, like the resolution of a Beethoven symphony]
                                 give . . . give

When we consider the content of the passage, it is remarkable how many ideas have been put in a few lines. Much of Wordsworth's thinking is touched upon in this brief space. He states his belief that feeling is primary and that we develop by feeling, one feeling and thought leading to another. He affirms his faith in human dignity and asks the question he is frequently pondering: Where do we obtain the power to feel and think? He answers his own question, saying that we obtain the power from ourselves, by giving, whereupon something is given to us. He hints at mysteries we apprehend at certain moments from a contact with nature, and he describes the poet's task: by a process of recollection to recreate those moments in poems that will serve as a restorative.

These ideas, however, would not be as persuasive had Wordsworth not used rhythm, sentence structure, and words in ways that support the argument. And it needed more than philosophy, it required poetic genius, to see the hidingplaces opening and closing. What were they? But we are left to wonder.

Language and Style

The following little poem has been remembered for hundreds of years:

Western wind, when will thou blow
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again

This is as simple and direct as the language a man might use in conversation. And if we look again at the passage from The Prelude, we see that though Wordsworth is philosophizing and speaking of difficult matters, he is for the most part using ordinary words. Poetry is the most expressive way of saying a thing, and sometimes plain words are best.

The language of some poetry, however, is difficult, for the poet is trying to convey a subtle or difficult idea. But still he or she is choosing the best words and putting them in the best order. (Bad poets use vague words and difficult constructions when they don't have to; when they say something we feel that it could have been said better.)

Milton has sometimes been accused of using pompous words and writing Latin rather than English sentences. If this were all there was to Milton's style, then we would not be able to read him with pleasure. But when we examine a passage of his writing we are likely to find that the construction of a sentence, if it is peculiar, has a definite purpose. Putting the subject after the predicate, for example, may be an attempt to represent the order in which things are actually happening. Milton wants to make us see and feel, and therefore he changes the usual sentence order in which, all too often, words are used in a nonspecific way and have lost their connection to the senses.

For the same reason Milton uses unusual words. In the following passage from Paradise Lost, Moloch, an angel who has been driven out of Heaven, is describing the battle in which the angels fell. He is arguing that as there is a kind of gravity that draws spirits upward, it will not be too hard for the fallen angels to fly up again:

              Who but felt of late
When the fierce foe hung on our broken rear
Insulting, and pursued us through the deep,
With what compulsion and laborious flight
We sunk thus low?

Consider the words Milton is using, particularly "compulsion" and "laborious." The sound of these words is like the action they describe. In compulsion and laborious, the plosives p and b, the following vowel sounds, and the ponderous length of the words give a sense of wings pushing back against a pressure that is forcing them downward, a pressure greater than the strength of wings but not irresistible.

Every poet has a style, a certain way of using language, figurative and rhetorical devices, tones, and patterns of sound. Just as we can tell from a few bars of music that they were composed by Mozart, from a few lines of verse we can tell that they are by Emily Dickinson or by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

But as people live in communities they think and speak alike, and though poets may have a distinctive style they owe something to the style of their time and place. Therefore we speak of the style of a period: Elizabethan, Augustan, Romantic, Victorian. In the early eighteenth century, Pope and Swift moved in elegant society. Though they were very different men, they both wrote wittily, with turns of speech that were fashionable in drawing rooms. A hundred years later, after the French Revolution and the industrial revolution, poets were not so often in society and were given to taking long walks in the country and writing about nature. Wordsworth and Keats, who lived in this period, are closer to each other in their styles than they are to Pope and Swift.

At the beginning of the Romantic period, Wordsworth argued against the farfetched words and euphemisms of verse in the late eighteenth century. He cited a passage from the Bible:

Go to the Ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.

Then he quoted Samuel Johnson's version of the passage:

Turn on the prudent Ant thy heedless eyes,
Observe her labors, Sluggard, and be wise;
No stern command, no monitory voice,
Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice.

This, Wordsworth said, was a hubbub of words, and indeed it does seem that the busy housekeeping little ant has been crushed under the weight of Doctor Johnson's attention.

In literary generations, writing swings like a pendulum from one style to another. Wordsworth's liking for simplicity enabled him to write lines of his own that have a Biblical grandeur:

The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills . . .

However, later in the century Browning is anything but simple:

While Paul looked archly on, pricked brow at whiles
With the pen?point as to punish triumph there,
And said "Count Guido, take your lawful wife
Until death part you l"

The eccentricities of Gerard Manley Hopkins would have puzzled Wordsworth:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal
      diamond,
                Is immortal diamond.

At the beginning of the present century, poets seemed again to be out of touch with common speech. The language of poems was vaguely romantic, but without the Romantics' power of thought. In reaction against this there was a swing toward a kind of "hardness," and about 1910 a group of poets who called themselves Imagists began to write a new kind of poetry with short, simple phrases, as in these lines by Hilda Doolittle:

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Thirty years later, in the writing of Dylan Thomas the pendulum will have swung the other way?sound is more impressive than sense:

Who blows death's feather? What glory is color?
I blow the stammel feather in the vein.

In modern writing there have been attempts to separate style from content, attributable, I think, to the separation of the writer from the community. Chaucer who was a civil servant, Shakespeare who wrote for the theater, and Milton who was Latin Secretary to the Council of State, did not feel that they were different from the people around them. But as the old communities disappeared the artist felt increasingly isolated. At the end of the eighteenth century Rousseau made a virtue out of seeming different; in the Confessions he claimed proudly, "I am made unlike anyone I have ever met," and other writers would make a similar claim.

Their individuality was expressed through style. The novelist Flaubert spoke of style as "absolute"?he said that he would like to write "a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style." But even Flaubert was not able to do this - Madame Bovary has a subject, the life of an unhappy woman in a French provincial town.
Mallarme, leader of the Symbolists, declared that poetry should not be explicit. It was only to suggest?"suggestion makes the dream." Yet even the most "suggestive" of his poems contain a grain of matter, like the grain of sand that irritates the oyster into producing a pearl.
It seems that we cannot think without thinking about something.

© 2001 Elena and Yacov Feldman