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present, the term "free verse" is used to describe a multitude
of quite different and even contradictory strategies, several of which may
be employed in the same poem. If metrical poetry can be defined as verse
in which strong and weak sound-elements are patterned by numerical rules
into self-similar lines, then free verse might be defined negatively as
nonmetrical verse in which no such system is discernible. Though free
verse doesn't have the involved accentual-syllabic patterns of its
metrical counterpart, in practice it usually makes recourse to one or more
of the following strategies: loose accentualism (the counting of accents);
isochrony (lines of similar duration); syntactic parallelism; aleatory
(chance-determined) structure; procedural (mathematically determined)
structure; word count; and even syllabic verse, since raw syllable count
is its only repeating pattern.
There
is, though, another type of free verse, one that gives pattern and shape
to its lines by means of what Annie Finch has (after T. S. Eliot) called
"the ghost of meter." Eliot designated this quasi-metrical
poetry vers libere to distinguish it from vers libre. Sometimes combined
with, or incorporated into, vers libere is another type of
"free" verse: the logaoedic--that is, poetry using more than one
kind of metrical foot within the line. Both these types of loosely
patterned verse originate, like more rigorously metrical poetry, in what
Eliot called the "auditory imagination." After distinguishing
this ear-centered offshoot of the metrical tradition from what has become
the dominant mode of free verse in English, I will argue that only this
"better tradition" of free verse has the potential to attain the
rich complexity shared by formal poetry, fractal geometry, and organic
natural forms.
Metrical
poetry evolved over vast stretches of time in what Marshall McLuhan calls
the "acoustic space" of ancient, preliterate societies--a space
he describes in The Medium Is the
Message as "boundless, directionless, horizonless." Such
verse was composed and learned by ear, stored in memory, modified in
performance, and passed down from bard to bard. Evolving with the
languages and cultures in which they were composed, these songs and epics
were communal works and belonged as much to a kind of collective mind as
to singular poets.
This
origin has deep implications for metrical verse. As I have argued before,
there are structural similarities between formal poetry, organic natural
forms such as leaves and trees, and the computer-generated shapes of
fractal geometry. Unlike simple equations and Euclidean geometry, which
produce and measure predictable and static results, these self-organizing
forms are nonlinear and dynamic, changing over time. Given rise to by an
unforeseeable combination of rules, feedback, and chance, they occupy a
boundary region between pure randomness and deterministic order.
Scientists now call such systems "chaotic" or
"complex."
Like
other nonlinear, dynamic systems, a formal poem is rule-governed,
holistic, sensitive to initial conditions, recursive, and self-similar at
different scales. It uses feedback to organize itself in a top-down,
bottom-up fashion as the poet tinkers, letting rhythms form as imagination
interacts with verbal patterns sounding in the ear. Small-scale elements
like phonemes help determine larger aspects of the poem such as words,
lines, and so on. These scaled similarities are arranged in a hierarchy of
levels that reflect and influence one another, from the level of phoneme,
word, metrical foot, metaphor, symbol, syntax, stanza, up to logic, theme,
overall form, and the ethics and metaphysics implied by the poem's
meaning. Offsetting the self-similarity of alliterative patterns and
metrical feet are the "broken symmetries" of metrical
substitutions and, in some poems, the varying consonants of assonance and
rhyme. The poem's final shape is drawn into being partly by a
"strange attractor," which tradition calls sonnet,
blank-verse monologue, rhyming
quatrain. Finally, metrical poetry possesses another characteristic of
self-organizing systems: flow.
Free
verse is much more recent in origin. Though it has precedents in the
Hebrew poetry of the Bible (which may owe its looser structure to the
patterning conventions of musical accompaniment), in Western literature it
becomes prominent only in the nineteenth century, with Blake, the French
Symbolists, and Whitman. These differences of derivation have had enormous
ramifications for the practice of modern poetry. The invention of writing
marked a paradigmatic shift in human consciousness, as McLuhan has
explained: "The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts
which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung
together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered
and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and
spatial terms." As the eye replaced the ear in the hierarchy of
perception, the "boundless, directionless, horizonless" universe
in which metrical poetry was composed was eclipsed by the linear, visual
world of the written word.
A
second, and perhaps deeper, shift occurred with the advent of printing.
Mass-produced books accelerated linear habits of thought and cognition.
Though poetry in forms continued to be written--shaped by tradition;
readers' expectations; poetry's on-again, off-again association with
music; and the tendency of words to self-organize into repeating metrical
patterns--the omnidirectional "aural space" of old became, as
the Gutenberg era wore on, the linear "visual space" of the
modern industrial world.
It
is no coincidence, then, that the modernist revolution began with imagism.
T. E. Hulme, one of Ezra Pound's early associates and a cofounder of the
movement, termed the new poetics a method of "recording impressions
by visual images in distinct lines." In The
Pound Era, Hugh Kenner writes that Pound's early poetry was dominated
by an "aesthetic of glimpses," which he later replaced in the
period of Mauberley with an
"aesthetic of 'hard squares.'" In 1916, in Gaudier-Brzeska,
Pound writes of poetic images this way:
The pine-tree in mist upon the far hill looks
like a fragment of Japanese
armour.
The beauty of this pine-tree in the mist is not
caused by its
resemblance to the plates of the
armour.
The armour, if it be beautiful at all, is not
beautiful because of its resemblance to the pine in the
mist.
In either case the beauty, in so far as it is
beauty of form, is the result
of "planes in relation."
Kenner
and Dana Gioia have hypothesized that many of the modernists' formal
innovations might be traced to the fact that they were the first
generation of poets to compose on the shift-key typewriter, and Pound was
certainly abetted by that new machine in his sculptural and spatial
conception of poetry. Noting the difference between Pound's practice and
that of Eliot, who resorted to typed space simply "for
convenience," Kenner writes about Pound's habit of striking the space
bar twice between words: "And he does this whenever he types
anything, the final text of a poem or the hastiest note, and did it the
day he first possessed a typewriter, circa 1913, reproducing on the
machine a gesture his hand always performed when it held a pen and marked
with wide spaces the initial stroke of a new word."
Other
poets were equally influenced by the new invention. William Carlos
Williams kept a typewriter in his office and worked, between patients, on
his poems. In A Homemade World,
Kenner reports that Williams regularly "typed and retyped sequences
of a few dozen words, changing a word or two, or shifting the point in a
phrase at which the eye must turn back round a line's end." It is
this procedure of Pound and Williams that moved Charles Olson, at
midcentury, to underscore the typewriter's importance in his influential
essay "Projective Verse":
[D]ue to its rigidity and its space precisions,
it can, for a poet,
indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the
suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of
phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and
the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the
convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own
speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently
or otherwise, to voice his work.
It is time we picked the fruits of the experiments of Cummings,
Pound, Williams, each of whom has, after his way, already used the machine
as a scoring to his composing, as a script to its vocalization.
Olson's
statement clearly leaves behind the omnidirectional "aural
space" of metrical poetry for the Euclidean microcosm of the printed
page. One can't help thinking of McLuhan's phonetic units strung
"bead-like" when Olson asserts that in projective verse,
"ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER
PERCEPTION."
The
problem for the poet of thinking in these terms is that the still universe
of Euclidean geometry can't accommodate time, yet time remains an
essential feature of all self-organizing, complex systems. Poetry that
treats the line as a mere unit of space is therefore unlikely to achieve
the same complexity as poems that elaborately pattern unfolding time.
Even
Marianne Moore's eye-pleasing syllabics suffer the drawbacks of a
space-based poetics. Kenner, as always illuminating, writes, "Her
poems are not for the voice; she sensed this in reading them badly. In
response to a question, she once said that she wrote them for people to
look at." He observes of Moore's "The Fish":
It is a poem to see with the eye, conceived in a
typewriter upon an 8 1/2"x 11" sheet of paper. If metric is a
system of emphases, centered in human comfort, human hope, syllable count
is a system of zoning, implied by the objectivity of the words, which lie
side by side for their syllables to be counted. If the stanzas of
"Go, lovely rose" are primarily audible, created by the
symmetries of the uttering voice, the stanzas of "The Fish" are
primarily visible, created by an arrangement of words in typographic
space, the poem made for us to look at.
Marjorie
Perloff, writing in Radical Artifice
of a similar poetic "grid" by the objectivist Louis Zukofsky,
approvingly quotes Rosalind Krauss's statement that this "is what art
looks like when it turns its back on nature the grid is the means of
crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the
lateral spread of a single surface."
Olson's
adherents may object that I've ignored his comments about the centrality
to composition of "the syllable" and "the breath" and
thus oversimplified his views. Charles O. Hartman makes a case, in Free
Verse, that Olson did not mean to use the typewriter to supplant aural
with visual prosody, but, rather, that he intended "its spatial
manipulations to stand for temporal ones with a new precision." This
argument doesn't hold, for two reasons. First, for all Olson's mystical
mumblings about "the syllable," he gives no clue how a poet is
to arrange those syllables except to say that they're to be dispensed in
equally mysterious and undefined "breath units." Olson's own
line-lengths vary enormously. His breath units contain no internally
repeating pattern; they are simply varying lengths of pure duration, like
bursts of static or random sounds. This is the device known as isochrony,
and a poem written according to such a measure cannot achieve the same
level of self-similarity as those whose patterns at the level of foot and
syllable reflect patterns at higher scales, nor can its lines share enough
similarity to other lines to "break" their symmetry with subtle
variations.
Olson's
proponents might also argue that his breath units are simply a poetic
refinement of natural syntax; that in using typed space to place pauses
and arrange lines, a poet is merely recording his or her personal speech
pattern. In part Olson's essay supports such a view, as when he writes,
"And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing
of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes for only he...can
declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending--where its
breathing, shall come to, termination." But one has only to look at
Olson's poetry to see this argument's insufficiency. What are we to make
of the opening of "The Cause, the Cause":
It is the cause the cause, still, it is (and
she, still
even though the method be
new, be
the rods and cones of, a pigeon's or, a rabbit's
eye, or be
who, man, is that woman you now dream of, who
woman, is that
man...
The
lines are certainly idiosyncratic, but their terminations are hardly
directed by anything like standard English syntax. In both theory and
practice, Olson deliberately blurs the distinctions between poetic line,
speech, and grammar. In The Language
Instinct Steven Pinker elucidates, by contrast, the natural interplay
between breath and syntax in the making of speech:
When we talk, we depart from our usual rhythmic
breathing and take in quick breaths of air, then release them steadily,
using the muscles of the ribs to counteract the elastic recoil of the
lungs. (If we did not, our speech would sound like the pathetic whine of a
released balloon.) Syntax overrides carbon dioxide: we suppress the
delicately tuned feedback loop that controls our breathing rate to
regulate oxygen intake, and instead we time our exhalations to the length
of the phrase or sentence we intend to utter.
In other words, phrases, clauses, sentences are already "breath
units," timed to the twin necessities of syntax and speech. Looking
back to Olson's lines, we see how they distort and violate--both with
their capricious line-ends and in their odd phraseology--the standards of
syntax. This is intentional, certainly; as he writes in "Projective
Verse," "[T]he conventions which logic has forced on syntax must
be broken open as quietly as must the too set feet of the old line."
Olson's
Black Mountain followers, among them Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov,
have continued his practice of spatializing and fragmenting syntax. Such
poets tend to supplant natural word order and concatenation with
manifestos on their breakdown, using the typewriter to dispose words and
lines in willfully contrived units, hyphenating words, splitting and
stringing clauses and phrases across lines and strophes. The poet neither
lets the rhythms of syntax dictate pauses nor lets syllables coalesce into
repeating rhythms that build to a line. Instead of a top-down, bottom-up
interplay among syllabic configuration, syntactic unit, and poetic line,
we have a top-down model of order dictated by the poet: "Position is
where you/ put it," as Creeley writes in "The Window."
There remains a crucial distinction between Creeley's line, whose length
is determined by the poet's choice, and a metrical line, which achieves
its identity only when a certain number of metrical feet accumulate from
within.
In
Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor,
Donald Davie describes how Pound wanted readers to feel the
"cut" of his words, lines, and images in order to experience
them as separate and discrete units. This results not only in linguistic
fragmentation but in a kind of atomizing of experience. Davie states,
"The breaking of the pentameter made possible, indeed it enforced,
the breaking down of experience into related but distinct items." In
this enterprise, the typewriter proved to be an ideal instrument. It let
the poet use space to isolate lines and words, as well as to slow and
disjoint the natural flow of language so the mind could weigh and
contemplate each piece in linear succession. Olson echoes the Poundian
precepts, arguing that composition by field "is a matter, finally, of
OBJECTS" and adding in a subsequent paragraph that since a poem now
has "solidity, everything in it can now be treated as solids,
objects, things." He names this new practice "objectism"
and suggests that it necessitates a revolution in syntax, so that poetry's
"tenses" may be kept as "immediate" as its
"space-tensions."
Almost
a half-century after Olson's essay, we hear Helen Vendler espousing
similar ideas in "Jorie Graham: The Moment of Excess." After
commenting on how the "individual line" is "the most
sensitive barometer of breath units," Vendler writes of Graham's
poetic strategies in terms of coordinate geometry: her "long
horizontal line of extension in space toward the horizon" is
"joined to the long sentence" so that to its "horizontal
axis is added a long vertical axis." Expanding the metaphor, Vendler
writes of Graham's Materialism
that "the combination of horizontal and vertical prolongations is
carried out to the uttermost degree, so that the poems literally construct
visual plane areas ... in which words cover and spatialize being."
Even as she tries to distinguish Graham's method from Olson's, Vendler
speaks in terms that evoke his ideas, including his most radical, "objectism":
The physiological regulation of breathing makes
natural breaths roughly isometric--in, out; in, out. And isometric
breathing is the basis for regular lines, orderly and successive ones. But
the gaze has no such isometric rhythm: a gaze can be prolonged at will,
held for inspection, meditated on, and periodically interrupted. It is the
gaze, rather than the breath, that seems to me Graham's fundamental
measure in the numbered-line poems. By this choice of the gaze over the
breath, Graham redefines utterance; and what utterance becomes is the
tracking of the gaze, quantum-percept by quantum-percept, bundle by
bundle.
In other words, one perception-packet must immediately and directly follow
another as the gaze moves from thing to thing. Compare this to Olson's
dictum: "The objects which occur at every given moment of composition
must be handled as a series of objects in field."
Olson
avers that "man himself is an object" and defines objectism
"as the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as
ego, of the `subject' and his soul." Like Williams's equally bold
pronunciamento "No ideas but in things," this is Cartesian logic
with a vengeance: "I think, therefore I am-an object." Vendler
uses explicitly Cartesian terms in characterizing Graham's method as an
attempt "to show us her expanding universe by means of a slice of it
in conic section."
Louis
Zukofsky, in his objectivist version of the Pound-Williams tradition, has
applied Vendler's conic section metaphor quite literally as a structuring
device. Kenner calls Zukofsky's long poem "A" "a sequence
of word games, of which we are not told the rules," then writes of
the first half of "A" #9 that as it follows the rhyme scheme of
Cavalcanti's "Donna Mi Prega," it "adapts from Das Kapital ... the phrases it sets to this tune, and moreover
governs the distribution of 'n' and 'r' sounds according to the formula
for a conic section."
A
precursor to the contemporary L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school, Zukofsky's work
sometimes represents the reductio ad
absurdum of modernist poetics. In his sequence 80
Flowers he reduces words to static objects and radicalizes syntax into
nonexistence. The poem is composed of five-word lines, strictly determined
by word count and without regard to syllables, metrical feet, or syntax;
these lines are grouped by eights into stanzas. A representative sample
will show what poetry looks and sounds like when fitted to a Cartesian
grid. "Meaning" is beside the point ("No ideas but in
things"); games don't have meanings, only sets of arbitrarily imposed
rules. In place of syntactic flow or narrative or lyric unity, such poems
require critical commentary to invest the inert object with an aura of
significance. Stripped of commentary, the poem's artifice is almost
completely divorced from its necessary complement, utterance. Here's
"Flower #74 (Aloe)":
Alow alow loo no words
Oliver-error Rowland to Tower came
eyebright
monkeyshines monkey-wrench whitespotted eyetooth
Adder's-tongue
juice'll
streak kill-courtesy
mule-bitter-aloes
fancies of boor succulence
Bermoothes
thrust rapier's-point barb A-doze
stemless-lilies-internode more a low E
mellows habit swept dust or
William
Carlos Williams once defined a poem as "a small (or large) machine
made of words"--a precis that became one of the principal metaphors
of modernist verse. The machine is the very embodiment of linear,
deterministic processes; when we oppose it to the metaphors of Keats,
Whitman, and Hopkins, who compared poems to leaves and trees, we can see
just how fundamental a change occurred in the brief compass of a few
decades. We still speak of a sentence's kernel,
of its branching clauses and phrases; words are said to have roots.
Our figures imply that language, and especially syntax, is a living,
organic thing, directed by inner laws that generate and transform it.
Linguist Steven Pinker unabashedly describes speech in terms of flow,
irreducible to atomistic parts: "Speech is a river of breath, bent
into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat." In
this view, words are not separable "objects" to be handled one
after another, but nearly indistinguishable vortices in language's
turbulent flow: "In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the
next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way
there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word
boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that matches some
entry in our mental dictionary." Pinker's comments remind us that the
use of space as an organizing device came rather late in the history of
writing; originally words were simply run together on the handwritten
page.
Furthermore,
spoken language isn't a series of linguistic elements strung
"bead-like." It is nonlinear and fractally scaled:
"Phonemes are not assembled into words as one-dimensional
left-to-right strings. Like words and phrases, they are grouped into
units, which are then grouped into bigger units, and so on, defining a
tree." Pinker continues:
Even the sequence of sounds we think we hear
within a word are an illusion.If you were to cut up a tape of someone
saying cat, you would not get pieces that sounded like k,
a, and t
(the units called "phonemes" that roughly correspond to the
letters of the alphabet). And if you spliced the pieces together in
reverse order, they would be unintelligible, not tack....
[I]nformation about each component of a word is smeared over the entire
word.
Individual
words, syntax, and meaning are, then, inextricable from one another; and
in poetry they are even more intimately intertwined and unified by
metrical rhythm. Attempts to fragment, defamiliarize, and deconstruct
poetic language are therefore doomed to failure or, at best, only partial
success. Contemporary L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets illustrate this dilemma.
Thinking conventional poesy to be linear and authoritarian, they strew
syntactically unrelated words across a page or combine letters into
unpronounceable and semantically empty neologisms in order to expose the
vacuousness of poetic meaning and "command." Yet for all their
liberationist intentions, such a reductive conception of language defeats
itself. Instead of opening their texts to unfettered interpretation, such
authors may succeed all too well in making their work unreadable. Further,
their desire to "foreground the material signifier" exposes an
intellectual error that artificial-intelligence pioneers like Douglas
Hofstadter call "level confusion"--a mistake analogous to
confusing the melodies of Mozart with the way they're digitally encoded on
a compact disc. Chaos theory, conversely, shows how higher levels of order
can "emerge" from simple processes and indicates that
imaginative and moral complexities might emerge in the same way from
words, syntax, and poetic forms and rhythms.
Linguistic
research tells us that language cannot be broken down to strings of
atomized sounds; meaning informs and generates language's minutest
features, is fully "smeared across" or dissolved into its flow.
Pinker reports that when a nonlinguistic sound like the rapid-fire
clicking of a telegraph "is repeated at a rate of twenty times a
second or faster, we no longer hear it as a sequence of separate sounds
but as a low buzz." Yet in speech we can hear twenty to thirty
phonemes per second, and in artificially speeded-up speech as many as
forty to fifty. Pinker concludes that "the phonemes cannot possibly
be consecutive bits of sound; each moment of sound must have several
phonemes packed into it that our brains somehow unpack. As a result,
speech is by far the fastest way of getting information into the head
through the ear."
In
a wonderful act of synthesis, the philosopher Susanne Langer has, in Philosophy
in a New Key, captured the interdependence of rhythm, syntax,
language, and meaning in poetry:
Though the material
of poetry is verbal, its import is not the literal
assertion made in the words, but
the way the assertion is made, and this involves the sound, the tempo,
the aura of associations of the words, the long or short sequences of
ideas, the wealth or poverty of transient imagery that contains them, the
sudden arrest of fantasy by pure fact, or of familiar fact by sudden
fantasy, the suspense of literal meaning by a sustained ambiguity resolved
in a long-awaited key-word, and the unifying, all-embracing artifice of
rhythm. (The tension which music achieves through dissonance, and the
reorientation in each new resolution to harmony, find
their equivalents in the suspensions and
periodic decisions of propositional sense in poetry. Literal sense,
not euphony, is the "harmonic structure" of poetry ...)
Any
analysis that fails to take into account what Langer calls poetry's
"harmonic structure" will fall prey to the fallacies and
contradictions that plague the space-centered and deconstructive poetics
of modernism and postmodernism. To avoid this trap, we must abandon
modernism's central myth--the myth of a perpetual avant-garde, a notion
whose very name implies a linear conception of time and progress. For the
idea that the poet is eternally progressive and forward-looking we will
have to substitute a more recursive and evolutionary model of growth. If
we want to invent new poetries with the kind of scaled complexity we see
in nature and want to rediscover the "unifying, all-embracing
artifice of rhythm" in verse, we have to turn back to the beginnings
of modernism and salvage what remains beautiful and formally challenging
in that epoch-making work.
William
Carlos Williams was perhaps the most visually oriented modernist poet of
his generation. Unlike Pound and Eliot, who were classically trained and
familiar with the verse of several European languages, Williams was pretty
much self-taught. Paying no attention to Pound's elaborate experiments
with meter, he simply mimicked the look of Pound's work on the page and
tried, in varying degrees throughout his career, to carry his own quirky
patterns of speech over into print. From remarks in his autobiography
about The Waste Land, it's clear that Williams believed in the legend of
the avant-garde and saw himself as the avatar of a new American poetry. He
later said of Eliot's great poem that it "set me back twenty
years"; that it "returned us to the classroom just at the moment
when I felt that we were on the point of an escape." Williams's
belief in positivistic progress is most apparent when he writes that
without Eliot's retrograde countermovement, "we might have gone ahead
much faster."
Forging
ahead was the last thing Eliot wanted. In his best-known essay,
"Tradition and the Individual Talent," he urged the opposite
approach: a poet was to find a voice, invent a style, or (in Pound's
words) "make it new" by looking backward, to the great works of
the past. It was the recursive nature of Eliot's poetics--this returning
of the art "to the classroom" where traditions are
expounded--that enraged Williams, arch-apostle of the avant-garde.
For
Eliot, as for Pound in his best moments, the tradition is not a collection
of musty artifacts kept and passed down, but a living, evolving entity
that absorbs new information and transmutes itself into new forms as fresh
strategies and innovations affect the delicate relations of its
parts:
[W]hat
happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing
monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing
order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after
the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so
the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole
are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the
form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that
the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is
directed by the past.
Recursiveness
is a feature of all nonlinear, dynamic systems. Without it, there's no
evolution. Elsewhere in the essay, Eliot suggests that the tradition is an
organic, sensitive "mind," and he ascribes to it a stream-like
"current"--that is, flow.
Eliot's current not only carries its own accumulated history, but gains in
complexity as it goes:
The poet must be very conscious of the main current,
which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished
reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never
improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be
aware that the mind of Europe--the mind of his own country--a mind which
he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind--is
a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons
nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer,
or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development,
refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view
of the artist, any improvement.
With
Eliot's concept of a verse tradition, we return to the preliterate model
of poetry as communal mind. His "auditory imagination" restores,
too, the omnidirectional universe of "aural space." It is no
wonder, then, that for Eliot, free verse "does not exist." In
"Reflections on Vers Libre"
he writes that if such work constitutes "a genuine verse-form it will
have a positive definition. And I can only define it in negatives: 1)
absence of pattern, 2) absence of rhyme, 3) absence of meter."
Eliot's own poems often do have pattern, rhyme, and meter, and in fact are
amazingly diverse in style and structure. He uses blank verse, rhyming
metrical lines in assorted schemes, accentual verse, and occasional
"free" verse that appeals to the ear by continually approaching
and then retreating from or undercutting meter. His definition of this
final type of poetry, vers libere,
makes it sound like only a slightly more audacious and irregular form of
metrical manipulation:
[T]he
most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been
done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and
constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly
approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and
flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life
of verse.
Purists
have quibbled for decades over whether Eliot's practice meets any
legitimate definition of form or meter. Eliot himself saw his method as an
echo and outgrowth of the experiments of Jacobean playwrights, intimating
that we might find in his work and that of his contemporaries "the
same constant evasion and recognition of regularity" that one finds
in John Webster and Shakespeare. Eliot admits there is some
"irregularity of carelessness" in this mode of writing, but he
insists that some of the deviations from expectation belong to an
"irregularity of deliberation." I think history will confirm the
judgment of readers who trust the testimony of their ears that Eliot has
given us some of the century's best poems--work made memorable precisely
because of how it appeals to the auditory imagination.
Pound
too writes of tradition as a living thing, most memorably in the moving
finale of Canto 81, in the "libretto" section, where he cites
the musical-lyrical vein worked by Henry Lawes, Edmund Waller, Ben Jonson,
and others, then declares that "To have gathered from the air a live
tradition" is "not vanity." Like Eliot's "mind of
Europe," this live tradition shapes the living poem, finding its most
authentic expression in form and rhythm. Davie has traced Pound's idea of
form to the Latin forma, which
Pound defines most appositely: "The forma,
the immortal concetto, the
dynamic form which is like the rose pattern driven into the dead
iron-filings by the magnet, not by material contact with the magnet
itself, but separate from the magnet. Cut off by the layer of glass, the
dust filings rise and spring into order. Thus the forma,
the concept rises from death." Though the example of filings and
magnetism is deterministic in nature, Pound's image of the forma is a wonderfully intuitive picture of the chaotic
"attractors" that draw patterns from seemingly random phenomena
such as dripping faucets and collapsing sand piles--as well as of the
poetic attractors that, says Borges, shape rhymed lines into sonnets.
Davie asserts that Pound's source for this idea was almost certainly The New Word by Allen Upward, who described the forma in chaotic
terms as a "waterspout" or double vortex--terms that lead Davie
to compare it to the double helix of DNA. Though in some writings Pound
opted for the argot of sculpture--"planes in relation"-at other
times he envisioned the poetic image more kinetically as "a radiant
node or cluster" and, even more tellingly, as a "VORTEX, from
which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly
rushing."
Consider,
too, what Pound wrote in Canto 87, in a manner reminiscent of Hopkins's
"law of oak leaves": "in nature are signatures/needing no
verbal tradition,/oak leaf never plane leaf." And in Canto 91:
That your eyes come forth from their caves
& light then
as the holly-leaf
qui laborat, orat ...
Davie
relates these lines to others about foliage in the Cantos, showing how they embody Pound's "neo-Platonic doctrine
of signatures," according to which "every particular holly leaf
vouches for an identical forma reduplicated endlessly as every holly leaf
in its generation grows and withers. The holly leaf, simply by being
itself, celebrates a spiritual order, just as, by an old compassionate
doctrine, the simple man simply fulfilling his proper vocation makes
thereby an act of piety--`qui laborat, orat.'" For Pound, the forma is the patterning force behind all art, is the equivalent of
Eliot's "tradition."
Pound's
best critics have already pointed out what we might call the fractal
scaling of the Cantos--though
this epic lacks what may be the key element in any fractally scaled long
poem: narrative. In the verbal arts, narrative is the unifying force that
binds and molds small-scale movements into larger ones, and its absence in
Pound's poem not only vitiates much of his art but undermines claims that
it is fractally scaled and self-similar. Still, like Eliot in The
Waste Land and Joyce in Ulysses,
Pound does employ another overarching, unifying device, one Eliot defined
in "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" as "the mythical
method." This specifically modernist mode works, says Eliot, by
employing "a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and
antiquity." Pound opens his epic with a loose translation of Book
Eleven of The Odyssey, with a
descent to the underworld, and after many peregrinations through history
ascends in the late cantos back into myth, moving upward to what has been
called the poem's Paradiso. Even
Pound's inclusion of "history" in his most ambitious piece of
work operates in a way that might accord with chaotic principles. Davie
writes: "One way by which a poem might be thought to `contain'
history is by mirroring its own large-scale rhythms of discovery, wastage,
neglect, and rediscovery that historical records give us notice of."
In The Pound Era, Kenner
writes of how Pound's small-scale "subject-rhymes" and larger
"culture-rhymes" echo each other throughout the poem, and he has
more recently--in an essay entitled "Self-Similarity, Fractals,
Cantos"--attempted to use fractal geometry to illumine Pound's epic.
Kenner's analysis is frustratingly vague, however, offering few specific
examples of fractal scaling and self-similarity, and those not entirely
convincing.
The
lack of an overall structure in the Cantos
has often stymied even the poem's staunchest defenders, who are forced to
claim its very amorphousness as a virtue. Thus Kenner: "History works
toward no finale; analogously, self-similarity imposes no norm of
completeness. The Alps...are self-similar, from skyline clear down to
boulder; and had a few mountains never been formed, we'd not deem the Alps
`incomplete.'" Davie sounds a similar note: "[W]e can forget
about such much-debated nonquestions as whether this poem has a structure...or again, why the poem isn't finished, and whether it ever could have
been. Does the sea have a structure?
Does a sea finish anywhere? The
Mediterranean boils into and out of the Atlantic.... "Despite such
rhetorical finesse, the question of the poem's encompassing form and
scaling remains a problem for the Cantos
as it does not for Homer's epics, with their flowing narratives, unifying
meters, and self-similar episodes.
Until
Jim Powell's landmark essay "The Light of Vers Libre," Donald Davie had offered the most fruitful
analysis of Pound's metrical rhythms, another relatively neglected field
for critics. Davie traced those rhythms to the logaoedic experiments of
Jonson's "A Celebration of Charis: in Ten Lyric Pieces,"
particularly that poem's fourth section, which is composed of lines of
heterogeneous feet. Davie catalogs Jonson's reverberations throughout the Cantos, including the poem's most notable echo (given the steel dust
reference), in Canto 74:
Hast
'ou seen the rose in the steel dust
(or
swansdown ever?)
so light is the urging, so ordered the dark
petals of iron
we who have passed over Lethe.
Until
Powell, the usual mistake was to scan lines like these with iambs,
trochees, anapests, and dactyls, in their miscellaneous combinations and
permutations, and leave it at that. Following Pound's hints, Powell traced
the poet's rhythms to the larger, knottier metrical configurations of
Greek lyric poetry, specifically the Aeolian verse forms of Sappho and
Alcaeus and the choral meters of the great tragedians.
Pound's
reliance on the complex meters of the Greeks, in contradistinction to
Eliot's insistence on a "simple form, like the iambic
pentameter," marks perhaps the most notable difference between their
poetic practices. Pound seized on this point in his essay on Eliot,
complaining that Eliot's "article was defective in that he omitted
all consideration of meters depending on quantity, alliteration,
etc." Yet only when we see that the two poets' methods were closely
related can we begin to understand the better tradition of free verse that
originates not in the visual prosody of the print age but in the auditory
imagination.
In
much of his mature work, Pound writes in the tradition of metrical
experimentation begun by the predecessors of Sappho, Sophocles, and
Euripides. In his "Treatise on Metre," he argues that the meters
of classical Greek poetry were already in some sense "free":
"When the Greek dramatists developed or proceeded from anterior Greek
prosody, they arrived at chorus forms which are to all extents `free,'
though a superstructure of nomenclature has been gummed onto them by
analysers whom neither Aeschylus nor Euripides would ever have bothered to
read."
Powell
has demonstrated how in the Cantos
Pound freely modifies and combines meters in the manner of Greek dramatic
choruses. This skillful adaptation of classical meters--the same feet
employed by Euripides--was a central feature of Pound's mature work,
Powell argues. And the intricate Aeolic meters Pound uses (my examples are
from
/ - -
/ -
/ -
Canto
7)--aristophanean ("Life to make mock of motion"); dodrans
/
- - /
- /
/ -
/\ /
(shells
given out by shells); choriamb (shakes the dry pods) --correspond on a
small scale to the Greek myths animating much of the poem at a higher
scale.
For
all the expressiveness of Pound's technique, though, it does present
several thorny difficulties. The first is the problem of expectation: if
the reader doesn't know what metrical configurations Pound is
manipulating, how can he or she anticipate their appearance or hear them
upon repetition? Powell addresses this issue:
No "predetermined pattern" governs these
lines: no matter how thoroughly we analyze their accentual patterns, we
will never be in a position to predict the rhythmic shape of a given line,
will never find a preordained metrical pattern. What counterpoint Pound's
rhythms can achieve, they will play not against the reader's expectation,
against the meter ... but rather, against their own echo in the auditory
memory.
In
order to play off their own echoes in the auditory memory, the lines must
be self-similar.
A
second quandary arises from the size and complexity of Pound's unfamiliar
feet. His wont was to use the main components of Aeolic verse as a base
measure, mixing them with other Greek rhythms to fresh effects. This is
what makes Pound's verse "free," though his work bears scant
resemblance to the prosodic anarchy that followed in the wake of imagism.
But maintaining prosodic order is tricky when one's building blocks are so
unwieldy; the units of the English metrical tradition are small and
flexible, but if one tweaks or alters a multisyllabic configuration like
an aristophanean, the whole thing can quickly dissolve into chaos. Noting
the danger Pound faced in replacing the iambic "bars" of the
metrical cage with the "Aeolic bars" of a new one, Powell goes
to some lengths to show how the poet varied his meters. One solution to
the conundrum of how to do so without having feet break down was to let
one metrical pattern merge subtly into another at points so that a single
syllable performed double duty. Powell points out, for instance, that in
the line
- /
-
/ /
- -
/ -
"The sea is streaked red with
Adonis,"
"red" functions simultaneously as the
second stressed syllable of a
bacchiac(- / / ) and the first stressed syllable of
an adonic ( / - - / - ). Pound seems to operate, in lines where such a
fusion of shapes occurs, in the same field, and according to the same
principles, as did the poets of the tradition before Sappho and Alcaeus,
who evolved the first strains of the Aeolic melody [by devising a hybrid
of the choriamb and the cretic called the "choriambo-cretic"].
Yet
however Pound mixes and blends these metrical figures (and Powell is
extremely clever, and persuasive, in identifying and disentangling them),
an obstacle remains. Large units such as adonics cannot be broken or
carried over to the next line without loss of identity; the foot is
coterminous with the line. This poses a serious drawback for creating
patterns that bind several lines together; and it accounts, no doubt, for
Davie's remark that in the poetry of the Cantos
"enjambment is impossible."
Unlike
Pound's more massive metrical units, the simple binary pattern of the
iamb, which he was so anxious to break, offers almost infinite
possibilities for modulating and enjambing rhythms. A line of iambic
pentameter, for example, can sustain variations in all five of its feet
and still keep its integrity. Lines of blank verse can run over to form
verse paragraphs, as in Milton's poetry, and thus preserve that crucial
characteristic of complex dynamic systems: flow. In addition, the iambic
matrix is so holistic that an unstressed or lightly stressed syllable,
placed in the right position, can be "promoted" to--and heard
as--an accented syllable, thus maintaining the pattern.
We
need to recognize the sharp distinction between Pound's "free"
verse and that of his less musically ingenious contemporaries, and
Powell's essay is an invaluable resource in that regard. And lest we
continue to talk blithely of a Pound-Williams tradition, or--more
abominably--of a Walt Whitman-Williams nexus, let us turn now to that
grandfather of modern free verse, Whitman, whom Pound addressed as
"pig-headed father" in "A Pact," and to whose poetry
Eliot paid discreet homage from his first poems to his last. Once we
examine the work of this archetypal American poet, we will see that the
barbaric howls and yawps of his imitators only testify to their deafness
to his often subtle music.
Numerous
attempts, none wholly satisfactory, have been made to codify Whitman's
prosody. One faction holds that his primary formal device is accentualism.
These critics show how Whitman begins with a simple repeated pattern--of,
say, five or six accents per line--and varies his rhythm by shifting the
placement of caesuras from line to line. Another group claims that
Whitman's prosody is based on syntactic parallelism. Finally, some
commentators use the traditional feet of scansion in English--iamb,
trochee, dactyl, anapest--to scan Whitman's verse, uncovering lines and
passages composed of one or more of each. (Annie Finch's perceptive recent
study The Ghost of Meter is an
exemplar of this school.) The traditional metrical approach has been the
most fruitful for analyzing individual poems and offers the most coherent
and compelling account of Whitman's modus operandi. The truth is that
Whitman uses all the stratagems listed above, often merging and blending
them with passages of prose. He keeps our attention (usually) and
maintains the integrity of his verse even in such passages through the
felicity of his language...because he is, even at his windiest, what
Eliot once called him: a master of our prose.
To
this hodgepodge of prosodic explanations, I now propose to add another. I
wish to expand our metrical vocabulary to account for Whitman's rhythms.
For though dactyls and iambs are frequently the atoms of which his lines
are made, those particles often coalesce into multiplex
"molecules," and it is Whitman's manipulation of these that
gives his work its distinctive character. These larger units of rhythm
occur with enough regularity to fit our definitions of self-similarity and
so further our inquiry into how vers libere and logaoedic verse might
augment the metrical tradition and resemble complex dynamic forms.
Consider
the short poem "Quicksand Years," which I have scanned below:
/ -
/
- /
- -
/ -
/ -
Quicksand years that whirl me I know not
whither,
-
/ /
- -
/ /
/\ /
/ -
- / -
Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way,
substances mock and
-
/ -
elude me,
/
- -
/ -
/ - /
-
/ -
/\
/ -
/
Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess'd
soul, eludes
/\
not)
-
/ -
/ -
- /
/ - - /
- /
-
/
One's-self must never give way--that is the
final substance--that
-
- /
- /
out of all is sure,
/
- / -
- /
-
/ -
/ /
- -
/ -- - /
Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what
at last finally remains?
-
/ /\
/ /
- -
/ -
/
When shows break up what but One's-Self is sure?
Surprisingly,
the first line scans metrically as the initial line of a Sapphic stanza.
It is nearly identical to the opening of Pound's Sapphic imitation "Apparuit":
/ -
/
- / -
- /
- / /\
Green the ways, the breath of the fields
is thine there ...
The
remainder of Whitman's lyric commingles the same feet Pound pulled from
the Aeolic stockpile. One has only to compare their lines to see how
closely and strikingly the rhythms correspond:
/
- -
/
- /
-
Pound: "Life to make mock of motion"
/
- - /
- /
-
Whitman: "... whirl me I know not
whither"
/
- - / -
/ -
"--that is the final substance--"
/
- /
- - /
-
/ -
"Out of politics, triumphs, battles,"
/
- -
/ -
/
Pound: "Shells given out by shells"
/
- -
/ - /
Whitman: "--that out of all is sure,"
/
- /\
/ -
/
"... what but One's-Self is sure?"
Pound
was right when he said, in "A Pact," that he and Whitman
"have one sap and one root." Applying Powell's Greek
nomenclature, we can identify Whitman's meters above as choriamb
("politics, fail"), dodrans ("Only the theme I sing"),
and aristophanean ("Whirl me I know not whither" and
"strong-possess'd soul, eludes not"). Of the aristophanean,
Powell explains that when standing alone as a line or ending a line, the
final syllable may be short or long--but whether we trot out its technical
name or call it a thing that goes "Bum di di Bum di Bum di" or
"Bum di di Bum di Bum Bum," Whitman uses this shape with such
frequency in his poems that it amounts to a rhythmic signature.
"Quicksand
Years" also represents a clear case of fractal scaling. In it Whitman
repeats several metrical rhythms, making his lines self-similar, yet he
alters and admixes these shapes with others to break their too-strict
symmetry. In addition, the poem's central theme--that only the strong soul
can resist the fluid slippage and drift of time--mirrors at a higher scale
the dramas enacted in the rhythms, which maintain their integrity within
the temporal flux of the verse. The more closely we attend to Whitman's
verse, the richer and more rewarding it appears; poets who try to emulate
him merely by aping his meandering lines and syntactic parallelism delude
themselves and devalue Whitman's achievement.
Critics
like John Frederick Nims, Paul Elmer More, and Annie Finch have explored
Whitman's astonishingly widespread and inventive use of adonics,
amphibrachs, medial caesurae, and so on. It is, then, misleading to claim,
as Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell do in Sound
and Form in Modern Poetry, that the structuring device of the
following lines is simply anaphora or syntactic parallelism:
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in
the cool
transparent night,
As I watched where you pass'd and was lost in
the netherward
Black of the night,
As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where
you sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night and was gone.
and
With
the pomp of the inloop'd flags with the cities draped in
black,
With the show of the States themselves as of
crape-veil'd women
standing,
With processions long and winding and the
flambeaus of the night,
With countless torches lit, with the silent sea
of faces and the
unbared heads ...
Much more than syntax and word order are repeated; the lines are rhythmically
similar at the level of foot and syllable. The second line in the first
excerpt above is perfect anapestic hexameter. The line that follows is
nearly identical; the line preceding is anapestic with a few variations.
The rhythmic repetitions occur in these and other passages with such
consistency that we can be sure Whitman heard and intended them. Dactyls
and anapests were in the air during the period when Whitman wrote Leaves
of Grass; but how do we account for the presence of so many adonics
and choriambs, since Whitman didn't ever study Greek? Of course, the
larger feet can be broken down into trochees, dactyls, and iambs, but in
many of Whitman's lines the Aeolic figures maintain their integrity so
surely and occur so often that it seems they, and not their constituent
particles, are the key elements of his verse.
One
half-serious answer to the question of where Whitman got these Greek
meters might be that when he invited the classical muse to migrate to
America in "Song of the Exposition," she complied, bringing her
rhythm-hoard with her. After all, as Finch has pointed out, it is no
accident that the lines that invoke the muse might be classified as rough
dactylic hexameter:
Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid
accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and
Aeneas',
Odysseus'
wanderings,
Placard "Removed" and "To
Let" on the rocks of your snowy
Parnassus...
Furthermore,
in the two short poems that open Leaves
of Grass, Whitman announces his epic intentions, declaring that he'll
sing not of arms and the man, as did Virgil and Homer, but of
"One's-Self" and of "Modern Man."
A
more serious and cogent answer to the question of Whitman's meter lies in
modern systems science. After all, one core principle of chaos theory is
that complex systems are self-organizing. If so, then the Aeolic shapes
might be said to have organized themselves from Whitman's rhythmic
improvisations, drawing with them the whole substructure of Greek lyric
poetry. Whitman's meters might then be said to have arisen out of the same
matrix (or from the same "roots") as did those of Sappho's
poetic forebears. In the language of chaos theory, choriamb, adonic, and
dodrans might be considered metrical "attractors" that drew
Whitman's dactyls and iambs, accentual patterns, and syntactic repetitions
into metrically similar shapes, just as they had done millennia earlier to
the lines of ancient Greeks. Whitman's fitful and somewhat scattershot use
of these meters resulted no doubt from the fact that he worked in
isolation, without the support of any institution or known tradition. At
times, the poet himself--who might, in fact, have been as cheerfully
indifferent as Aeschylus or Euripides to the gummed-on
"superstructure of nomenclature"--must have assumed that the
sole source of his novel poetics was the syntactic repetitions and
parallel constructions he'd borrowed from the King James Bible.
To
buttress the claim that metrical rhythms are self-organizing, we might
adduce parallel cases where meters seem to emerge spontaneously in writing
structured on principles that would seem inhospitable, even inimical, to
such regularity. There are long passages in Moby-Dick
where, as Melville's prose mounts in emotional intensity, line after line
of iambic pentameter appears. Marianne Moore's syllabics might provide
another example of this phenomenon. For instance, both Charles Hartman and
Hugh Kenner offer unconvincing accounts of why, in the middle of
"Bird-Witted," Moore's syllable count suddenly changes,
disrupting the stanzaic pattern. The lines that provoked their responses
begin in stanza four:
with rapid unexpected flute-
sounds leaping from the throat
of the astute
grown bird, comes back to one from
the remote
unenergetic sun-
lit air before
the brood was here? How harsh
the bird's voice has become.
A piebald cat observing them,
is slowly creeping toward the trim
trio on the tree-stem.
Why
does the line beginning stanza five have eight syllables instead of the
expected nine, or the penultimate line of stanza four have six syllables
instead of seven? The answer is simple: both lines have become iambic. The
overall cadence in the passage is iambic, spliced with a few surviving
syllabic lines. Poets often use odd-numbered counts in syllabics in order
to resist the tendency of even-numbered lines to turn metrical. In her
original pattern, some of Moore's lines were even; at some point the
syllables started reacting to this numerical constraint and coalesced into
iambs, thus causing the odd-numbered lines to convert to an iambic beat
and skewing their syllable-counts accordingly.
As
these examples suggest, verse doesn't want to be free, though modernist
and postmodern poets have hatched strategies to spatialize and fragment it
into a dubious sort of freedom. After more than a century of experiment,
it's time to take a hard look at the results. The myth of the avant-garde
has led poetry into ever-increasing entropy and now, in the work of some
contemporary L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, propels it toward thermodynamic
heat-death. Chaos science offers a counterexample by showing how order
arises spontaneously from seeming randomness when rules are allowed to
interact with the workings of chance. As Pound and Eliot have proposed,
poetry has a mind of its own. If poets immerse themselves in that
mind--and listen to what they write--poems will self-organize into
beautifully intricate shapes. This process involves recursion, involution,
and the continuous fine-tuning of feedback.
True revolutions in poetry
must pass through the spiral of the vortex.
[Editor's
Note: This essay first appeared in The Southern Review.] |
