"Kitchen Criticism" - A Guide to Practical Matters in Poetry:Frost's "Mending Wall" and Playful Punctuation.

First, a little theory: Frost's principal contribution to prosody is his somewhat elusive idea of "the sound of sense." I won't go into it in detail--any serious Frost scholar has touched on it in some way, shape, or form already. Basically, it relates to the tension between speech and metre, and the creative possibilities for tone therefrom. Poetic metre is an imposition on speech in order to extract tones of voice for dramatic purposes. I might go into detail elsewhere to tidy up the rough edges of that brief explanation.

Regardless of my imprecision, there is one poetic prescription that follows from Frost's idea: we read a poem to the sentence, to the full stop, to get the full sense of the meaning. Tyler Hoffman, whom I will return to a few times, has a neat phrase for Frost's prosody in practice; he calls it "line-sentence counterpointing." I have always been taken with Frost's theory of the sound of sense--also called the theory of sentence-sounds (Frost couldn't make up his mind), hence Hoffman's useful coinage. 

So, we read the poem not to the line, but to the sentence. There's both a prosodic reason for this prescription, but also a conceptual one, and Frost manages to tease out a little play with both. Despite his claims, Frost most certainly relied, as most poets do, on punctuation to manage the pace of his poems, to manipulate the meaning, just as we see in "Stopping by Woods." He also had tremendous fun with the little dots and squiggles on the page; and it's to one such case I wish to briefly turn before I get too serious. 

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In "Mending Wall," one of Frost's most famous poems, and for a time my favourite, Frost leaves what gamers today might be call an "Easter egg," a little reward for those who know where to find it. There's a lot to say about the poem, but I want to focus on this little Easter egg. The poem is forty-five lines long, unrhymed, written in iambic pentameter, Frost's preferred narrative form. "Mending Wall" is more lyrical, but it does tell a little story. Like "The Road Not Taken" there is a deception, or a trick, at the heart of the tale the speaker tells. More on that poem another time. The Easter egg comes in line 23: 

There where it is we do not need the wall

But you won't see it if I just quote the line. You need the lines surrounding it; in fact, you need a few sentences: 

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

Do you see it yet? There's a tone of gentle mocking in this excerpt, as there is throughout the poem; the speaker finds his neighbour somewhat simple, and makes fun of him, both to his neighbour's face and to us, the reader. 

But there's a little grammatical play being had here, too. Let's look at the middle sentence as a sentence to see: "it comes to little more: there where it is we do not need the wall: he is all pine and I am apple orchard." Surely you see it now: two colons in the one sentence--a very unusual arrangement. Not ungrammatical, but certainly unorthodox. There's no real need to use it in any circumstance. What does it mean? 

The middle most line of the poem, asserting the redundancy of the wall, is bookended by two colons:

: There where it is we do not need the wall: 

Do you get it? The colon makes the line look like a little wall! Specifically, a wall of stones shaped like "loaves and some so nearly balls" that the wall-menders must use "a spell" to keep them in place. 

Unconvinced? There's more. 

The two colons are grammatically unnecessary. They could be replaced by semicolons or full stops. But Frost used two colons instead. The grammar is important here. Colons signify a subordinate relationship. Under normal circumstances, the second half of a sentence with a colon in it is dependent on, or subordinated to, the first half. By contrast, a semicolon is used to divide two independent clauses, or sets of clauses, each with at least one independent clause. 

Two semicolons wouldn't look like loaves and balls of stone stacked on top of each other, but they would indicate parallel clauses. Instead, Frost uses a subordinating grammatical structure to produce an image of a parallel construct: a wall separating two neighbours. But what he is really pointing to is the dependent relationship between the two neighbours, specifically speaker dependent upon his neighbour. 

The speaker mocks his neighbour, about the pine cones and apples, about "elves," and about his (the neighbour's) overreliance on his father's saying, that "good fences make good neighbours." But who called to whom about mending the fence? This from the speaker (my italics):

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line 

And set the wall between us once again.

It is the speaker who lets his neighbour know about the wall. The line is slipped in there and overshadowed by the later joke-making. It's a similar misdirection to the more famous one in "The Road Not Taken." Why does the speaker let his neighbour know about the wall? To make fun of him? Perhaps. That's a question beyond our purposes here; nevertheless, we can say that the speaker is dependent on his neighbour, regardless of how he views his neighbour's dependence on his father's words of wisdom. There are, we might say, parallels of dependency in this poem, and Frost's subtle play with punctuation and grammar is just one layer of the meaning in this poem. 

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That'll do for now. Frost is a meticulous craftsman, right down to the logical implications that follow from carefully selected punctuation marks. This level of grammatical intrigue is common to all poets, but especially formalists I find. Where formal metre is employed, high standards of punctuation tend to be there managing the prosodic tension. In the next blog, I'll look at some more Frost, but I'll bring in some Aussie poets as well. In particular, I'll be looking at silence... 

"Kitchen Criticism" - A Guide to Practical Matters in Poetry:Introduction.

The term "Kitchen Criticism" comes from Clive James' most recent (and probably last) collection of poetry criticism and commentary, Poetry Notebooks: 2006-2014. He borrowed it from Samuel Johnson and the Elizabethans, and I am borrowing it from him (40-43). In short, the term relates to the reading and critiquing of the practical matters of poetry, mostly to do with metre. I'll broaden my use of the term to include grammatical and rhetorical matters, which I think is in keeping with the spirit of the term.

Put another way, I take kitchen criticism to mean looking at--nay, unpacking--the raw ingredients of a poem. How does this differ from regular old criticism? Well, we'll have to see. To me, it's about the basics of poetry, not the highfalutin stuff in, say, Robert Pinsky's The Situation of Poetry (which I read the other day, so thought I'd namedrop), or Seamus Heaney's The Redress of Poetry (haven't read yet, but about to--namedropping again). I'm reading a lot of criticism at the moment, so I'll take this opportunity to do a little myself, starting with the basics.

There's a lot of metaphysics when it comes to poetic criticism, lots of "isms" and other abstractions; I want to get back into the physics, the grammar and the rhetorical choices of poets, to see what they're up to, before we get to the higher order stuff. Perhaps kitchen criticism is just another term for grammatical criticism, or rhetorical criticism. At this point, I don't think it matters much; it's probably just best to dive in and get my hands dirty.

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As a bit of a grammar nerd, I like to see how poets play with punctuation, to observe how it differs to the way we use it in prose, even of the academic sort. I'm a stickler on the semicolon, for instance; it does a certain thing in academic prose, and I want to see it do its job! But in poetry it's another matter. We aren't so much concerned with prose conventions in poetry as we are with sound and suggestion, with intonation and implication. Punctuation performs the role of a non-verbal signifier to the eye and to the voice; it influences both the pace of reading and the logical relations of lexical items, as in the famous debate surrounding the comma from this line from Frost:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.

Later changed to:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

Much meaning rests upon the presence or absence of a comma. The change may play into the perennial debate surrounding the so-called Oxford comma: should you or shouldn't you? (Yes, you should.) The change does, most people seem to accept, change the meaning of the line, and slightly the pace of its reading. The pause after "dark" is dropped, and with it the grammatical listing structure: originally, the woods were lovely, and they were dark, and they were deep; now they are lovely because they are dark and deep. A parallel relationship between the three lexical items (lovely, dark, deep), now becomes one of subordination. This is no minor change; rather, it is a change of perception, like when we change the focus of a photograph by zooming in or out, things in the foreground now blurred or clarified from our fiddling with the lens. Poets, too, must adjust the aperture of their perception to get things how they want them, and a little fiddling with punctuation may achieve just that.

There's nothing controversial about that analysis. You'd be justified in being underwhelmed thus far. So we'll just take that as a bit of practice, or a warm up; but you get the idea.

Being a formalist, Frost is a wonderful subject for such kitchen criticism, and I'll spend a bit of time with him. (I also wrote my thesis on his poetics, so that helps.) I'll be looking at other poets as well, including Australian poets Gwen Harwood, Judith Wright, and Stephen Edgar, as well as American poets Theodore Roethke, Ted Kooser, and Weldon Kees. Those are just some names off the top of my head at the moment. I may even throw in some Henry Lawson. (I'm doing some research on Lawson, so this might be a good place to trial a bit of close reading.)

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I'll leave it there for now, as I have a habit of over-writing these things. I'll pick up a bit more on punctuation and more in Frost and others next time, building towards a deeper consideration of the relationship between punctuation and sound. As I get more technical and more evasive in my criticism, I'll come back to "Stopping by Woods"; there's a lot to look at--and listen for--in this short and beautiful poem.

The Physiology of Poetry

The first thing you must know about reading poetry is that it is unlike reading any other kind of text; not an essay; not a novel; not a newspaper article. Poetry is read as if it were read aloud. When it is read aloud - recited - it is, in essence, performed. The sound of the spoken word is as important as the content. Poetry resides at the primitive intersection of expression and meaning, vocalisation and intention. Language emerges from the body's capacity to produce sounds and to gesticulate (with hand gestures, body language, and facial expressions). When language takes the written form, we often neglect this essential embodied foundation. When reading poetry it is important to remember that it is grounded in the body: the lungs; the heart; the throat; the tongue; the lips; even the neck and back muscles. Posture matters in the recital of poetry - both real and silent - and the understanding that follows from this embodying of the poem.

The act of reciting silently to oneself I call "self-recital." The name, however, implies more than just reciting to oneself; it entails a recital of oneself. In reciting a poem, the reader is imitating or mimicking the poem and the creative processes that constitutes the making of the poem. Following this line of thinking, one might more appropriately say the reader recites the "self" of the poem through this imitation. I must stop here on this point, however, before it gets too abstract. Two things have been asserted thus far that need reiterating: first, reading poetry entails an act of recital; second, and related to the first, reading a poem entails imitation, or mimesis. When we read or recite the poem, out loud or to ourselves, we mimic it. 

So far, this won't help your understanding of poetry; what I have said is very abstract. Persevere: it will make sense shortly. What i have posited doesn't answer the most common complaints about poetry from novices. "I don't get it!" "I don't understand poetic metre." "Why does poetry rhyme?" "Why doesn't this poem rhyme!?" There are different issues at play here, but all these issues revolve around how poetry makes the meaning that it expresses. As I said above, poetry derives from a primal site of human meaning-making: the body. This is why poetry is performed, or acted out, even in self-recital. 

Rhyme and metre are merely devices that help the poet to shape and contort the language (meaning and expression) he or she uses. To the reader, these devices, if and when they are used, are like stage directions; the reader shapes and contorts himself as he or she tries to mimic the poem. By contortion, I am making a physiognomic connection: the mouth, the face, the tongue, the lungs, the eyes, even the neck and back muscles of the reader take a different shape to mirror or mimic the poem in order to reproduce the meaning-making process of the poem. These contortions in the act of self-recital are not obvious, of course. Nobody twists their features so dramatically in a way we would recognise as physical "contortions." The contortions I mean are neurophysiological. The imitation of poetry is subtle and internal. 

The devices that are used to contort and compress the words and sounds of the poem are often misunderstood, and because they are misunderstood the reader's mimetic relationship with poetry is greatly diminished. Here, I will address rhyme and metre, arguably the two most commonly misunderstood elements of poetry. Rhyme, in particular, has an insidious effect on our experience and understanding of poetry. Rhyme is often seen as a basic poetic device, when nothing is further from the truth. Rhyme misused destroys poetry and our understanding of it. 

End-rhyme, for instance, can give the impression that poetry must be read "to the end of the line"; that is, poetry should be read to "hit" the rhyme so that the rhyme is emphasised. This is not the case, certainly not with blank verse or free verse, not even with all rhyming poems. Poems do not have to rhyme, but plenty of good poems do. "Reading to the end of the line" is entirely the wrong message to take from the effect of end-rhyme. Metre, for example blank verse, is used, in part, to subvert acquired reading habits. More specifically, however, metre is used to compress the speech pattern of the poem in order to achieve rhythm. Importantly, rhythm is established so that it, too, can be subverted, changed, altered. A rhythm that does not change is monotonous, and poetry written as such doggerel.

Rhythm from line to line tends to remain consistent, albeit with variations, called hypermetric features. Simply because the rhythm is largely consistent doesn't mean you stop at the end of the line and start again at the beginning of the next. The rhythm wraps around from one line to the next based on the sentence structure. As such, you don't read to the end of the line, you read to the end of the sentence. The compression caused by the metre emphasises the rhythm of reading, but you still read for the logical unit of thought: the sentence. This raises the further question of grammar - while we have considerable flexibility with grammar in poetry, we cannot wholly ignore it (although some have tried). Punctuation, for example, plays an important role in signifying rhythm. In primary school, we are often taught that the comma signifies a "short" pause or breath, while a full stop signifies a "long" breath. This description, while questionable in the teaching of technical grammar, is useful for reading poetry. 

Where the metre provides the tension and compression required to produce a consistent rhythm, and rhyme can help to enforce that rhythm, punctuation and grammar help to structure and signify, or flag, the rhythm to the reader. When reading a poem, imitating it in the act of self-recital, we read in "parcels" of two to three words. The metre, specifically the basic unit of metre the foot (2-3 syllables), at a fundamental level, and punctuation and grammar at a level higher (and rhyme at a level higher still) all contribute to the way we perceive and subsequently comprehend the poem. The poem is a dynamic of these (and other) elements. Reducing the poetic experience to any one element is counterproductive. 

There are a few points to take out of this discussion:

1) Reading poetry is a form of performance, a recital or self-recital, which is predicated on an act of imitation. 

2) This act of imitation is an embodied act. Poetry acts upon the body in subtle but significant ways. 

3) Poetry employs a number of devices, including metre, rhyme, and grammar and punctuation, to compress and contort language for effect.

4) The reader mimics these contortions in order reproduce the meaning-making process of the poem. 

5) In imitating the poem, the reader must take a couple of things into account:

5i) Not all poems will feature all the possible elements of poetry. Not all poems rhyme for example.

5ii) In order to experience the rhythm of the poem, we don't read to the end of the line, but to the end of the sentence.

5iii) Punctuation and grammar helps to provide "stage directions": a comma indicates a short breath, a full stop a long breath, semicolons and colons somewhere in between. When they are used, question and exclamation marks indicate the appropriate inflection. 

One last point is worth reiterating, and it relates to the process of reading itself. There is a disparity between the way we perceive words on the page and the way we speak them. When we read, our eyes dart rapidly from side to side, movements called saccades. Because of this, we don't actually read word by word, we read in parcels of words, two or three at a time. When we speak, however, we speak in syllabic progression; to be understood, we have to enunciate our words clearly (speed of enunciation differs with familiar, mature native speakers). 

Poetry, as an act of imitation and recital, requires that we read at a pace that allows us to enunciate the words in syllabic progression; but because of our faster reading habit (saccadic rhythms are the reason we can skim read) we have to resist the urge to skim or scan quickly. If this happens, the effect of the poem is lost. This is one aspect of poetry's subversion of acquired language habits. Importantly, the saccadic rhythm of eye movements helps us find the beat of the poem. A metrical foot is 2-3 syllables long. We can, in fact, perceive the metre of half a line quite easily, with a little practice. The punctuation on the page helps to slow us down even further, because a foot usually does not cross punctuation marks. 

Hopefully, I have conveyed the complexity of the poetic experience, but I have not overwhelmed you with it. There are simple things to keep in mind in order to come to grips with poetry. It is only through accumulating an admittedly imperfect arsenal of hints, tips, and rules of thumb over time, as well as plenty of practice, that you will reconstruct the poetic experience for yourself and come to understand poetry at its most fundamental level. 

The Defence of Poetry in the Modern World: A Proposal

It has largely become a cliché in the discussion of poetry, of its moral and social merits, to address the great Platonic rejection of the art from any ideal state of being. Poets were kicked out of the Republic, and for millennia they have held a grudge. Poets “know” intuitively the social and moral importance of their art, the odd outlandish remark punctuating the point: “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” Shelley announces. The emphasis, one suspects, is on unacknowledged with a touch of agitation. As a result of Plato’s rough treatment, there has grown the tradition of the “defence” of poetry, but it seems no acknowledgement of poetry’s importance is yet forthcoming.

But can poetry’s modern obscurity and disfavour really be attributed to an ancient philosopher? The problem that poetry faces today is not philosophical, but perhaps rather economical. Poetry has always suffered from a lack of money and popular appeal; as Robert Frost says, “there is no money in poetry and no poetry in money.” Poetry is forever on the defence because it has a limited audience; it seems it has always had a limited audience, with few exceptions. We try to teach it in school, and perhaps this is where the problem lies. Equally as problematic, in the contemporary context, poetry cannot contend with the hyperstimulation of modern technology and entertainment.

Poetry has remained largely unchanged; the biggest change it has ever endured is the great leap from the oral to written form. The latter, of course, retains a connection with the former. Modern technology, however, has accelerated at such pace that our lives and or experiences are unimaginably different to what to what they were two or three generations ago. Poetry, to be sure, is an ancient art, if not the most ancient, and this is perhaps why we so often return to that first great rejection. We must not overlook the possibility, however, that society may have just past us by. This is the existential threat that poetry faces, and it is up to poets not only to resist this nihilism, but to assert its positive presence in society. More than just poets, it is up to thinkers and theorists and poetry’s small but loyal coterie of sympathisers to defend poetry.

But, does poetry actually need “defending”? Surely, there will always be readers of poetry. The internet has opened up the lines of communication between human beings across great distances more than any other invention; it has taken the inventions of language and the written word into a new dimension. There are numerous online poetry publications, as well as online communities of poets where their art can be shared and discussed. While there is still little money in poetry, it doesn’t seem to be any worse off in Information Age.

Poets still practice their art freely; readers still read, and theorists still theorise. Students still hate poetry, and teachers still don’t help. The question “what is poetry?” however, also remains unanswered. Poetry, for many, still remains a mystery; the mysteries of rhyme, metre, free verse, even the social and moral purpose of poetry, are vexatious for many. Or, perhaps, poetry slows life and the mind down to a pace at which it must consider things at depth, and this is frustrating in the flittering age of the internet. Does anybody really want to think anymore when knowledge is just a Google search away? Importantly, does anybody need to think the way in which poetry compels us anymore?

Poetry must always find and assert its relevance in any given time period; it is no different today. Poets have an obligation to their craft not only to find its contemporary niche, but to expand that niche and seek acknowledgement. This is achieved as much through the practice of poetry as through imparting the practice to others, creatively and pedagogically. Understanding what poetry is requires a sustained engagement by practitioners and theorists alike in order to uncover and convey the mysteries of poetry to those both inside and outside the coterie of poetry.

Understanding poetry is not the same as understanding other arts. Poetry is itself about understanding, about metaphor and meaning-making. Poetry can make us think deeply, and challenge our cognitive capacity; a good poem will always punish a lazy reader, but reward an attentive one. Understanding poetry, answering the question “what is poetry?” is a complex matter that has wracked the minds of poets, theorists, critics, and philosophers since Plato. It may, then, have been a fundamental misunderstanding of poetry that led to Plato’s rash decision. But we can only assume.

How then is poetry to be explained? Perhaps more importantly, how is poetry to be explained so as to attract more readers? Poetry, after all, relates to a fundamental process of thinking; indeed, poetry turns us back towards that process of meaning-making like no other art. To understand poetry, then, is to understand meaning-making at its most fundamental level. The challenge for poets and poetic thinkers alike is to demonstrate this vital dimension of poetry. This is a theoretical problem as much as a practical problem; as much as a pedagogical problem as it is a critical problem.

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The relationship between poetic practice and theory is an important intersection that can shed light on our understanding of poetry, but that relationship is also problematic. There is no comprehensive theory of poetry, but countless parochial ones. Every poet has a few theories that might explain their use of a favourite metaphor or trope; every theorist has a theory by which to explain why their favourite poet is particularly special. There may be a danger, then, that theory is just a side industry or a curiosity, so much self-justificatory or self-congratulatory “padding.” What, then, is the relationship between practice and theory? Does poetic practice even need theory? What purposed does the latter serve to the former?

It is, perhaps, too glib to suggest that the theory of poets is self-serving, equally so with theorists and critics. The attempt to understand poetry is an ongoing effort to which every poet and theorist adds his or her voice and ideas. The question, however, must be asked, what value does theory have in relation to the practice of poetry. Can theory ever explain poetry? Can practice ever be used to prove theory? Do poets write to a theory, or does theory come ex post facto?

Poets, like Wordsworth, Shelley, Eliot, and Brodsky, have contributed just as significantly to poetic theory as much as practice. But we must ask what the relationship between their theory and practice is. In what way, for instance, is Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative” at work in The Waste Land? Equally importantly, we must also ask what the relationship between the theoretical insights of poets is. And further, can we apply the insights of one poet to the works of another? Can Philip Larkin’s notion of the “emotional concept” be applied Robert Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man”? Is there any value in such comparative analysis? Will this get us any closer to understanding what poetry is?

We have been trying to understand poetry – to answer the question “what is poetry?” – since at least Aristotle; since Plato, we have been “defending” it against misunderstanding. There is a long tradition of theoretical defences and explications of poetry, which can be mined for convergent insights. “Delight,” for instance, or “wisdom” (or “knowledge,” or “learning”) are recurrent concepts in the defence of poetry. The goal of poetry, as Sidney succinctly puts it, is “to teach and delight.” “A poem” Frost says concurring, “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” For Aristotle, the delight, or pleasure, originates in mimesis; for Plato, the sin of poetry consists in the wrong kind of teaching it imparts through mimesis. Is it possible to explain the delight and teaching of poetry in defence against Plato’s accusations?

Our understanding of the human body and brain is of such an advanced nature that we may someday soon map human thought with high fidelity. Soon, we may be able to map the poetic experience inside the brain and see poetic delight; we might be able to see the benefits of poetry. This might be considered a threat, the unravelling of yet another rainbow. What are the implications of our growing cognitive and neurological understanding of human thought and experience for poetic theory and practice? To what extent should poets embrace technology? And how might our understanding of the human body and brain be incorporated into our understanding of poetry?

Perhaps a new “defence of poetry” would be characterised by the re-evaluation of poetry in light of new scientific knowledge. As knowledge and technology evolves, society changes; as society changes, so does its relationship to its artists, including its poets. The poet’s niche must be carved anew. The rise of technology and scientific knowledge can be seen to throw into stark relief the relationship between poetic practice and theory, in part because science and technology have changed how we relate to each other. Poetry, the “most ancient” of arts, connects us to our history and our origins; how we reconcile it with our technology-driven future may be the most important question of all.  

Pronominal Poetics: "This Is How It Goes."

In adopting the poetic stance we adopt the posture of reading the poem (and there is a definite posture to reading); the articulatory or verbal gestures of the poem become our own. The standing is also a pointing or an indicating. As the poem nods or winks or grins or raises a subtle eyebrow, so do we, the reader. This is how it goes.

“This” is a pronoun; it points to where it stands. This is where it stands. This is how it goes. Not “that,” which points to the past or to some other place. This is the present, for the poetic experience is always in the present. When we adopt the poetic stance we are always adopting it here and now. If “this” is the poetic experience, then “it” is the poem.

The poem is a pronominal object that points elsewhere; it stands for the complex of sounds and associations that constitute the poetic experience; in essence, the poem is pronominal for the poetic experience. The poem, the “it,” points to “you” and “me” the reader, and it points to the poetic experience that you and I will have. “This” is the experience of “it.” This is how it goes. It is an experience.

“Is” is the pure copula, connecting the subject to its predicate, connecting “this” to “how it goes.” The pure copula has no content except to signify existence, that “this” and “it” are connected. But “this” is how it goes. “This” is the “how,” the “how” of “it.” “How” is a conjunction. “How” connects the pronoun “this” to the pronoun “it” and its existence is asserted by the pure copula “is.” “How” is the “manner in which” of “this,” how it goes.

“Goes” is the verb, simple present tense and intransitive. “To go” means to move, to go from one place to another. “This,” the poetic experience, is “how,” the manner in which, “it,” the poem, goes. This is how it goes. But “it” goes nowhere but within the reader, for whom “this” is the experience of “it,” here and now, the manner in which the poem moves within you and me.

In adopting the poetic stance, we adopting the standing of the poem, its posture, the way it stands in relation to other things, what “it” is about. “This” is how the poem goes about being about what it is within the reader’s adoption of the poetic stance. The reader stands for the poem by adopting its stance, and what the poem stands for becomes what the reader stands for. This is how it goes.

Poem: [Poetry should be just a little sexual]

Poetry should be just a little sexual;

It rolls around the mouth, across the tongue;

The fingertips outstretch and poised; the lips

Puckered, pursed, now pouting to pronounce.

What’s not to be aroused by there? The sounds

Of sweet love-making bound up in the mouth and hands.

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 3): Larkin and Brodsky, The Face of the Poem

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 1): Eliot, Theory and Criticism

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 2): Eliot and Brodsky, the Experience of Poems

Note: this thread has taken on a life of its own. The original intention of this thread was to develop a seminar paper on the Philosophy of Poetry that I would deliver in July; however, it has become apparent that this series of blogs is far more in-depth than a seminar paper. I will continue to explore the notion of a philosophy of poetry here, and hopefully generate further insight into my overall research. As such, this will be an ongoing enterprise. The format will remain the same as a continuous text. Each individual post is not a discrete unity.

 

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 3): Larkin and Brodsky, The Face of the Poem

The conversation, then, in Brodsky’s estimation, is between the reader and the poem; “a poem,” it must be remembered, “addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct [...] relations.” The poem catalyses in the reader’s mind so that the reader can, indeed, “be like” the poem. Where Eliot refers to this process of getting inside the reader’s head as a catalytic process, Brodsky refers to it as “linguistic osmosis.”

Both poets are referring to the way in which the poet conveys the experience of the meaning-making process to the reader. This is process entails emotion. The British poet, Philip Larkin puts the point directly: “poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transference.” Elsewhere he explains the process of transference in three stages:

The first [stage] is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote.

The “transference” of the “emotional concept” through the “verbal device” of the poem from poet to reader – not just a single reader but all readers – resonates with Brodsky’s “linguistic osmosis,” but it also resonates with the catalytic metaphor Eliot uses to explain his “Impersonal theory” of the poetic process.

            Brodsky argues that the poetic experience is intensely private, throwing into stark relief “the privateness of the human condition.” It nevertheless is a conversation with the poet, at least through the medium of the poem; for Eliot, the poet is merely a conduit, and it is the poem that stands in his place, conveying emotion through the “objective correlative,” the objects or series of events that encapsulate what Larkin calls the “emotional concept.” The mechanics of the poetic experience, for Larkin, is best facilitated “in silence”:

the reader’s first encounter with the poem must be a silent, active one, an absorption of spelling and stanza arrangement as much as paraphraseable meaning and corrective historical knowledge.

Larkin is making a comparison between reading poetry and hearing it read; he says elsewhere:

Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much – the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go at your own pace, taking it in properly; hearing it means you’re dragged along at the speaker’s own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing “there” and “their” and things like that. And the speaker may interpose his personality between you and the poem, for better or worse.

The reader can only be like the poem if the responsibility of re-enacting the meaning-making process is his. We may become curious, Larkin admits, of what the author sounds like:

there comes a moment with any poem that we have really taken to ourselves when we want to hear its author read it. We want to confirm our conviction that he would quicken the pace here, throw away an irony there, or perhaps our curiosity is just for what his voice can add.

This curiosity about the poet’s voice is a natural outcome of what I previously called poetic mimesis; Eliot’s theory of depersonalisation and Brodsky’s linguistic osmosis represent different, but related, facets of poetic mimesis.

            For Brodsky, the curiosity engendered in the reader goes beyond the voice of the poet; it is, for Brodsky, the face of the poet that we become curious about:

In theory, authors’ looks should be of no consequence to their readers: reading is not a narcissistic activity, neither is writing, yet the moment one likes a sufficient amount of a poet’s verse one starts to wonder about the appearance of the writer. This, presumably, has to do with one’s suspicion that to like a work of art is to recognise the truth, or the degree of it, that art expresses. Insecure by nature, we want to see the artist, whom we identify with his work, so that the next time around we might know what truth looks like in reality.

Both Brodsky and Larkin touch upon an essential mimetic component of the poetic experience. However “depersonalised” the poet becomes in the act of poetic meaning-making, the mimetic instinct compels the reader towards this curiosity; the poet is the natural proxy in this experience. It is not the face of the poet, per se, that the reader is curious about, but the face of the poem, the face of meaning-making in general, the human face.

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 2): Eliot and Brodsky, the Experience of Poems

See Part One here: The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 1): Eliot, Theory and Criticism

 

Eliot and Brodsky, the Experience of Poems

 

This kind of "theorising about the nature of poetry" is essential to the understanding of poetry, and it is, indeed, the duty of the poet to engage in the philosophy of poetry. The philosophy of poetry goes beyond criticism, however, and beyond just poets. More on the latter shortly. Many prominent poets have engaged in the philosophy of poetry. The Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky is a prime example; his extensive collection of essays on a wide range of subjects, including other poets, contains important insights into the essence of poetry.

In his lecture to the Library of Congress, entitled "An Immodest Proposal," in his capacity as Poet Laureate in 1991, while lamenting the "plight of the audience" for poetry, he postulates:

A poem, as it were, tells its reader, "Be like me." And at the moment of reading you become what you read, you become the state of the language which is a poem, and its epiphany or its revelation is yours. They are still yours once you shut the book, since you can't revert to not having had them.

This passage has always struck me; I think it captures the poetic experience, "our experience of poems," quite well. Brodsky is referring to a form of poetic mimesis, as he calls it "linguistic osmosis." In his 1987 Nobel Lecture, he writes

If art teaches anything [...] it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness - thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous "I." Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem [...]. A work of art, literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct [...] relations.

The emphasis on "the privateness of the human condition" is prevalent in Brodsky's essays and lectures. Are we then to draw from these two quotes that a poem that says "be like me" draws the reader into a private experience? Brodsky provides us with an answer:

A novel or a poem is not a monologue but a conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others - if you will mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around [...]. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person's conduct.

A theory of poetic experience can be distilled from these quotes. The conversation between reader and writer is mediated through the metaphoric experience of the reader's "being like the poem," his "becoming the state of language that is a poem." The "autonomous 'I'" is, in fact, a metaphoric conglomeration of reader and writer - I would argue this conglomeration includes all potential readers of the poem, but I am getting ahead of myself. A poem cannot be shared, but the experience can be had by any competent reader. It is perhaps a paradox: the experience is private, but it is a private experience anyone can have.

For Eliot, the poet is a "catalyst" in the poetic experience: this is the essence of his Impersonal theory. The poem comes about as a result of the "depersonalisation" of the poet in the creative process; the experience of that poem, then, is not so much a conversation between reader and writer, but it is, nevertheless, a transformational experience. Eliot elaborates this depersonalisation by way of analogy: the poet, he argues, is like a shred of “platinum […] introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.” The platinum is integral in catalysing the two gases into sulphurous acid, yet “the platinum is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged.” Eliot says directly: “the mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.”

The poet, is the catalyst in a transformation. In the poetic experience it is the poem that acts as the catalyst; this I believe is the intention of depersonalisation in Eliot’s Impersonal theory. This is supported by another of Eliot’s theories: the objective correlative. He says,

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

At the risk making a bad metaphor worse, the objective correlative can be seen as the sulphurous acid that has been catalysed by the platinum, the mind of the poet. The purpose of the objective correlative is to evoke emotion in the mind of the reader, but according to Eliot’s Impersonal theory, the poet has receded into the background.

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 1): Eliot, Theory and Criticism

In this blog, and in subsequent blogs, I will be posting portions of a forthcoming seminar in which I will discuss the relevance of a philosophy of poetry. In this blog I discuss the critical work of T. S. Eliot, which dominated much of the 20th century thought on poetry. Eliot's criticism helps to set the groundwork for a philosophy of poetry, in spite of the fact that he shows an aversion for explicit philosophising on the subject, particularly by poets.

Eliot, Theory and Criticism

I wish to put a general proposition to you: poetry is a philosophical activity. I wish also to put another, related, proposition to you: there exists a discipline of the philosophy of poetry. The veracity of the latter follows from the inherency of the former. “Poetry is a philosophical activity,” however, is quite vague; do I mean writing poetry? Or do I mean reading poetry? I mean both; and I mean all that poetry entails, including poetic criticism and theory. Poetry is a philosophical activity because it is an investigation into what is meaningful, and why. Poetry is also the creation of meaning. The philosophy of poetry, as I envision it, then, entails an attempt at understanding this dual dynamic of poetic investigation and creation.

In this seminar, I will explore the possibility of a philosophy of poetry through a synthesis of different theoretical perspectives on poetry. In particular, I will discuss and analyse the critical and theoretical work of a number of prominent 20^th century poets, as well as a number of 20^th century philosophers who address the question of poetry. The question of poetry can be understood simply as “what is poetry?” The philosophy of poetry, then, can be understood as an attempt to answer this question.

T. S. Eliot addresses the question “what is poetry?” in the "Introduction" to his The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Eliot argues that poetry and criticism both seek to address this question; that poetry and criticism are, in effect, different aspects of the same activity. "The question 'what is poetry?'" he says, "issues quite naturally from our experience of poems." "To ask the question 'what is poetry?'" he says shortly after, "is to posit the critical function," by which he means the act of criticism. Eliot is justifying the importance of criticism to the understanding of art, in this case poetry. He says, in fact, that criticism is "inevitable and requires no justification" (emphasis mine).

My interest in Eliot's apology revolves around a seemingly innocuous parenthetical phrase. It occurs amidst the quotes already cited. I will cite the extended quote:

At any rate, the question 'what is poetry?' issues quite naturally from our experience of poems. Even, therefore, although we may admit that few forms of intellectual activity seem to have less to show for themselves, in the course of history, in the way of books worth reading, than does criticism, it would appear that criticism, like any philosophical activity, is inevitable and requires no justification. To ask 'what is poetry?' is to posit the critical function. (emphasis mine)

"Like any philosophical activity" implies that criticism is a philosophical activity. At the very least, Eliot means that criticism is comparable to philosophical activities. This proximate relationship of criticism and philosophical activity is important in light of the causal relationship between poetry and criticism with regard to the question "what is poetry?"

If "the experience of poems" leads "naturally" to the question "what is poetry?" and if "to ask 'what is poetry?' is to posit the critical function," and if criticism, which is "inevitable," is "like any philosophical activity," then there is a philosophical dimension to poetry.  The question "what is poetry?" then, is a question with philosophical implications, a philosophical question. I will address the conceptual importance of this point shortly. There are two further points I need to address first.

Eliot does not deny the connection between philosophy and poetry, but he does obfuscate the relationship. There are two quotes that illustrate this point. In his lecture on "Shelley and Keats," Eliot opines, "I believe that for a poet to be also a philosopher he would have to be virtually two men." He goes on to say that

A poet may borrow a philosophy or he may do without one. It is when he philosophises upon his own poetic insight that he is apt to go all wrong.

He says elsewhere, however, that "the extreme of theorising about the nature of poetry, the essence of poetry if there is any, belongs to the study of aesthetics." We can glean from these two quotes that poetry can, indeed, be understood philosophically, but that poets themselves are "apt to go all wrong" when they try to engage in that philosophising.

The division Eliot erects between philosophers and poets, however, is arbitrary, and it may have more to do with Eliot's dislike of Shelley and the Romanticism more broadly, which he called a "literary disease." There is nothing to say that a poet cannot philosophise or theorise on poetry; Eliot himself does it. Like many poets, Eliot smuggles his own theorising into his criticism of the poetry or literary works of others. For instance, Eliot postulates his theory of the "auditory imagination" in his criticism of Mathew Arnold, while he develops his "Impersonal theory" of poetry in his critique of Hamlet. Criticism is a philosophical activity.