Strict Wildness

Discoveries in Poetry and History

Peter Viereck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780765802941
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351487863
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nella poesia

A reviewer once called Peter Viereck's thought "not common sense but inspired, electric common sense." This volume of Viereck's selected essays on poetry and on history, written between 1938 through 2004, exemplifies this quality. Its main theme is suggested in Viereck's coined phrase "strict wildness," which suggests a balance between restraint (which by itself is staid and rigid) and passion (which by itself is incoherent). Frost called free verse tennis without the net. Viereck calls dead mechanical form "net without the tennis." Strict wildness, then, is spontaneity of feeling within strict organic form.The book explores questions of modernism and poetic craft with respect to American poetry. It discusses the controversy over Ezra Pound's politics and its relation to his poetics, as well as the nearly forgotten poet Vachel Lindsay. Viereck offers more general views on poetics, including the fruitful tensions between form and content, and the impact of modern technology on poetic expression. He also discusses history and politics, and contains essays on McCarthyism, the Cold War, political conformity of the Left and Right, and discusses issues of historiography and culture that define Viereck's highly individual, often critical brand of conservatism. In treating representative trends and figures in conservative thought, Viereck insists on clear awareness of what exists to conserve, what ought to be conserved, and why it should be conserved.In their range and originality, the writings brought together in Strict Wildness constitute an ideal introduction to Peter Viereck's literary and political thought and how they come together. It will be of interest to literary scholars, intellectual historians, and social scientists. The introduction allows the reader to grasp a clear sense of the context and background of Viereck's works.

Part 1
Poetry: Controversies

Strict Form in Poetry: Would Jacob Wrestle with a Flabby Angel?

“Great poets ... the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines.”

—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“It don’t mean a thing If it ain’t got that swing.”

—Duke Ellington, 1931

“I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”

—Jacob wrestling with the angel of God’s “form,” Genesis 32:26

Is poetry in English still a continuity? A shared continuity? Does it have a structure not mechanical but alive, with strict motions of muscle and torso that are not private contortions but a general language, a shared yet nonverbal language? If the answer to these questions is, as here assumed,¹ yes, then why is the assumption not widely shared? Why do the majority of writers and readers today answer these questions with no? Something is wrong when the self-evident isn’t evident, not even to the most thoughtful and sensitive readers of poetry, who cannot be dismissed as philistines.

Nor is it sufficient to note that tradition is vieux jeu in an age of rebel panache; the language of poetry depends on physical rhythms far too concrete to be budged by the abstractions of either revolution or reaction. The difficulty lies, rather, in the fact that, unlike other languages, poetic rhythms speak on two levels instead of one. Worse still: the two levels tend to contradict each other. All verse (even the purest lyric) is thereby verse-drama, a duel. All rhythms, being at war with each other, are sword-rhythms. The actionless dramatic action of poetic language is not physical acts, nor verbal acts, but physical waves of rhythms and their delicate or pounding counterspray.

A broader question: Has man’s response to poetry all along (man’s real response, not his official response) been less to meaning-plus-sound than to meaning-versus-sound? Obviously both kinds of response are essential; though here I happen to be discussing the secret rhythm-connotations, I would never intend thereby to undermine the equal need for overt word-denotations: the need for defending the dignity of ideas against romantic anti-intellectualism. The intention, rather, is to admit that man knows less about his own language than about far stars—and to concentrate an inward telescope on the non-word language of rhythm. When the non-word language contradicts the word-messages, it does so to enrich, not to replace, them. Both kinds of language are not only needed; they fulfill each other. Is not this the familiar dialectics of growth-through-contradiction?

Still, the differences are there. A word-message is indicative or imperative in grammar; it is at least partly conscious; and is relatively loose in formal construction. A rhythm-message is conditional or subjunctive in grammar; it is at least partly unaware; and requires the strict forms evolved over many centuries of a shared poetry experience.

In 1975 a famous Shakespearean director summed up his career in one portentous sentence: “Meter is the real key to understanding Shakespeare.” But in view of the tension between Shakespeare’s Apollonian surface pentameters and his Dionysian subsurface trimeters or tetrameters,² the “key to understanding” him is not meter but meter-clash. It also deepens major living prosodists: inter alia Warren (our best), Gwendoline Brooks, Dickey, Hollander, Lieberman, Nemerov, Shapiro, Simpson, Wilbur, and the Russians Pasternak and Brodsky, the German of Heym and Celan, vastly though they differ from each other.

Poetry doesn’t write about what it writes about. Critics may now agree that this tends to be so, but why? Is it, as here argued, inherently so because of poetry’s two or more rhythm-levels? Or is it, as many “explicating” critics imply, noninherently and only recently so because of the two or more diction-levels of the symbolist heritage? If the answer to the latter question is no, then the explicators have brought us to a blind alley by being oversubtle about the ambiguities and ambivalences of diction and undersubtle about those of rhythm. The fact that good prose (not to mention purple “poetic” prose) also has two rhythm-levels is not to the point. The tension between two irregular rhythms, as in prose, is simply not the same as that between one irregularity and one formal, traditionally shared regularity in poetry.

The half-conscious uncovering of rhythm’s hidden language helps explain an ancient truth: unlike a prose essay, a tragic poem or a tragic verse-play may leave the reader feeling exalted while an exalting love poem may leave him mournful. The explanation is not some miraculous “transcending” of tragedy and of the human condition (as if the presumptuous poet were doing God’s work for Him better) but the uncovering of a palimpsest layer. What will be needed, from now on, are not generalizations (like this one) but precise trochee-by-iamb-by-spondee analyses (which are exactly what I have begun) of why the relevant passages in King Lear, for example, achieve tragic joy by means of the joy-connoting rhythms beneath the somber words. While translating certain German and Russian poets of our century, I am also making a parallel analysis in parallel languages. My conclusion: the future translator should consult his dictionary less and his ear more (searching not for lilt duplications by metronome but for lilt equivalents by connotation). Poets, then, are not our Shelleyan “unacknowledged legislators” (no more delusions of grandeur on that score) but our unacknowledged kinaesthesia.

Once the columns of Bernini “made marble speak.” Today the rhythms of the lyric are the onomatopoeia of the flesh. As the dance language of bees is (to us) both cryptic and informative, so will our rhymed and metrical love lyric be decoded quite correctly (by Martians) as earth’s earthiest, nuttiest, and most practical artifact. It is not a flight from reality. Reality flees from it. And thereby to it? Either way, motion. Flesh feels a poem’s beauty not as picture but motion. Metronomes can’t feel; the motion they tick is not gesture but tic. Why is motion a duel, not one kind of scansion but two? Because all poetry is a pun straddling a charade.

Both the scansions here contrasted are accentual. Deliberately omitted is the furtive osmosing of classical quantitative scansions into English. Why omitted? Not because the counterpull of this third layer of the palimpsest is minor (it becomes major in the sensuous effect of slow-voweled lines with voiced consonants) but because, in the present context, it is a distractingly mine-strewn terrain, where critics rush in with maps too neat to work and poets fear to tread.

Rarely found in the denotational dictionaries of Webster or Euclid and compressed—like some coiled spring—into an explosive core by strict form, the connotations of accentual rhythm are a universal and not just private cryptography; otherwise how can poetry possibly “work”? Poetry that works is too unique for paraphrase (this truth is by now humdrum). But why can’t it be paraphrased? Surely its uniqueness is not visual and is not semantic (that is, not a matter of image, metaphor, destiny, irony, rhetoric, crossword puzzles, black humor, original sin, unoriginal virtue, or the rest of the explicator apparatus; all these visual or else semantic aspects can indeed be paraphrased in unrhythmic prose). Poetry’s unparaphrasable uniqueness lies, rather, in its being man’s unverbalizable pulse; you are not only scanning the poem, the poem is also scanning you. This two-way scansion—our “birth and death and lust” as spilt iambics—inspired the credo that follows:

POET

“Toute forme créée, même par l’homme, est
immortelle. Car la forme est indépendante
de la matière, et ce ne sont pas les
molécules qui constituent la forme.”
(Baudelaire, “Mon Coeur mis à nu”)

1

The night he died, earth’s images all came
To gloat in liberation round his tomb.
No vengeful colors, stones, and faces dare
To argue with his metaphor;
And stars his fancy painted on the skies
Drop down like swords
to pierce his too wide eyes.

2

Words that begged favor at his court in vain—
Lush adverbs, senile rhymes in tattered gowns—
Send notes to certain exiled nouns
And mutter openly against his reign.
While rouged clichés hang out red lights again,
Hoarse refugees report from far-flung towns
That exclamation-marks are running wild
And prowling half-truths carried off a child.

3

But he lives on in Form, and Form shall shatter
This tuneless mutiny of Matter.
His bones are dead; his voice is horribly strong.
Those famed vibrations of life’s dancing dust,
Whose thrice-named pangs are “birth” and “death” and “lust,”
Are but the spilt iambics of his song.
Scansion of flesh in endless ebb and flow,
The drums of duty and renown’s great gong—
Mere grace-notes of that living thousand-year
Tyrannic metronome whose every gear
Is some shy craftsman buried long ago.
What terror crowns the sweetness of all song?

4

What hardness leaps at us from each soft tune
And hammers us to shapes we never planned?
This was a different dying from our own.
Call every wizard in the land—
Bell, book, and test tube; let the dark be rife
With every exorcism we command.
In vain. This death is stronger than our life.

5

In vain we drive our stakes through such a haunter
Or woo with spiced applaudings such a heart.
His news of April do but mock our winter
Like maps of heaven breathed on window-frost
By cruel clowns in codes whose key is lost.
Yet some sereneness in our rage has guessed
That we are being blessed and blessed and blessed
When least we know it and when coldest art
Seems hostile,
useless,
or apart.

6

Not worms, not worms in such a skull
But rhythms, rhythms writhe and sting and crawl.
He sings the seasons round from bud to snow.
And all things are because he willed them so.

Spirit is not being subordinated to matter (the question of which came first is left wide open) by this parallel between our bodily nature and the seeming unnaturalness of strict form. Rhythm for sure and probably also rhyme or its equivalents in echo-pairing (assonance, alliteration, sestina style repetitions, or the vowel stress of quantitative scansion)—yes, rhythm and probably also rhyme are not luxury but necessity, not stale or arbitrary conformity but our very anatomy. Free verse and unstrict form are stillborn: not because they are “free” or lack a tennis net but because they lack the recurrences of living flesh. So, at the other extreme, does the dead metronome of the mechanical formalists. What is life, what is poetry, but an organic recurrent vibration?

Without recurrence, no resonance. A “good ear” means or ought to mean a just scale; it balances a background of strict recurrence against a foreground of free change. Rhythm includes not only the official metrics of the schoolma’ams but the unofficial crosscurrents of shifting mood pace, runaway vision, all kinds of prankish onomatopoeias, and the sleepy epiphanies of the caesura. If weighed on the other side of the same just scale, change would not be changing without the background of regularity that defines it by contrast and gives it something to strain against. The stricter the form, the more it downright insists on irregularities (and then assimilates them). It is free verse that soon becomes too regular: the old-fashioned regularity known as prose.

Not the prose writer but the formal poet is marshaling his words the way the body organizes its nervous system. Ponder the nervous system’s physical structure, its facilitatory and inhibitory signals of reflex conduction, its ballad style refrains, its rhyme style telegrams of reinforcement, the enjambmentlike junctures of its “synapses,” and, above all, its farflung contrapuntal controls, ever balancing the terrifying risks and rewards of exposed nerve ends in the world of chaos. This whole neural gestalt is not so much a line of alternating beats as an entire iambic stanza. Both the stanza and the gray matter are coordinating separate “lines” of varying length and of contradictory impulse; they do so by laws of pattern. In contrast, formless verse obeys no law except Gresham’s. It is the strictness of form that blesses; would Jacob wrestle with a flabby angel?

Whether our biological pendulum (the thump-THUMP of artery and lung) is but the spilt iambic of a song, or vice versa: either way, biology and poetry are welded by the same scannable tide. The welding not only throws new light on the odd, obsessive quality of poetry’s magic; its reestablishes, in the teeth of current opinion, the dependence of that magic on the continuity of traditional meters and even of rhymes.

Several times now, these pages have linked rhyme with meter. Is there some inherent link, or am I smuggling rhyme in arbitrarily because of some personal hang-up? The link is that rhymes inhere as the punctuation marks of rhythm. Rhymes are rhythm’s brittle-consonanted commas or else its italics, heavy and long-voweled. Rhythm has no need for those metallic rhymes that are a mere stapling machine for two end words: click-click. What rhythm does need is the organic rhymes that we may define as a torrent of mood-signaling vowels, interweaving not two words or two lines but whole symphonies of stanzas. Not merely form but strict form is needed in order to harmonize the runaway autonomy of the separate lines. What, in free verse, is left to hold the lines together? Gesticulating frantically their primadonna solos, they require the conductor’s baton of the stanza. Ever since the overkill of the success of The Waste Land, fragmentation has been justified as mirroring (but why ought it to mirror?) the momentary social reality. What such fragmentation fails to mirror is the lasting biological reality; here (in biology) the whole is not sacrificed to the part.

But here, in turn, enters a second kind of fragmentation, a profounder split, not of whole versus parts this time but of conflicting cipher-messages within two simultaneous wholes. How better express today the inherent schizophrenias of “civilization and its discontents” than by an aesthetic that conveys a surface mood through the logic-meaning of the rhyme-words and a hidden mood through their suggestiveness. In the following poem, “To Helen (of Troy, N.Y.),” there is a double message: the denotative surface-rhythms tell u——with a grammatical error in every line—that this is a comic poem about a gross, crude, pathetic adolescent; the deeper connotative rhythms hint, in contrast, at a tragic poem about the wistful, delicate dignity of all wounded love.

To Helen (of Troy, N.Y.)

I sit here with the wind is in my hair;
I huddle like the sun is in my eyes;
I am (I wished you’d contact me) alone.
A fat lot you’d wear crape if I was dead.
It figures, who I heard there when I phoned you;
It figures, when I came there, who has went.
Dogs laugh at me, folks bark at me since then;
“She is,” they say, “no better than she ought to;”
I love you irregardless how they talk.
You should of done it (which it is no crime)
With me you should of done it, what they say.
I wait here with the wind is in my hair.

Call the widening ripples (the rings of connotations around the dropped stone of denotation) illogical or call them psychological; either way, they can voice more of schizophrenia’s terror and beauty than can rhymelessness. More: because the rhyme-ripples possess more codes of communication, more consonant-crescendos, vowel-nudges, a whole repertoire of semaphore. One such full-throated rhyme-echo, cutting across a whole brisk flurry of later grace-note rhymes, works as a sustaining pedal under the piano keys of, say, ottava rima or of pantoum. Rhyme is the most effective sympathetic magic yet devised for undamming the contradictory Niagaras of the pent-up heart.

Your choice of rhyme scheme sets off not only your collective culture (Shakespearean versus Petrarchan sonnets are setting off Elizabethan versus Florentine Renaissance); your choice also conveys your individual faith. This is as true today as when terza rima was voicing Dante’s Trinitarian Christianity. The particu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraph—"Autobiog"
• Part 1 Poetry: Controversies
• Part 2 History: Its Sadness
• Part 3 German Poets
• Epilogue - My 89th Year