Subjects in Poetry

Daniel Brown

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807176672
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Daniel Brown's Subjects in Poetry is the first book to examine the broad and imposing topic of poetic subject matter, probing both what poems are about and how that influences the way they're made. It comprises one poet's attempt to plumb the nature of his art, to ask how the selection of material remains a crucial yet unexplored area of poetic craft, and to suggest the vast range of possible subjects for poems.

The book begins by venturing a novel definition of "subject," derived from Robert Frost's dictum that poetry constitutes an "art of having something to say." Brown posits that a poem can say something by expressing, evoking, or addressing. He considers each of these ways-of-saying in turn, first defining it and then looking at poems in which it predominates. Brown next makes a wide-ranging case for the value of subjects to poems, poets, and the art of poetry, especially at a time when many poems appear subjectless. He concludes the book with practical guidance on finding subjects, improving them, and realizing their potential.

Replete with thoughtful readings of poems both classic and contemporary, Subjects in Poetry should appeal to poets across all levels and readers interested in understanding the art and practice of poetry.

1

Subject as Something to Say

An online dictionary defines subject as “a basic matter of thought, discussion, investigation, etc.” This definition is fine for most purposes, but one runs into trouble in applying it to poetry. It works well enough for a poem like, say, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s little classic “The Eagle.”

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring’d with the azure world he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The “basic matter” of this poem is, not to put too fine a point on it, an eagle. This subject sits at the poem’s center, where it exerts a kind of gravitational attraction on a set of observations that could be said to orbit it.

But what about something like, say, Hamlet’s soliloquy? Is its basic matter suicide? Death? The passage is about both of these things—or, to do fuller justice to what’s going on in it, about the movement in Hamlet’s mind from the former to, and through, the latter. If “The Eagle” can be figured as an orbit, Hamlet’s soliloquy can be figured as a journey, from thought to thought.

The figure of a journey can also be applied to narrative poems. Take Ovid’s account of the King Midas story. You could say that the subject of this poem is the wages of greed, but I’d call that its theme, not its subject. You could say its subject is King Midas, but where would that leave the Midas story? Mightn’t the subject of the poem be the plot of this story? (When we’re asked what a story “is about,” don’t we typically respond with a plot summary?) As Hamlet’s soliloquy travels from thought to thought, so the Midas story travels from event to event.

In applying the word subject to the attractor in an orbital poem and the path of a journeying one, we may be using the same word for insufficiently similar things. As I ponder this possibility, I think of an observation in Robert Frost’s essay “The Figure a Poem Makes.” He says that the importance of subjects “leaves us back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say.” “Something to say”: might that serve as a definition of subject? Among other virtues, it would apply to orbiting and journeying poems alike.

A poem can say something in one or more of several ways: by expressing and/or evoking and/or addressing. In this chapter I’ll consider each of these ways-of-saying in turn, first defining it and then looking at some poems in which it predominates. I hope to suggest, in the process, the vast range of possible subjects for poems. It can seem as if half the new poems these days are about the death of the poet’s parent (if they aren’t busy botanizing—as William Carlos Williams didn’t quite say, “No ideas but in shrubs”). Whereas the poems in this chapter’s transhistorical sampler are about all manner of things. As the shaking of a snow globe liberates a flurry of flakes, so a stroll through such a verse gallery may shake up one’s idea of the sphere of subjects to where it’s milling with possibilities.

SOME POEMS THAT SAY BY EXPRESSING

A poem that says by expressing gives vent to an emotion. Of course, some would say all poems do that. There’s even a gold-plated precedent for thinking so: Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” This definition calls to mind a locution in the title of a poem of his: “Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg.” Some expressive poems effuse, but others (including some canonical ones) don’t.

Expressing is probably the way of saying that first comes to mind when one thinks of poetry, but comparatively few poems purely express. (Though there’s a huge body of sort-of-poems that do: the lyrics of the countless operatic arias devoted entirely to the expression of emotion, sometimes a very particular emotion, as in “revenge arias” and the like.) Consider, in this connection, one of the oldest known expressive poems, at least in the Western tradition: Sappho’s fragment 35. (Only one of her poems has survived in its entirety.) Its subject is an access of passion. Here it is in a translation by Diane Rayor:

To me it seems

that man has the fortune of the gods

whoever sits beside you, and close,

who listens to you sweetly speaking

and laughing temptingly;

my heart flutters in my breast,

whenever I look quickly, for a moment—

I say nothing, my tongue broken,

a delicate fire runs under my skin,

my eyes see nothing, my ears roar,

cold sweat rushes down me,

trembling seizes me,

I turn the color grass,

to myself I seem

needing but little to die.

But all must be endured, since . . .

This passage is almost purely expressive, “almost” in that the lines up to the semicolon largely set the scene: how else would we know what triggers the remaining, paradigmatically expressive lines? In the latter, Sappho’s passion seems to be expressing itself; is so overwhelming it’s as if it’s blowing an exit hole through her chest. True, it’s Sappho, not her passion, who speaks to a “you”—the woman she’s on fire for—in the third line. But it’s not as if Sappho actually expects to be heard by this temptress. One might say the poet is speaking to herself, but that doesn’t seem quite right either; one doesn’t sense the presence of an internal interlocutor as one does in a meditative poem or a soliloquy. The pressure behind Sappho’s speaking is so strong that it obliterates any sense of a listening. Does this make the expressing in this poem, to invoke Wordsworth’s term, an effusion? I’d call it more breathless than effusive—and even in its breathlessness, it manages a sort of clinical objectivity in anatomizing a passion into distinct facets of sensation.

A classical poem of expression that’s less—much less—effusive still is the famous two-liner by Catullus known, per its opening words, as “Odi et Amo” (I hate and I love). The translations I’ve seen of this poem differ mainly in details. Here’s the anonymous, straightforward one in Wikipedia:

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.

Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask.

I do not know, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.

This poem is an atom of expression, the minimal possible bit of it. Yet even an atom has its constituents. The nucleus of the poem is “I hate and I love . . . I am tortured,” but this carries with it the electron cloud of “Why do I do this, perhaps you ask. / I do not know, but I feel it happening.” As in Sappho’s poem, a “you” is mentioned, but here it refers to us, the reader. And unlike Sappho’s “you,” this one is truly, if tangentially, addressed. I’m tempted to say that “Odi et Amo,” for all its minuteness, both expresses and, in its touch of speech to a “you,” addresses. If I file the poem as principally expressive, it’s because the helpless bafflement exposed by its addressing—“Why do I do this . . . I do not know”—is itself an emotion, one that supplements (and complicates) the expression of hate cum love to yield a work of feeling in every particle.

Unlike the previous two poems, a poem that unquestionably effuses is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet “‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend’” (1889). Hopkins takes his Latin epigraph from the biblical Book of Jeremiah. (It’s translated in the poem’s first three lines.)

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen

justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must

Dis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. Subject as Something to Say
• 2. Why Subjects?
• 3. Working with Subjects
• INDEX