Poetry

The Ultimate Guide

Richard Bradford

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781350310162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nella poesia

Richard Bradford's new introduction to poetry begins with and answers the slippery question, 'what is poetry?'. The book provides a compact history of English poetry from the 16th century to the present day and surveys the major critical and theoretical approaches to verse. It tackles the important issues of gender, race and nationality and concludes with a lengthy account of how to recognise good poetry. This engaging and readable book is accessible to all readers, from those who simply enjoy poetry through university first years to graduate students. Poetry: The Ultimate Guide provides the technical and critical tools you need to approach and evaluate poetry, and to articulate your own views.

PART I

WHAT IS POETRY?

1

The Basics

Poetry is unlimited in its range of subjects. The speaker of the poem can be old, young, male, female, mad, bad or mysteriously unidentifiable. The poem can be addressed to a fictive acquaintance, a friend, an enemy, a lover, a wife, a husband, God, or you, the reader. It can use all types of diction and idiom: local dialect, neo-Latinate syntax, formal or informal diction, grammatical, ungrammatical, hesitant or purposive modes of speech. Poetry can be, say or involve anything, but it will always be informed and influenced by another factor, the factor that identifies it as poetry.

John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ involves its male speaker in an attempt to persuade his female listener that sex with him will not be as disagreeable or shameful as she thinks. What is the difference between this and the kind of exchange that we might overhear in the pub? The intention, content and context of the public house seducer might be the same as those of Donne’s speaker; they might even share a talent for elaborate and persuasive metaphor and a taste for informal, familiar idioms. It is unlikely, however, that the man in the pub will have marshalled his language into an iambic pattern and gathered his sentences into three identical and incredibly complex stanzas. This is the double pattern. At one level we treat a poem much as we would any other unit of language; we read through the words to attain a basic sense of their meaning, collecting as we go evidence on the context and intention of the statement and on its writer or speaker. The poem, however, employs devices and effects that hinder and complicate this process.

In all non-poetic genres and classes of language, priority is placed upon the delivery of the message, but, uniquely, poetry is concerned as much with the processes and material of language as it is with its use as an efficient medium of exchange. Some might argue that fiction too is preoccupied with the peculiarities and arbitrariness of language, given that every novel is premised upon the creation of a world or state of mind that are falsifications of reality. But while novels do not pretend that the events they record or individuals they represent are aesthetic – as might a historical survey or a biography – they are nonetheless predatory in their borrowings from the fabric of linguistic discourses that make up the world. Letters in fiction, conversations between characters, events and scenes reported by narrators have a great deal in common with their counterparts outside the novel. The novelist trims and manipulates according to the broader demands of their work, but success is judged by the extent to which the finished product is believable and compelling. Even with such experimental devices as James Joyce’s stream of consciousness in Ulysses, mimesis is still the governing principle. Joyce was attempting for the first time to offer a linguistic representation of our prelinguistic condition – hence his general abandonment of punctuation and coherent syntactic structure; he was not writing about language, but using language as a means of representation.

Poems, from the seemingly transparent to the most dense, elliptical or impenetrable, are governed by a preoccupation both with what language can do and what language is. Read any poem. Choose one at random from a compendious anthology that covers everything from Chaucer to Concrete Poetry and even if the piece that appears before you on the page seems, at least at first, incomprehensible, you will within a few lines detect a hint of companionability. The words might not seem to make a great deal of sense but they are nevertheless words, which you will recognize as part of your waking routine, from reading the newspaper, saying hello to the dog, or paying due allegiance to the deity of your choice. You could, in the poem, be puzzled by the manner in which these units of meaning are put together but they are in themselves familiar. This is your first encounter with the double pattern. There is a sense of recognition, of becoming attuned to language as you customarily encounter it, as something that makes sense, but there is also an awareness that perversely, deliberately the poet is not quite allowing language to make sense. Medbh McGuckian begins stanza two of ‘Venus and the Rain’ with

On one occasion, I rang like a bell

For a whole month, promising the torn edges

The birth of a new ocean (as all of us

Who have hollow bodies tend to do at times): …

As individual units of syntax, the phrases and subclauses are comprehensible enough but when we attempt to place a frame around their general meaning, paraphrase them, we become confused. What ‘occasion’ might this be, we wonder, and how can anyone ring ‘like a bell’ let alone do so ‘For a whole month’? Can a ‘new ocean’ (what became of the old one?) be promised to ‘torn edges’? And why is she dividing up her sentence into lines, units which seem arbitrarily related to the already perplexing cascade of nuances. We can at a single reading of the poem steal the impression of a shifting peripheral presence which will rise to the surface, slip away or be displaced by other seemingly incongruous images. In doing so we are approaching the poem as we might any other linguistic text or statement, in the expectation that it will discharge a coherent unit of meaning, a message. Poems, being assembled from the same units of language as everything else, invite us to do this yet at the same time they thwart our expectations. They do so by creating an interplay between words and phrases that no longer pays adherence to the general rules of clarity and coherence. The words of a poem operate at one level according to an internalized fabric of interactions: some, such as the stanza, rhyme, sound pattern and regular metre, are traditional though entirely arbitrary features of verse, while others testify to a particular poet’s decision to detach their poem unilaterally from the rules of normal discourse. At another level, we are invited, often feel obliged, to make sense of the poem to bring it into line with all other texts and statements whose founding principle is clarity and transparency. It is the tension between these two spheres of structure and meaning – the arbitrary network of devices and linguistic interactions that grant the poem a sense of autonomy, and the poem’s link with the world of non-poetic discourses, secured by their shared raw material, language – that constitutes the double pattern. We will examine the double pattern in detail in Chapter 2, but for the time being let us concentrate on the nature of these uniquely poetic features.

Metre and rhyme indicate a stylistic difference between traditional poetry and other forms of language. Even those poets who reject rhyme and metre retain in free verse the unit that is the distinctive feature of poems: the poetic line. But the deployment and recognition of poetic form complicates rather than answers the question of why poetry is different. Surely the use of poetic form cannot fully explain the character of a genre as old as language, used in all languages and commanding, among many, a neo-religious respect?

Metre, rhyme and the use of the poetic line involve the organization of the material of language – sound, emphasis, rhythm – in a way that is impractical and arbitrary. In conversation, rhyme is a peculiarity, even an embarrassment; when we write letters to the local council, it is unlikely that we will divide up our language into free verse lines. The conventions and habits that prompt us to avoid such usages are based upon the precondition that ordinary language is concerned with the clear and efficient delivery of a message. Rhyme and the free verse line will interfere with the delivery of the message and draw attention to the medium through which it is delivered. Language becomes self-referential and the double pattern is brought into operation. Metre, rhyme and free verse are the most obvious cases of poetic self-reference. There are many others.

Craig Raine begins the final stanza of ‘An Enquiry into Two Inches of Ivory’ with

Day begins.

The milkman delivers

penguins with their chinking atonal fuss.

The visual and acoustic similarity between the white-bodied objects being gathered into a cosy group by the milkman and our memories, probably from television, of penguins huddling together and emitting random ‘atonal’ noises may not previously have occurred to us. Raine uses language to create an interface between prelinguistic images and ideas that have no logical or rational connection. The relations between the images and references of the poem effectively overrule our habitual modes of thinking. Such metaphoric uses are by no means forbidden in ordinary language. You could indeed point out to your neighbour that the milk bottles remind you of penguins, but, assuming that neither of you had recently consumed anything illegal, the conversation and your respective frames of reference would soon return to the prevailing context of the milk bottles as part of your familiar daily fabric of events and objects. Poems, rather than defer to the terms and conditions of the familiar world, tend to create their own worlds, in which connections and associations are formed in the mind of the poet. Raine begins his poem with the image of a vacuum cleaner, which

grazes

over the carpet, lowing,

its udder a swollen wobble …

Light switches become barn owls, light bulbs ‘electric pears’, wall phones wear spectacles and clothes ‘queue up’ in the wardrobe. The poem appropriates ordinary and familiar images and creates relationships between them that are disorderly, subversive of our conventional expectations of how language mediates the world.

Not all verse is as voraciously, self-consciously metaphorical as Raine’s, but the creation of a world with its own internalized relations, which echo but do not replicate the world outside the text, is an endemic feature of poetry.

We have so far considered two characteristics of poetry: poetic form and metaphor. What they have in common is the ability to focus upon the nature and power of language itself rather than its practical, utilitarian function. Metre and sound pattern obstruct and complicate the production of meaning by foregrounding the material of language at the expense of transparency and clarity. Metaphor involves language in the appropriation and juxtaposition of ideas and objects that in the rational world language would classify, catalogue and distinguish. Poetry reverses the pragmatic, functional role of language. Language is generally used to refer to, specify, indicate, mediate or articulate things, feelings and ideas. Poetry draws words and their meanings into concentrated spheres where their expected distinctions and relationships will be variously unsettled, complicated or re-examined: the double pattern.

This definition of poetry can be tested against the two other literary genres that use language to create their own self-referring worlds: the novel and drama. The best way to distinguish between poetry, the novel and drama is to compare a localized extract of the text with its entirety.

It is possible to locate sections of novels and plays which, in their own right, involve no obvious literary features. Sections of first- and third-person narrative could easily have come from a biography, an autobiography or a journal. Passages where narrative is integrated with dialogue or reported speech could belong to a magazine article on an evening in the local pub. Passages of dialogue from modern plays could have been recorded verbatim in a real front room, on a bus, in a courtroom.

The literariness of such passages, their difference from the real world, becomes apparent only when we recognize that their integration with the broader structural patterns of the text outweighs their correspondences with the world outside the text. As we read on we might find that the apparently objective third-person narrator has an exclusive and comprehensive knowledge of the thoughts and activities of the main characters that in non-fiction would be implausible or impossible; or that the realistic dialogue between two characters actually functions as part of the patently unreal structure of a dramatic text which organizes, rather than reflects, the spatial and temporal actions of the characters.

Choose an extract from a poem and you will find that literariness, its patent and self-conscious difference from non-poetic discourse, will be far more localized and concentrated. The most obvious instance of this will be the interference of poetic form – from dense sound patterns to the line endings of free verse – in the routine production of meaning. Poems, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost or Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, can, like novels and plays, involve dialogue, extended narratives and narrators. But in poems each of these broader structural elements is informed by localized poetic devices. Milton’s narrative account, the speeches and dialogic exchanges of God, Satan, Adam and Eve are pervaded by the metrical and syntactic conventions of blank verse. Pope’s account, the narrative of the card game and Belinda’s utterances are organized by the tight symmetry of the heroic couplet. Shorter lyric poems such as Keats’s odes, Shakespeare’s sonnets or the two-line economies of the modern Imagists might seem to have little in common with narrative verse, but all these subgenres share a unifying characteristic: poetic language will constantly unsettle or intensify its familiar non-poetic function and form.

In what follows I will offer a more detailed account of the devices employed by poems to create their own networks of form and meaning – key features of the intrinsically poetic aspect of the double pattern.

Prosody and poetic form

The poetic line draws upon the same linguistic raw material as the sentence but deploys and uses this in a different way. Our awareness of the grammatical rules that govern the way words are formed into larger units of meaning is based upon our ability to recognize the difference between individual words. Words are made up of sound and stress, identified respectively by the phoneme and the syllable. The function of sound and stress in non-poetic language is practical and utilitarian: before we understand the operative relations between nouns, verbs, adjectives and connectives, we need to be able to relate the sound and structure of a word to its meaning.

Traditional poetry uses stress and sound not only as markers and indicators of meaning but also as a way of measuring and foregrounding the principal structural characteristic of the poem, the line. In most poems written before the 20th century, the line is constructed from a combination of two or more of the following elements:

1. A specified and predictable number of syllables: the most commonly used example of this is the 10-syllable line, the pentameter.
2. A metrical pattern consisting of the relation between the stress or emphasis of adjacent syllables: the most frequently used metrical pattern in English involves the iambic foot, where an emphatic syllable follows a less emphatic one, with occasional variations, or ‘stress reversals’.
3. Rhyme: the repetition of the phonemic sound of a single syllable at the end of a line.
4. Assonance and alliteration: the repetition of clusters of similar vowel or consonant sounds within individual lines and across sequences of lines.

The persistent and predictable deployment of two or more of these features is what allows us to recognize the traditiona...