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On the Line

 1. Poetic Form                  

            I'm always coming across articles in literary journals that simplistically associate the poetry of closed forms with the poetry of closed minds.  Usually a political or metaphysical authority is evoked, as being less suspect than the purely aesthetic: words like "democratic" or "existential" are opposed to others like "elitist" and "authoritarian."  But to be avant-garde in poetry is to be thoroughly traditional; similar words and equivalent values have informed the dialectic of English poetic theory throughout its history.

            On the other hand, the pull towards unity and coherence in poetry is so strong that even free verse tends to fall into quite regular line-lengths, whether these are controlled by number of strong stresses, number of syllables, a certain recurring speech cadence, or even typographical boundaries.  John Hollander remarks wryly that:

At the present time in the United States, there is a widespread, received, free-verse style marked by a narrow (25-30 em) format, strong use of line ending as a syntactical marker, etc., which plays about the same role in the ascent to paradise as the received Longfellow style did a century ago.i]

Hollander is not alone in recognizing the conventionality of free verse today; more and more poets are exploring other ways of articulating the line beside the "received style."  Metre and rhyme have made a come-back among some; others are following the Whitmanesque route of long lines governed by speech cadence or rhetorical schemes; still others have turned to the prose-poem. Rather than labelling certain poetic forms "closed" and others "open," therefore, what is obviously required is a re-examination of what we mean by the word form.

            For example, a form may be "closed" in that it is patterned, and nonetheless unique to a single poem.  The early English lyricists invented hundreds of forms they never repeated: Sir Philip Sidney alone used 143 different line and stanza patterns in his 286 poems, 109 of which he used once only, and most of which had never been used before in English.[ii]  And even when such organizing structures are repeated we run into problems of terminology.  As Robert Hass notes,

Thinking about poetic form has ... been complicated by the way we use the word. We speak of the sonnet as 'a form' when no two sonnets, however similar their structures, have the same form.[iii]

When we move from poetic "forms" such as the sonnet or ballad to formal structures of poetry such as rhyme or metre, we encounter the same difficulty: we are always dealing with analogy, not identity.  A sonnet, formally, is more like another sonnet than it is like a sestina; one person's iambic tetrameter resembles, though it never duplicates, another's.  For metre is a system of relative, not absolute stress (just as rhyme is an approximate chiming of sounds).  "'Tis eight o'clock—a clear March night—" and "It is an ancient Mariner," the first lines of Wordsworth's "The Idiot Boy" and Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" respectively, are both nominally in iambic tetrameter. And even poems by the same poet having the same metre may sound totally different; Milton proved this wittily by writing both "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" in iambic pentameter.

            Metre, after all, is only one component of rhythm, especially in English, which is a stress-based language.[iv]  All metre does is give the inevitable alternation of weak and strong stresses in English speech a recognizable pattern; this pattern can range from monotonous regularity to unpredictable irregularity.  Unfortunately, because it is the component of poetic rhythm most susceptible of study, metre has received much more attention than other important factors such as pitch, pace, cadence, and pausing.  And because of the great investment scholars and critics from the sixteenth to the twentieth century made in the study of scansion, unmetred poetry (in its modern, "free verse" incarnation) initially met with critical opposition.  Critics were disarmed of their best tools of analysis, the plotting of metrical and rhyming patterns, when free verse came along.          

            Now that free verse has established itself as the dominant prosody, we have a new orthodoxy.  Too many poets and critics talk as though the vindication of free verse necessitates the rejection of poetry in metre.  This is as unimaginative and historically inappropriate a response as that of their predecessors.  To quote Robert Hass again:

What passes for discussion of it [form] among younger poets has been an orgy of self-congratulation because they are not writing metrical poems.  A marginal achievement, since many of us, not having worked at it, couldn't write them competently if we wanted to.[v]       

At the same time, it's essential to remember that, as Donald Hall notes:

The wholeness and identity of the completed poem, the poem as an object in time, the sensual body of the poem - this wholeness depends upon a complex of unpredictable fulfillments.  The satisfying resolutions in a sonnet are more subtle than rhyme and meter, and less predictable ... Any poet who has written metrically can write arithmetically complex correct iambic pentameter as fast as his hand can move ... The poet is mostly aware of what sounds right and what does not.[vi]

            Seventeenth-century dramatists were not counting beats when they wrote blank verse. Contemporary poets do not scrutinize every single line-break while composing.  A lot of poetry—like any art—is improvisation; it relies on a profound understanding of formal conventions, but doesn't enlist theoretical analysis unless the writer becomes aware of a problem.  Criticism comes afterwards, if something doesn't "sound right."  And what sounds right changes, as the conventions themselves change, from age to age. 

                                                                    2.The Line

            I believe that one way to get over the formalist hurdle and into the heart of poems from other times and other cultures is to concentrate on the function of the line, the fundamental structural element of poetry.  By "the line" I mean something more than the typographical convention, though the visual test ("if it's in lines it's a poem; if not, it's prose") is more comprehensive, if more fallible, than the aural test ("if it rhymes," etc.) [vii] By concentrating on the line, I mean to focus on the way a poem moves, and moves us, by its interruption of narrative progression by a system of pauses, both syntactic and rhetorical.[viii]

            The poetic line is where feeling and syntax meet.  That is to say that the movement of the line enacts two different ways of using language at the same time; the first, which I have gestured at rather inadequately under the name of "feeling," has to do with the way emotions, thoughts and perceptions are recreated by the poem using all the non-grammatical resources of language.  These include cadence, pace, pitch, metre, all kinds of rhythmic patternings, and other figures of sound like alliteration, rhyme, and onomatopoeia.  "Syntax" refers to the use of words according to the principles of grammar. Feeling and Syntax are equally important influences on the final shape of a line; their interaction determines the sequence of words in the line, the segmenting of groups of words by pauses, and the positioning of the line-break itself.[ix]

             With this terminology, I am setting the line against the sentence as a unit of composition. But I want to emphasize first that, except for concrete poetry, which is unequivocally textual, most poetry today strikes a balance between writing and speaking.  Though we meet it first on the page, and its typographical appearance is very important, poetry creates the illusion of a speaking voice.  It is most useful, therefore, to look at the way lines and sentences differ not as abstract grammatical units, or as typographical segments, but in the way they are articulated by the voice.  A sentence is segmented by its syntactical structure; it is punctuated, as here, to elucidate the grammatical relationships of its phrasal and clausal components.  It may include some purely rhetorical punctuation, to clarify how the sentence should be heard (for example, my last comma was technically unnecessary), or typographical clues (as in my italicization of the word "heard"), but syntax is always the priority.  Where rhetoric and syntax collide there is confusion—or poetry. For in poetry the priorities are often reversed.  Obviously poetry has to allude to grammar to be understood: language is a system of symbols which must be mutually intelligible to speaker and audience, writer and reader.  But poetry is always testing the limits of syntax to achieve more freedom for itself.

            Therefore, although a line may coincide with a sentence or with a segment of a sentence so that its rhythm accords with syntax, it need not do so, because it is motivated by non-logical impulses. That is to say that discursive thought and language, while important resources for poetry, are always used for specific purposes: as means and not as ends.  Poetry is less concerned with the clear statement of thought than with the evocation of experience.  As Auden wrote, poetry is "a way of happening."  But it is also, as he continues in "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," "a mouth": that is, a linguistic event.  Ultimately then, it "makes nothing happen: it survives/ In the valley of its making."

            This is not to say that poetry automatically excludes discursive thought or considered statements - far from it.  But logical thinking is only one of the resources poetry has.[x] T ocapture the totality of experience, poetry elicits a full range of linguistic possibilities, from the most geometrically intricate couplets of Pope (which emphasize syntax itself as a source of aesthetic patterning and wit) to the most syntactically diffuse projective verse of Charles Olson.  All poets try to articulate a personal grammar as an alternative to the impersonality of syntax.  Some, like Pope, enlist syntax as part of their scheme; others reject it.

            The most obvious way of signalling this alternative grammar is by the emphatic patterning of sounds and rhythms.  End-rhyme and accentual-syllabic metres are the patterns we in the West are most familiar with today; the more overtly patterned poetry is, the more clearly it identifies itself as "art language" rather than conversation or discursive prose.  In fact, ask the average Westerner what a poem is, and the reply will be "Language that rhymes."  Impatient as we may be with a response so ignorant of much of the great unrhyming poetry of the world, we must nonetheless acknowledge that rhyme is an infallible,  and therefore reassuring, signal of poetic form.  People know what to expect with rhyme and, after all, a large part of what makes poetry poetry is the willingness to listen.  As Robert Graves said, "one doesn't 'listen' when reading standard prose," and listening—attending to all the details of sound and meaning, not just scanning for paraphrasable content—is central to the experience of poetry.[xi]  To really listen, especially while reading silently to oneself, one must have a strong sense of the sound of language.  Rhyme is the hook that lures people into listening, and helps them remember what they've heard.  For us, the talking animals, what better seduction is there than the pleasure, not of the text, but of the ear!

            It is the pleasure of expectation: we are cued to anticipate the return of sounds in sequential or alternate lines of the poem.  It is also the pleasure of surprise, for, though we may anticipate a particular rhyme-word, we cannot infallibly predict it.  Listening for the chiming of like sounds with unlike meanings engages the audience with meanings as well as with sounds. Consider the sequence of rhyming words in Shakespeare's sonnet 129: "shame" "lust" "blame" "trust" "straight" "had" "bait" "mad" "so" "extreme" "woe" "dream" "well" "hell".  A whole story has been implied by the combined weight and resonance of similar sounding words.[xii]  Those who dismiss rhyme, scornfully, as embarrassingly old-fashioned, are under-estimating its usefulness as a poetic resource.

    Nor was rhyme always "old-fashioned.  Like Campion in his Observations in the Arte of English Poesie (1602), Milton, in his preface to Paradise

Lost, condemns rhyme as "the invention of a barbarous age" and a "troublesome and modern bondage."  Milton loved the oratorical cadences of Hebrew

poetry, and both writers were devoted classicists; to them, therefore, rhyme was a "modern" invention.  And historically they were right.  Even in their own

England, the native Anglo-Saxon strong-stress, alliterative poetry was only gradually displaced by rhyming poems in accentual-syllabic metres after the Norman

Conquest.  These new metres were a tremendous resource for Chaucer; his voice was liberated by the same conventions that Milton would later find so

restrictive.  (And then, by Blake's time, Milton's blank verse had become a burdensome and artificial measure to be denounced with the heroic cry "Poetry

Fetter'd, Fetters the Human Race!")

            One of the great arguments for rhyme has always been that it helps us to hear each line of poetry as an integral unit.  Dr. Johnson, for example, was uncomfortable with blank verse because, to his ear, it did not infallibly mark the line terminus.  English accentual-syllabic metres, with their only relatively weak and strong stresses, he considered highly imprecise forms of measurement compared to classical scansion by long and short syllables.  He favoured rhyme as a way of keeping line-boundaries distinct.  To quote from his essay on Milton in Lives of the English Poets:

            The musick of the English heroick line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together: this co-operation can only be obtained by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another, as a distinct system of sounds; and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme. The variety of pauses, so much boasted by lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer; and there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton, who enable their audience to perceive where the lines end or begin. Blank verse, said an ingenious critick, seems to be verse only to the eye.[xiii]

     Johnson's comments suggest two areas of investigation; the first, the question of what constitutes "music" in poetry, and whether this quality can only be attained by preserving the integrity of each line, I will return to later.  But even granting him his premises, is rhyme the only guarantor of line boundary?  He himself admits it is not, but does not trust the reader to pause long enough at the end of each line unless such pausing is enforced by rhyme.

            In his analysis of phonetics in poetry, David Abercrombie found three main characteristics that distinguish the line from the sentence.  One is rhyme.  Another is a monosyllabic stress coming only at the end of the line.  The third is what he calls a "silent stress": the pause indicated by the line-break.  All these conventions have a common acoustic effect in ensuring that the boundary between lines will be clearly marked, and that each line will be heard as a distinct unit.[xiv]  In free verse, therefore, the silent-stress alone does a job that is reinforced in traditional measures by both rhyme and metre.  The line-break itself serves to emphasize the line and becomes the clearest signal of poetic form.[xv]

            Traditionally, we have described lines that break at syntactical pauses as "end-stopped," and those that run over the line-break to complete themselves as "enjambed."  Enjambed lines are read with a much slighter pause than end-stopped lines - but that fractional hesitation is still there; it is noted on the page and should be honoured in the reading.  Thus Denise Levertov remarks:

"Poets who write non-metrical poems but treat the linebreak as non-existent are not even respecting the traditional "slight pause" of the run-on line."[xvi] 

But chronic confusion has surrounding the function of enjambment; too often both writers and readers have considered it a signal to disregard lineation.  There would be no point writing in lines if enjambment meant that the line-breaks were to be regarded as invisible!  Enjambment works precisely because it emphasizes the unexpectedness of the line-break.  This unexpectedness itself enforces the line-break; hesitation as to meaning is reinforced by an audible pause.  That pause, Abercrombie's "silent stress," allows for many kinds of effects, both semantic and rhythmical. Words are redefined once their full context is known.               

            Of course, in metrical and/ or rhyming poetry, the line is fairly easy to hear through the enjambment, since it is so clearly measured, or marked by terminal sound.  It may be worth noting, at this point, that this was why Campion objected so strongly to rhyme:  he felt it was a facile substitute for a truly musical line structure; a kind of ornamental affectation which could cover up shoddy craftsmanship. Therefore, speaking of his own work in quantitative metre he declares:

some eares accustomed altogether to the fatnes of rime may perhaps except against the cadences of these numbers; but let any man judicially examine them, and he shall finde they close of themselves so perfectly that the help of rime were not only in them superfluous but also absurd.[xvii]

Campion asks us to listen "judicially" and we shall hear the lines "close of themselves."  Of course, it is less easy to hear the lines close in free verse than in metre; this is precisely why the line-end pause must be respected, and why poets such as Levertov are so concerned with exact placement of the line-break.  Levertov in her way, like Johnson in his, is pleading above all for accurate scoring of poetry: both critics wish the poem on the page to be an exact guide to reading.  Levertov is more democratic than Dr Johnson, however;  she trusts the reader to be "skillful."  The poet's job to make sure the written score is easy to interpret.

            John Hollander, who has written the single best essay on the subject of enjambment, describes the spectrum of possible line-breaks as ranging from "hard" (deliberately cutting into syntax, the most extreme form of which would be to break in the middle of a word) to "soft" (coincidence of line-break with syntax, the most extreme form of which would be the period concluding the last line of a poem).[xviii]  Line terminus has a more marked cutting effect than the simple boundary between words, though a less emphatic one than the kind of pausing signalled by punctuation.  The degree to which the cutting effect becomes prominent and operates as a rhythmically and semantically meaningful technique in a poem depends upon the reader's perception that the line-breaks have been placed deliberately.  Variety can be important in this regard; the most radical enjambment can loose its effectiveness if it appears habitual.  Anyone who reads contemporary literary journals can testify that breaking every line against syntax can result in tedium as quickly as pausing only at ordinary phrasal divisions!

   

                                                                3. Counterpoint

            The interplay between syntactical pauses and line-breaks is often described as "counterpoint."  In music, counterpoint means the independent movement of two melodic parts. Gerard Manley Hopkins appropriated the term to describe the way the abstract pattern of metre pulls against ordinary speech rhythm in poetry.  This process might more accurately have been described as "syncopation" (the playing off of a new rhythm against the expected one by the displacement of accent), but Hopkins' choice of terminology has stuck, perhaps because by evoking melody, it suggests a more comprehensive description of poetry than the purely percussive.[xix]

            Critics used to accept the effect of counterpoint in metered verse but rejected its operation in free verse, where there is no metrical pattern to displace.  John Livingston Lowes was typical of many early critics in doubting that unmetred poetry could provide much rhythmical interest.  I would like to quote his 1919 opinion at length, since it is more thoughtful than those of many of his contemporaries, and clearly articulates the issues that were to be debated for many years to come.

The movement of regular verse is a resultant, a resolution, of two rhythms, one of which, taken alone, tends towards utter freedom, the other of which, taken alone, tends towards restraint. There is in verse, on the one hand, the metrical unit - that is to say, for our present purpose, the line. There is, on the other hand, what we may designate as the sentence rhythm or cadence. If the line length and the sentence rhythm uniformly coincide (as they do in some of Pope's couplets, for example) we get monotony, deadly and intolerable. If there is only the sentence cadence, without the beat of the line, there is variety, but it is merely the variety of your speech and mine, when charged with emotion in varying degrees.[xx]

The problem here is Lowes's definition of the line; he identifies it with metre by calling it "the metrical unit," and allows for no rhythmical possibilities in poetry other than the two extremes of regular patterning in quantifiable measures and the purely rhetorical emphases of speech.  Lowes is reluctant to give up metre for the same reason Dr Johnson held fast to rhyme.  Both critics fear that, without systematic formal devices, poetry will lose its generic purity, becoming nothing more than a record of the speaking voice: in Dr Johnson's words, "the measures of an English poet" will change into "the periods of a declaimer."

            Nonetheless, Dr Johnson acknowledges that, despite his discomfort with its prosodic subversiveness, Milton's blank verse works.  Similarly Lowes is more than half-way to accepting free-verse; he just needs to be persuaded that it too is "a resultant, a resolution of two rhythms."  In his early defence of free verse, T.S. Eliot tried to explain that taking away rhyme and metre would not deprive poetry of music; on the contrary, it would encourage the poet to discover the native music of the English language.  He said:

When the comforting echo of rhyme is removed, success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the order, is at once more apparent.  Rhyme removed, the poet is at once held up to the standards of prose.  Rhyme removed, much ethereal music leaps up from the word.[xxi]

This is of course the beginning of the answer I promised earlier to the anxieties of Dr Johnson about whether poetry without rhyme would have any music.  Only a beginning because, radical as Eliot's statement seemed at the time, it seems quaintly timid now.  Moreover, one must read rather carefully.  Eliot does not mean to suggest that free verse is nothing more than a framing technique for focussing the reader's attention on the sounds of words.  On the contrary, he emphasizes the poet's task of selection and arrangement, "success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the order."

            Of course, the word "sentence" is unfortunate, implying as it does that the poet writing without rhyme and metre is automatically writing sentences, not lines.  On the other hand, here is Wallace Stevens who seems to be replying directly to Dr Johnson, conceding but vindicating his description of unrhymed poetry as "declamation."  Stevens says

yesterday, or the day before, the time from which the use of the word "music" in relation to poetry has come down to us, music meant something else. It meant metrical poetry with regular rhyme schemes repeated stanza after stanza. All of the stanzas were alike in form. As a result of this, what with the repetitions of the beats of the lines, and the constant and recurring harmonious sound, there actually was a music. But ... there has been a change in the nature of what we mean by music. It is like the change from Haydn to a voice intoning. It is like the voice of an actor reciting or declaiming or of some figure concealed, so that we cannot identify him, who speaks with a measured voice which is often disturbed by his feeling for what he says ... Instead of a musician we have an orator whose speech sometimes resembles music. We have an eloquence, and it is that eloquence that we call music every day, without having much cause to think about it.[xxii]