A Way Forward

The Teutonic Barbarian Talks Poetic Ideals

Wild Geese and Water, Katsushika Hokusai, 1839

Γνοῖεν δ,᾽ ὡς δὴ δηρὸν ἐγὼ πολέμοιο πέπαυμαι.

“The motto shows the feeling of both Froude and myself at the time; we borrowed from Mr. Bunsen a [volume of] Homer, and Froude chose the words in which Achilles, on returning to battle, says, ‘You shall know the difference, now that I am back again.’”

John Henry Newman

If you’ve not been following the hot debate over the nature of poetry, meter, and all that is good, moral, and noble between Robert Charboneau and me, allow me to update you on all that’s transpired.

Charboneau posted an interesting, but flawed essay on the nature of meter in poetry.

I responded with a gentle, thoughtful commentary on how he might revise some of his points to better strengthen his argument.

To which he responded with an unscrupulous and vicious piece of writing, in which he insulted, not only my ideas, but my family heritage.¹

Having no choice but to return again to my desk and draft a new rebuttal of the crude and inaccurate ideas expressed by certain individuals, I have labored to set forth another essay articulating my ideas on the nature of Poetry, which document I now set before you, dear readers, to assess whose ideas have triumphed in this clash of minds.

In opening, I wanted to quote part of a comment from J. Z. Schafer: “This series of exchanges is proving very rich. Thanks for the next installation. A comment: the selected battleground of the Oliver poem doesn't seem like a good place to further this discussion. I'd be more curious as to your and Ms. Marstall's thoughts regarding a way Forward.”

To which I have to say, I heartily agree. Imagine how I felt, having drafted five thousand words of sincere, intelligent writing on the theory of poetry, to see that Robert Charboneau’s response to my response chiefly consisted of an analysis of my analysis of Oliver’s poem. In fact, just writing that sentence shows to which levels of pedantry this conversation might easily descend. I think he makes great points about the poem and the craft of poetry in general, but I hope he’ll forgive me for sidestepping a further conversation about the merits of “Wild Geese.” I’m less interested in going back and forth over a particular poem and how to read it than I am in outlining the philosophical contours of poetic theory: what is poetry? what is good poetry? and how should poets approach their craft? I’m also personally fascinated by the question, “Given that we have an old poetic tradition, and an ever-living stream of new poetry, how might we talk about the new-in-terms-of-the-old?”, which is what I was endeavoring to do (somewhat playfully) in casting Oliver’s “Wild Geese” in light of Germanic poetic convention. Though I do think that the tools of alliterative verse have made their way into free verse, particularly through the influence of Hopkins on twentieth century naturalist poets like Oliver. For more Oliver on Hopkins, read her essay “The Poem as Prayer, the Prayer as Ornament: Gerard Manley Hopkins” in her book Winter Hours. I’ll quote a brief passage below:

“Hopkins dedicated many hours to a description and explanation of his technique, whose mainstay was "sprung rhythm" and whose apparatus included such phrases as "hangers" and "outriders." Practically speaking, it is accentual verse and follows the course of logical intonation. There may be four or there may be five stresses to a line, and there are times when, to make this happen, one must compress a combination of words within a single emphasis, which adds to the density of the whole. The truth of the matter is that the poems do not require half the explanation Hopkins gave them, and to tell a further truth, he elaborates in such detail that it becomes finally obstacle rather than assistance. The poems are not hard to read. In their own way they are fluid, with obvious points of emphasis. There are unexpected lapses and ties and conjunctions within the syntax, but even with such moments the poems are readable and understandable. Also, as almost all poems do, they will occasionally, for a brief spell, make use of some familiar metrical pattern, that oldest obtainment of design.”²

I’m sure her comments about Hopkins over-elaboration might annoy some who enjoy the analytical aspects of poetry. But as Charboneau and I have both pointed out in our essays, sometimes poets talk too much about their poetry, to a point where it kills the livingness of it.

On that note, if you’ve not read Nik Hoffman’s contribution to the discussion, “Thoughts on Prosody”, do so. It’s an interesting piece, made more interesting by the fact that it has, in my personal opinion, both a great virtue and a great fault: a great virtue, insofar as it has “the excellent virtues of both brevity and clarity”, as Nik himself says of another author, and a great fault, insofar as it says half the things I would’ve liked to say better than I could’ve said them, which makes me feel redundant. But not having written the essay, I’ll take the liberty of quoting a few ideas that I found particularly helpful.

The Norm

…Aesthetically speaking, the point of meter is to establish a norm. The point of writing metrical verse is to deviate from the norm. Metrical rules are made so that they might be bent. That is the whole point. Establishing then deviating then returning to the norm is a pleasurable experience.

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The Metrical Handshake

The first line or lines of a poem can act as a metrical handshake to the reader. They set a metrical or otherwise rhythmic expectation for the poem. They present a standard which “sets the stage” for the rest of the poem. Returning to the sheet music metaphor, these handshake lines are akin to time signatures.

It is not necessary that the handshake appears in the initial lines. They can appear anywhere, and can come in multiple forms.

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The Guiding Hand

Extending the previous note, a good poem will teach the reader how to read it. If the reader pays sufficient attention, he will find the sign posts on how to recite the verse. (Emphasis mine.)

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Discrete and Unique Lines

Every line is totally unique. No two lines will ever scan the same unless we achieve a sufficient enough level of abstraction to make them. The method posited in these notes, I believe, achieves enough abstraction to make scansion helpful to the poet and the reader.”

Yes to all of this, and the final point in particular. One of the interesting points that Nik makes throughout his essay is that most of our poetic terminology is an attempt to describe abstractly what we experience concretely—that is, we hear a particular rhythm or musical effect in a poem, and use the language of meter or scansion to name what we’re hearing. But, as Nik says elsewhere, “the final authority on all prosodic matters lies within the ear.”

This point struck me because, in a small way, it’s an example of how all knowledge works. Most of us born into the twenty-first century are ill-equipped to talk about how knowledge works. How do we know? do we know? what do we know? And most people hold to two simultaneous extremes: either our knowledge is comprehensive and empirically proven, or the nature of the mind and language prevent us from knowing anything at all. Generally speaking, we trust statistics and case studies about the small things and assume there aren’t any certain answers to the big ones: whether the universe exists, where we’re going after death, and so on.

The problem with that approach is that most knowledge sits in the middle. There’s a real world around us, which we can know, measure, understand, and define. But because there are limits to our reason—our tool for knowing—we can’t completely know, measure, understand, and define our world. We’re left in a sort of middle position—“placed on this isthmus of a middle state,” as Pope says. We can’t comprehend everything, but we can apprehend it. We can’t quite get our heads around it, but we can touch it. For everything, we can offer what Plato calls a likely account—an eikôs logos. “Logos” because any definition includes the ordering principle that makes something what it is, and “eikos” because it is reasonable: there are good reasons to accept such a definition, even though we understand that there is something at the back of what we’re trying to define that we can’t quite articulate. Not because it’s not there, but because the tools we’re working with—reason and language—only go so far.

It’s the same thing with any theory of poetry. We can apprehend what Poetry is—we can give a “likely account”, we can say many true things about its essence—but can we comprehend it? Is there a single definition which encompasses the whole nature of poetry? I’m not convinced, and I think Nik’s essay does an excellent job of exploring the tension between what we can and can’t say. I think theorists like Charboneau are weakest when they attempt to comprehensively define Poetry, especially if they try to do so by reference to the formal aspects of Poetry. They think that being old-school traditionalists means finding a scientific definition and sticking to it, when really, the oldest schools—at least the Athenian ones—have always been comfortable with the grey areas in human understanding.

Meter Still Not Essential to Poetry

In his second response, Charboneau says that I agree with his claim that meter is essential to poetry. In my first essay, I argued at length why meter cannot be the sine qua non of poetry, but perhaps Charboneau overlooked that point. To help him out, I’ll quote it again here:

In this section, Robert also claims that meter is “the essential element of verse.” I’m going to get philosophical and nitpicky for a second. To call something the “essential element” of anything means that it is the “sine qua non” of that thing—the element “without which” you lose all definition of the thing. In the definition “man is a rational animal”, “rational” is the essential element: if man is not “rational”, there is no specific difference to set him apart from all other animals, and you have no way of delineating what is and isn’t man. If meter is the essential element of verse, then everything inside the category of meter is verse, and everything outside its bounds isn’t.

In his counterpoint, Charboneau argues that I agree with his definition of meter as the essential element of poetry, because T. S. Eliot and I both believe that free verse, at its best, picks up and discards a strict meter. He seems to takes Eliot’s quote about “lurking” meter in vers libre to mean that all free verse really is “metered”, but hides it…by refusing to use it? This is a misread of the quote. Eliot’s actual point is that if free verse is a dramatic scene (in keeping with his idea that each poem is a unique “experience”), then there are multiple players on stage. One of the players ought to be meter, but he should be waiting in the wings, “lurking behind the arras”, to step forward at the right dramatic moment. Which is exactly my point. To better understand Eliot’s original point, I recommend the little-known stage play Hamlet to Charboneau, from which Eliot takes his reference to the “arras.”

In his section “What is Meter?”, Charboneau defines Meter as “the consideration of structural rhythm.” A few paragraphs later, he says, “Is meter the only technique in prosody for creating rhythm and regularity? No.” This is the sort of sad equivocation that I try to train out of high school students. Is meter the underlying principle of structural rhythm in all poetry, or is it a technique in prosody, one among many, to be employed by the poetry? It can’t be both the essential element and a tool in the toolbox. If it’s a tool, than a poet can choose not to use it, whereas an essential element cannot be set down. To return to my previous example of man as “rational animal”, man never sets down the tool of “reason” and picks up a different one.³ Rather, it is the principle that determines his entire relation to the rest of the world. I agree with Charboneau that meter is a tool in the poet’s toolbox—perhaps even the best one—but I disagree that meter is the essential element of poetry. The fact that I can both agree and disagree with his definition of meter shows that perhaps it needs a little clay to stop the leaks.

Mary Oliver (Again)

Like I said earlier, the bulk of Charboneau’s essay seemed to focus on my analysis of Oliver’s “Wild Geese.” As Nik Hoffman pointed out in his piece on prosody, there are limitless ways to talk about a poem. I could go back and forth with Charboneau for a number of essays discussing the worthy or unworthy elements of the poem, but as I said above, that seems like a poor end to the conversation. So I’ll only add a few final thoughts in response to his critique.

First, I would love to hear Charboneau’s honest and unfiltered opinion on my most recent poem, “A Winter Day”, which was an imitation of and response to another well-known poem by Oliver, “A Summer Day.” It was also the first free verse poem I’ve written in a few months.

Secondly, Charboneau offers William Bryant’s “Thanatopis” as an example of a poem that does what Oliver’s does, but better, due to its metrical regularity and specificity of language. To that, I’ll only say that I think the poems offer different experiences, and the authors had different aims. Bryant’s poem does not read like a “better” version of Oliver’s, but a wholly different emotion, beautiful in its own shades and subtleties. As a reader, there are times when I want to feel the “Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste” and there are times when I want to be reminded of my place in the family of things. As Lewis notes in Experiment in Criticism, the delight of reading is to experience every author’s view of the world, translated by their unique approach to the craft of writing. Oliver’s unique approach isn’t to Charboneau’s taste; it is to mine. If Poetry and its merits can be expressed by a single, comprehensive definition, then I am at fault for defending “bad poetry”; if, on the other hand, our attempts to understand how Poetry works and why it’s beautiful fall into the category of “a likely account”, then perhaps I can be forgiven for overreaching—in Charboneau’s estimation—the bounds of my account.

Thirdly, in his critique of Oliver, Charboneau said: “[When] I want to read about the everyday transcendence of the natural world, I pick up Annie Dillard instead. She does it better in prose than Oliver in poetry.” Another statement that I’m afraid I’ll have to nitpick a bit. For this one, I’ll switch hats and respond as an essayist, instead of a poet. As someone who’s spent a fair amount of time studying the familiar essay⁴, which is what Dillard writes, I had to sigh a little bit at this supposed critique of Oliver, because Dillard’s style of essay is what’s known as a lyric essay. And a lyric essay is a creative nonfiction genre which borrows techniques from poetry. If poetry and prose are, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch says, two lands with an indeterminate boundary, then the lyric essay lies close to that borderline—and closer to poetry—than say, Bacon’s philosophical essays.

To illustrate what I mean, here’s another diagram:

What Charboneau admires about Dillard’s prose is way that she, like a free verse poet, treads the borderline between the conventions of prose and poetry. He admires the influence of poetry on Dillard’s prose. Which poets? Perhaps not Oliver. But in “The Death of the Moth”, Dillard does mention one of her literary influences—she describes reading a novel called The Day on Fire, which she says “made me want to be a writer when I was sixteen”. The novel is about the life of the French poet Rimbaud, whom I cited in my first essay as one of the forerunners of vers libre. So sure, you can get the same thing from Dillard that you can from Oliver—because their roots are in the same soil.

But despite all my objections to Charboneau’s points, I aspire to be someone who can humbly accept criticism, and so I’ll admit that it’s possible that my portrayal of Mary Oliver’s poetic craft, and particularly her application of the poetic tradition to free verse, may have been lacking, incomplete, or unconvincing. To that end, I have supplemented each of my further points in this essay with a relevant quotation from Oliver’s Poetry Handbook, which is a brilliant little guide on the art of poetry. That may not convince those readers, including Charboneau, who were unimpressed by my reading of “Wild Geese”, but it will amuse me.

For the rest of this essay, I’d like to offer a few thoughts about what Poetry is and how poets ought to go about writing it. This is not a systematic of poetry, and my own thoughts have been informed by poets who wildly disagreed with each other; therefore, there may be inconsistencies both in my sources and my own attempt to understand the nature of Poetry. I’m okay with that. As Chesterton says, “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”⁵ These next few notes are not a comprehensive definition, but my attempt to get my head into the heavens: to apprehend something about the nature of Poetry. Call it a likely account.

What is Poetry?

Consider these next few thoughts my attempt to answer the question “What makes poetry poetry?”

1. Poetry as an intensification.

In his essay “Traditional and the Individual Talent”, Eliot makes the point that poetry is less concerned with the portrayal of his personal emotion than with the expression of intense experience through the devices of poetry.

“The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.”⁶

Quiller-Couch says much the same thing in On the Art of Writing: he says it is the poet’s job to “turn up the pitch” of human feeling in his work, and by doing so, draw his audience into a heightened experience of the world. The value of this heightening is that such intensity of expressed feeling has the surprising effect of making us pay more attention to the ordinary world: it does not diminish our ordinary feelings by its extremity; rather, it expands them.

“Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” - Mary Oliver

2. Poetry as patterned sound.

I think I’ve made this point sufficiently in my first essay. A poem is the most intense version of what St. Augustine calls “vox articulata”: sound which bears meaning. Poetry is meaning mediated through sound. A rich understanding of sound must, for the poet, involve meter. As Mary Oliver says:

“Aquaintance with the main body of English poetry is absolutely essential—it is clearly the whole cake, while what has been written in the last hundred years or so, without meter, is no more than icing. And, indeed, I do not really mean an ancquaintanceship—I mean an engrossed and able affinity with metrical verse. To be without this felt sensitivity to a poem as a structure of lines and rhythmic energy and repetitve sound is to be forever less equipped, less deft than the poet who dreams of making a new thing can afford to be” (emphasis hers).⁷

3. Poetry as Reserve.

For Tractarians John Keble and John Henry Newman, the central principle of Poetry was “Reserve.” They characterized Poetry as a kind of harnessed or restrained intensity. For them, Poetry was the coupling of powerful emotion—especially spiritual—with the tools and techniques which naturally restrain such emotion, as the poet subordinates his raw sensibility to his artistic vision. “Reserve” also refers to the unique nature of Poetry to express through metaphor and image and “by indirections finds direction out”, rather than construct a linear argument, like prose. In poetry, the meaning is “meant” through the imagery, sound, and experience of the poem; it is not a logical medium, but a personal one, which is to say, it encompasses everything that the human person does. This is why Edgar Allen Poe argues in “The Poetic Principle” that poetry can’t be didactic. For more on the relationship between reason, emotion, and embodiment in poetry, read Eliot’s essay on “The Metaphysical Poets.” For more on Reserve, I recommend G. B. Tennyson’s Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode.

See also Keat’s “negative capability”, Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility”, Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” for various articulations of what this “Reserve” might look like.

As regards poetry as personal, not merely logical:

“If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet—one or the other lagging, or afraid or busy elsewhere—there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different—it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and then something begins to happen.” - Mary Oliver

4. Poetry as Sacrament.

Another point taken from Keble. A sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”⁸ As I said earlier, Poetry is the proper medium of signification—of symbol, from the Greek symbolon, joining two things together. Poetry signs, it symbolizes. Like Nature, marriage, or the Eucharistic cup, Poetry embodies and images the presence and power of grace through the concrete. It opens, like an icon, a window between the ordinary world and the spiritual one. Because it concerns itself with both the use of imagery and attention to the concrete world, it captures the world, and since the world is “charged with the grandeur of God”, Poetry catches in its net the perfect actuality of the divine. This is to say that the poet’s work is not merely to describe what he sees, or to express what he feels, but to remind his audience of “their place in the family of things”, this family being the whole order of creation, into which is woven all spiritual and all visible things.

“Figurative language can give shape to the difficult and the painful. It can make visible and “felt” that which is invisible and “unfeelable.” Imagery, more than anything else, can take us out of our own existence and let us stand in the condition of another instance, or another life.” - Mary Oliver

A Way Forward

This is not intended as a comprehensive answer to J. Z. Schafer’s comment, which I quoted at the beginning of this essay. Rather, these are a few of the principles that I keep at hand when I write, borrowed from my own reading about the craft and the poets I love best. These principles are drawn from my attempts to understand “what Poetry is”, and particularly the views on Poetry that I listed above, but they don’t get much further in defining Poetry qua Poetry. Thankfully, you’re not required to perfectly comprehend the essence of poetry in order to start writing it.

Principles for writing poetry:

Study meter (and free verse). Get the sound of old poetry in your ears, but understand the motives behind others’ innovations.

Pay attention to the world.

Write out of something greater than yourself.

Imitate those who’ve gone before.⁹

Feel deeply; write sober-mindedly.

Employ the senses.

Take your craft seriously and master its tools.¹⁰

I’ll close with Oliver’s “instructions for living a life”, which we might also call “instructions for a poet.”

“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

1. The surname “Marstall” does not derive from a mere hostler’s profession, which employ any common groom might engage, but from my ancestor’s lineage as the horsemen of the royal households of Germany. Imagine if you were descended from the Rohirrim, and someone implied that your family tree had its roots in mere innkeeper’s stablehands: that’s the severity of the insult that Charboneau has committed. His last name, as far as I can find, derives from the trade of coal-mining.

2. Mary Oliver, “The Poem as Prayer, the Prayer as Ornament: Gerard Manley Hopkins”, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2016).

3. “Rational”, in Aristotle’s definition, doesn’t refer to discursive thinking (what we moderns mean by reason; i.e., logic and syllogisms), but something more like the Hebrew “yada”, to know. It’s the faculty by which we have interiority (self-consciousness), creativity, relationship, and the ability to order and name the world around us. In other words, all of the things that distinguish the human mode of being from other animals’.

4. Between a college level course, a capstone project involving nine months of writing and revising essays, and a semester of interning at my alma mater to co-teach the same course I took as an upperclassmen.

5. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

6. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

7. One has to wonder, in light of Oliver’s own love of the poetic tradition and the worthiness of form, if Charboneau was really familiar enough with her work and poetic theory to provide such a sweeping dismissal as he does: “Oliver’s line seems to me a clear example of the disadvantages of not studying meter, an obvious lack of consideration of the relationship between sound and sense. As a poet I don’t find her particularly compelling. It doesn’t, anyway, seem like she gives much thought to the construction of lines, or to the structure of her poems as a whole. The page is merely a place for her to write down her thoughts as they strike her.”

8. The Book of Common Prayer

9. Another Oliver quote: “You would learn very little in this world if you were not allowed to imitate…Before we can be poets, we must practice: imitation is a very good way of investigating the real thing.”

10. “It is craft, after all, that carries an individual’s ideas to the far edge of a familiar territory.” - Mary Oliver