Poems, Poets, Poetry

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Hebrew Verse Structure

Introduction

Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (Boston, MA: Bedford Books, 1997).

Helen Vendler, an American literary critic and Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University, has been called the 'grande dame' of poetry in America.[1] She is known for her close, almost scientific attention to both poems and poets.[2]

Summary

"The poignancy of any poem comes with the struggle between uttering truth and honoring the undertow of strong feeling." (p. 86)

Vendler's book simultaneously explains and instructs regarding poetry: what constitutes the 'inner life' of a poem and how to extract it from a poem so as to understand it. "In this book she combines a sense of intellectual excitement and emotional engagement that no general poetry anthology or guide to reading poetry published in the last twenty years can even approximate.... Vendler's prose is entirely lucid for a general audience while satisfying the critical demands of the most skeptical academic." (Charles Altieri, from the back cover)

Outline

  1. The Poem as Life
    1. The Private Life
    2. The Public Life
    3. Nature and Time
  2. The Poem as Arranged Life
    1. The Private Life
    2. The Public Life
    3. Nature and Time
  3. Poems as Pleasure
    1. Rhythm
    2. Rhyme
    3. Structure
    4. Images
    5. Argument
    6. Poignancy
    7. Wisdom
    8. A New Language
    9. Finding Yourself
  4. Describing Poems
    1. Poetic Kinds
    2. Narrative versus Lyric; Narrative in Lyric
    3. Classifying Lyric Poems
    4. Content Genres
    5. Speech Acts
    6. Outer Form
    7. Inner Structural Form
    8. Exploring a Poem
  5. The Play of Language
    1. Sound Units
    2. Word Roots
    3. Words
    4.  Sentences
    5. Implication
    6. The Ordering of Language
  6. Constructing a Self
    1. Multiple Aspects
    2. Change of Discourse
    3. Space and Time
    4. Testimony
    5. Motivations
    6. Typicality
    7. Tone as Marker of Selfhood
    8. Imagination
    9. Persona
  7. Poetry and Social Identity
  8. History and Regionality
  9. Appendices
    1. On Prosody
    2. On Grammar
    3. On Speech Acts
    4. On Rhetorical Devices
    5. On Lyric Subgenres

Key Concepts

In addition to narrative and dramatic social genres, there exists the lyric poem: a script for performance by its reader. Imagination may be at its most unfettered in lyric, because there is no requirement to give a recognisable portrait of society (as the novelist or dramatist must). This enables lyric to be the most intimate of genres (constructing a kind of twinship between writer and reader) as well as the most universal of genres (presuming enough similarity to enable the reader to step into the writer's shoes and speak the lines written as though they were his own).

The analytic shape of a poem is any meaningful patterning in the poem that 'acts out' an insight the poet has had about the experience treated by the poem. In well-written poems, most of the larger perceived patterns will be analytically meaningful.

We can summarise a poem, but that does not explain the shapes the poet invents out of a life-moment. Only an examination of the form shows us how the poem enacts (represents by several formal shapes) the moment it has chosen, and makes us see the processes of that moment, how it gradually unfolds in time, with both pathos and joy.

'The ideal poem would have a temporal shape, a spatial shape, a rhythmic shape, a phonetic shape, a grammatical shape, and so on — each one beautifully worked out, each one graphically presenting in formal terms an aspect of the emotional and intellectual import of the poem. One way we distinguish more accomplished poems from less accomplished ones is the control of the artist over a number of shapes at once. Other things being equal, the more shapes that are being controlled, the more pleasure one derives from the poem because more of its inner life has been thought through, analyzed, and made visible in form by its creator.' (p. 44)

Narrative poems tell a story, whereas lyric poems may contain the germ of a story, but the poem dwells less on the plot than on feelings and reflections. They sometimes overlap, because each often has both feeling and reflection as well as plot.

The process of paying attention to words, their functions, their logical arrangements in sentences, and their implications is what is meant by close reading. It means spelling out, in your own mind — since the words of a poem are given to you to say as if they were your own — what the generalizing phrases of the poem mean in your own case as you extend their implications to yourself. Only then can you speak the words of the poem with conviction.

The identity of the lyric speaker (by contrast to the speaker of satire or of dramatic monologue, for instance) has historically been "open-ended," meaning that the words of the speaker could be spoken by any reader within the culture. In the past, in literate cultures, both Western and Eastern, education was preliminary to the (male) professions; and writers, who usually came from the group of those so educated, directed their writings to people who belonged to the same group and possessed the same culture. No longer, today: often speakers are defined by nationality, race, class, sex or sexual preference. The analyst's challenge is to see why the chosen identities are relevant to the poem.

Key Arguments

Classifying Lyric Poems

Content: e.g. autobiography, love poem, nocturne, pastoral, elegy, prayer, travel poem

Speech act: e.g. confessional narration, meditation, apology, apostrophe, boast, command, hypothesis, rebuttal, reproach, prayer

Outer form: matters of metre, rhyme and stanza-form

  • line width
  • poem length
  • rhythm

Inner structural form: dynamic shape, derived from the curve traced by the emotions of the poem as they develop; always variable, since they represent emotional response, which is always volatile

  • sentences (poets means us to notice how many there are and how they relate to one another)
  • person (a change to second person, addressing a person who hasn't appeared before, usually raises the temperature of a poem, p. 115)
  • agency (By tracing agency through a poem we can tell who is ruling it as it goes along, p. 117)
  • images, or sensual words

The poet is expected to know prior examples and to follow the rules until he changes them, violating the very expectations the poem has set up. This is how interest is added.

Describing Poems

  1. Meaning: Can you paraphrase in prose the general outline of the poem?
  2. Antecedent scenario: What has been happening before the poem begins? What has provoked the speaker into utterance? How has a previous equilibrium been unsettled? What is the speaker upset about?
  3. Division into parts: How many? Where do the breaks come?
  4. The climax: How do the other parts fall into place around it?
  5. The other parts: What makes you divide the poem into these parts? Are there changes in person? In agency? In tense? In parts of speech?
  6. Find the skeleton: What is the emotional curve on which the whole poem is strung? (It even helps to draw a shape –– a crescendo, perhaps, or an hourglass-shape, or a sharp ascent followed by a steep decline –– so you'll know how the poem looks to you as a whole.)
  7. Games with the skeleton: How is the emotional curve made new?
  8. Language: What are the contexts of diction; chains of significant relation; parts of speech emphasised; tenses; and so on?
  9. Tone: Can you name the pieces of the emotional curve –– the changes in tone you can hear in the speaker's voice as the poem goes along?
  10. Agency and its speech acts: Who is the main agent in the poem, and does the main agent change as the poem progresses? See what the main speech act of the agent is, and whether that changes. Notice oddities about agency and speech acts.
  11. Roads not taken: Can you imagine the poem written in a different person, or a different tense, or with the parts rearranged, or with an additional stanza, or with one stanza left out, conjecturing by such means why the poet might have wanted these pieces in this order?
  12. Genres: What are they by content, by speech act, by outer form?
  13. The imagination: What has it invented that is new, striking, memorable –– in content, in genre, in analogies, in rhythm, in a speaker?

(p. 128-9)

Pleasure and Shape

Every artwork exists to evoke pleasures that are easier to feel than to describe. (p. 67)

We perceive poetic shape mostly through oddness. We need a sense of patterning to give structure to the poem, but it is in the oddness of the structure that the distinctive shape emerges. It is the excess of patterning, beyond what is necessary to convey paraphrasable meaning, that additionally gives the work what we sometimes call "literariness." We tend to be moved by this more intense patterning, which distinguishes literary artworks from other verbal pieces of truth or wisdom.

Perhaps the greatest pleasure given by poetry is the sense that dynamic structure and thought are so intimately connected that each gives coherence to the other. We sometimes express this by saying that the structure of a poem enacts (acts out, dramatizes) by way of a dynamic evolution of form what the poem says by way of assertion. (p. 76)

The poet's intention

Although readers may only be conscious of a sound effect when they hear two end-words rhyme, poets are conscious of all the sounds in their lines, just as they are of the rhythms of a line. They bind words together with sound play, whether alliteration or assonance, making the words sound as if they "belong" together naturally.

In times past poets would have expected educated readers to recognise repeated roots, as in consider (cf. 'sidereal') and stars (Shakespeare, Sonnet 15) or perceive and conceive, with consider and conceive sharing the same prefix.

Making sense of a poem

Every image needs to be related to others in the same poem, but in an imaginative, not a mechanical, way.

Arguments in poems are miniature imitations of "real" arguments, and are often designed to show the moves in the argumentative game rather than to make a full argument in order to persuade a "real-life" person. The debates in poems are often sophisticated games, as when a "shepherd" (really a courtier in pastoral disguise) tries to persuade a "nymph" (an aristocratic young woman playing at being a rustic shepherdess) to love him. (p. 83)

The meaning of a word in a poem is determined less by its dictionary definition (a single word like "stage" or "store" can have many definitions in a comprehensive dictionary) than by the words around it. Every word in a poem enters into relation with the other words in that poem. These relations can be of several kinds:

  1. thematic (or meaning) relation — as we would connect "stars" and "sky" in Sonnet 15
  2. phonemic relation — as we would connect "stage," "stars," "secret," "selfsame," "sky," etc. in Sonnet 15
  3. grammatical relation — as "cheerèd" and "checked" (already linked phonemically by their sounds and thematically by their being antonyms of each other) are both verbal adjectives modifying "men" in Sonnet 15
  4. syntactic relation — as "When I consider" and "When I perceive" introduce dependent clauses in "I," both modifying the main clause "Then the conceit... sets you."

(p. 147)

The ordering of experience in shapes of radial or logical clarification — clarification by hierarchy, clarification by a comparison of then to now, clarification by here versus there, or clarification by rise-and-decline (to name only four common "shapes") — is what gives poetry its aura of mystery. Even when its "content" is tragic (as in Dickinson's list of the heart's requests), the fact that the list has been ordered into an understood set or a hierarchy reassures us that the mind can understand what the heart cannot endure, and that the imagination can find a linguistic shape for the structures of reality, even for those that are most tragic. (p. 155)

Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with line-breaks added. (p. 155)

Since the language of lyric is condensed, every word carries weight, and all aspects of grammar and syntax (parts of speech, speech acts, even word roots) are full of significance. Poets are steeped in language: "For many years," said Emily Dickinson, "my lexicon was my only companion...." Languages gives you the manner of the poem, as well as its matter. (p. 159)

Key Evidence

The volume contains a significant anthology of poems, illustrating every point. They are exclusively English poems, but they demonstrate a complexity that rivals the Psalms. Two examples for exploration in the Book Review are included below.

Emily Dickinson, The Heart asks Pleasure — first —

The Heart asks Pleasure — first —
And then – Excuse from Pain —
And then – those little Anodynes [painkillers]
That deaden suffering –
And then — to go to sleep —
And then — if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The privilege to die —

This is a two-stanza description of a prayer, organised as a list of goods. The Heart asks:

  • Pleasure (first)
  • Excuse from Pain
  • Anodynes

Then, the Heart asks:

  • to go to sleep
  • (if it be the will of the Inquisitor) the privilege to die

The break in stanzas marks the shift from hope to despair. At first the prayer is assumed to a benevolent being, who might offer pleasure, or at least no pain, or at least lessened pain. But, in the second stanza, all hope of benevolence is lost, and the one hearing the prayer has become a church-licensed torturer, and the abject plea is the 'privilege' to die.

A 'standard' Christian prayer, understood as the backdrop to this, might be:

The soul asks peace of mind,
And then for virtue's power
And then for hope and charity
In every evil hour;
And then for faith in grief,
And then — if it should be
The will of its Creator-God —
His face at death to see.

(Cf. pp. 107-8 for a fuller exploration)

John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816)

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.


Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; [domain]
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene [atmosphere]

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:


Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken; [view]

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.


John Keats did not read Homer in Greek, and his first experiences were unimpressive. When he read Chapman's translation, however, everything changed. (Cf. pp. 120-128 for a full exploration)

Impact

"Vendler’s introduction is intended for novices; but her sagacious and analytic approach manages to achieve accessibility without forfeiting depth. Each chapter explains a particular way of looking at a poem—whether as an arranged life, or as an exploration of language, and so on. And then, after you're armed with a toolbox of interpretive techniques, Vendler pits you against a truly marvelous selection of poems."[3]

The impact of this book pales in comparison to Vendler's impact in general as a literary critic. She was known for incisive criticism and a lack of concern for political correctness.

Questions for Biblical Poetry

How much does modern lyric poetry overlap with biblical poetry? If many of the psalms are first by and for David, but second for the people of Israel represented by David, is that the same as shifting from dramatic social genre to lyric poetry?

References

  1. ↑ https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/652357325?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1
  2. ↑ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/helen-vendler
  3. ↑ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48250.Poems_Poets_Poetry
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