Tamarah, I’m finding myself wanting to print out all of your essays on poetics so I can have them to highlight and underline and scribble in the margins.
They might be the best book on poetics I’ve read. At the very least the book that I need to be reading right now. They have a freshness and immediacy that speaks directly to my craft even though they are mostly covering ground that is already quite familiar. I hope you eventually gather and publish them.
Oh, this made my day. The image of you printing them out to highlight and scribble in the margins is genuinely one of the loveliest things a reader could say, and I am so glad they are meeting you where you are right now. And yes, this is going to be a book, I am quite certain. The shape of it is already forming, and messages like yours make me want to sit down and get to work on it sooner rather than later. I am enjoying this journey enormously, as well. It's good work to be doing.
I also really appreciate being able to read it in serialized form. The entries come at just the right pace. Any more frequent and I’d fall behind and give up. And less frequent and I’d forget. A book I might get distracted from and forget to finish. But a series of posts keeps it fresh and gives the proper dopamine boost.
I hope it's okay for me to quibble on just one detail, Tamarah!
"Keats is working...with an iambic pentameter base he loosens as the poem moves."
There is only one metrical departure from iambic pentameter: in common with the remaining stanzas, the 4th line of the sestet is a trimeter.
I'd call that trimeter a tightening, rather than a loosening (especially as it shrinks the default enlarged 3-beat rhythm of the pentameter to the bare three beats). And in this opening stanza it creates an *overlapping* of pentameters: read one way, far from loosening, the pentameters become so condensed they lie on top of each other!
"In some melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,"
Up to the comma, "Of beechen green" forms the last two beats of a pentametric phrase, while also forming the first two beats of a pentameter line.
The interweaving of the long EE & OH vowels is superb:
.
"That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless
Singest of summer in full-throated ease."
.
Between the bookending rhymed end-lines, "...trees...ease.", the doubling up of "beechen green" secures the hinge joining pentametric phrase & pentameter line.
On one side of this hinge, the first OH is lifted and encased within "melOdious"; on the other, expressively, it lands on the falling syllable of "shadOWs".
And the two vowels unify at the end, in service of the nightingale's song!
"Singest of summer in full-thrOAted EAse."
The deftness and variety with which he exploits that single short line from stanza to stanza is immensely satisfying.
This is the kind of observation that takes years of close reading to develop (which is so much fun).
Three things you said that I am still thinking about: first, that the trimeter is a tightening rather than a loosening, which is so interesting and such a different perspective of line than what I wrote. Second, the overlapping pentameters, the way "Of beechen green" completes one rhythmic phrase while simultaneously initiating the next, is a hinge observation I had not seen before. Third, the vowel tracking across "trees," "melodious," "beechen green," "shadows," and "ease" is the kind of sonic architecture that definitely rewards the kind of attention you are giving it. I’ve noticed this in many poems, obviously, but notably in hymns written in the 90s used this method much more than the consonant-reliant hymns of the past. Just an interesting observation!
Two things I want to add to the conversation: the trimeter's consistency across every stanza interests me as a kind of recurring breath like where the poem compresses before expanding again, and I wonder whether that compression is doing different emotional work in each stanza even as it holds the same formal position. And your phrase "condensed they lie on top of each other" is something…I’m thinking about for an essay on ekphrasis, so that’s interesting.
What a pleasure this has been, thank you for quibbling!
"...hymns written in the 90s used this method much more than the consonant-reliant hymns of the past." That is intriguing, and I wonder why that should be.
"...the trimeter's consistency across every stanza interests me as a kind of recurring breath like where the poem compresses before expanding again, and I wonder whether that compression is doing different emotional work in each stanza even as it holds the same formal position." Yes. Yes, it is! When I have the time, I'll map it out for you.
I'll look forward to reading that essay on ekphrasis!
Thank you for this helpful elucidation and reminder. I enjoyed it. I do, though, have a doubt, especially regarding this on poesia: “Something in the making of it went wrong at a deeper level: the poem was constructed rather than discovered, or the poet was performing feeling rather than moving through it”. It seems to me if this is considered a poetic fault, then one is ruling out for example Alexander Pope (and indeed much of eighteenth century poetry). Augustan poetry just doesn’t value feeling in this way; so either it’s a defective form (and it’s certainly not very fashionable today) or else the theory is flawed. I note in this respect that your main examples (Keats, Hopkins) are both post-eighteenth century.
Thank you again, though, for a thought-provoking read.
Thank you for this reflection! I feel like you've caught something very real in this. You're right that "discovered rather than constructed" and "moving through feeling" tilt toward a post-Romantic aesthetic that would quietly exile half the Augustans. Pope being the obvious casualty: the couplets of the Essay on Criticism or The Rape of the Lock are so skillfully architectured, and wit, not inwardness, is their animation. To call that a fault would be to mistake our own tastes for poetic truth.
I’m currently reading “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama,” and CS Lewis's chapter on the Drab Age captures the shifting nature of poetic breath better than anything I’ve read. He describes a mid-sixteenth century caught between tameness and bombast, verse that was, in his phrase, the coarsest fustian when it tried to rise, and then the surprising late-century ascent: the sudden return of fantasy, conceit, paradox, color, incantation. What Lewis registers there is this unpredictable arrival of a new inspiration…a return to youth… and the way register itself revolves across generations, is pretty much also what my framework needs to hold space for. Different eras breathe differently, and a taxonomy calibrated to Keatsian or Hopkinsian respiration will miss what a Pope or a Dryden is actually doing.
So let me restate the distinction I was reaching for. Construction and architecture itself is not the fault. The Augustan couplet is nothing if not beautifully constructed. What I meant is register-specific: within any mode a poem chooses, there is a difference between inhabiting that mode and merely performing it. A bad Augustan poem fails by wooden prosody or flaccid reasoning, not by insufficient sincerity; a bad confessional poem fails by performed feeling. The "deeper level" wrongness shifts its shape across eras. This is also, I think, why the poet needs to study the terminology of poetics carefully, so that the breath appropriate, or even proper to each mode can be heard for what it is rather than measured against a single imported standard.
Larkin, Pope, Millay, O'Hara: yes, entirely. Four distinct breaths, four different registers of what poesia is doing when it is doing its work. Again, thank you for this reflection!
Thank YOU for this long and thoughtful response. He has limits, but I always appreciate Lewis. As I drove home this evening, coincidentally, I was thinking more about the Augustan/Romantic dilemma… it occurred to me that if one values both Augustan-type couplets (and classicism) and also romantic poesia, then perhaps - just perhaps - Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” is the greatest poem in English - an odd thought, not least because it’s incomplete… I don’t recall Lewis’s verdict on the poem, but somehow I feel he would have disapproved…
I certainly find value in Aristotle's Poetics. But it hasn't much to say about lyric poems such as "Ode to a Nightingale" or "God's Grandeur." Most of what it discusses is tragic drama, which of course WAS written in verse in Athens, but is a different genus than lyric poetry, starting with lyrics not having plot, characterization, or spectacle. (For that matter, Dorothy Sayers wrote an ingenious essay on the Poetics as a theoretical analysis of the detective story!)
I'm not sure if you plan to confine yourself to lyric poetry, or also discuss narrative poetry such as "La Belle Dame sans Merci" or dramatic poetry such as "My Last Duchess," though it seems as if you're focusing on shorter verse forms, rather than prose or long verse. But if you have a book specifically on the lyric to recommend I would be interested.
You make several excellent points, and I appreciate the rigor of your thinking here. You're right that Aristotle has little to offer for understanding lyric poetry since the structural and philosophical concerns of drama are simply another beast. The Sayers essay is wonderfully ingenious, exactly the kind of repurposing of classical frameworks that shows how alive these texts remain when we ask them the right questions.
My primary focus, though, is on the vocabulary and terms themselves. The working language of the Poetics that writers and readers continue to use every day, often quite vaguely. So much of what we say about poetry, we've inherited from Aristotle through centuries of transmission and reshaping, and I think there's real value in excavating that vocabulary to understand what we actually mean when we deploy these terms. You're right that I won't be attempting to apply Aristotle's dramatic categories to lyric work; that would be a category error. But the philosophical and theoretical scaffolding beneath those terms, the way he thinks about language and form and pleasure and effect, seems worth examining even as poetry's purpose has shifted its lenses so radically across the centuries.
I think this is why we continue to read those who came before us. The purpose has shifted, yes, but the essential work of honing our craft through reading, study, and writing remains imperative. We stand in a conversation with Aristotle, even when we're saying no to him.
Okay, that's a position I can work with. I do use Aristotle's categories in thinking about the various forms of literature, and dianoia and lexis clearly apply to lyric poetry.
I must second what Melanie said. These essays are marvelous, and I enjoy each one. I also appreciate the choice to structure them around terminology, because clarifying terms is a great way to elucidate the concepts behind them. I have been writing poetry for many years, but I have not done any formal studies in poetry, depending on the occasional article but mostly on my own observation. The result is that there are things I know which I do not know discursively, only through praxis.
This is going to sound like very odd praise, but I already knew everything in this essay; I just didn't know that I knew it until I heard you say it. It's all a bit Platonic, as in the sense that he thought that the forms of knowledge were present, inherent in people, and were recollected rather than learned. Thus "education" comes from "educe," to draw out, not to teach. So thank you for the education. The inner understanding precedes words, but they bring it to birth.
Aside: I contribute to a humor page elsewhere, and one day I decided to write a long post defining the precise differences and relations between parody, lampoon, pastiche, travesty, and burlesque. The response was remarkable, with quite a few people exclaiming that they never knew humor had so much theory, and some swearing that they were going to print it out and keep it. It was of course a much lesser thing than your essays on poetry; I mention it to let you know that I understand just how happy you were over Melanie's similar reaction!
And because I can't shut up when I should, two more items: I tend to think in metaphor even when not doing poetry, so my immediate reaction was to formulate your remarks in an image: the poem is a door; poetics is the carpentry which allows it to swing open. Poesia is place to which it opens.
In my other life, I do mathematics, and there is a similar relation of terms there: mathematics is the organized study of knowledge; mathesis is the knowing itself. I am always after mathesis, which can only be reached if the mathematics is done correctly, but not all correct mathematics leads to mathesis, just as not all faultlessly constructed poetry leads to poesia. This is one reason why mathematics is properly considered one of the arts, not one of the sciences.
Briefly: I saw the word “poesia” on an instagram picture the other day, and I thought…I can’t define that. All of these vocabulary items that we are all familiar with are equally as elusive to practically define. 🌻
your last paragraph has a lot of truth in it. if people realized mathematics as an art, it would fare a lot better in people's vision of what Math really is, and there is not mere calculation, analysis and logical pedantry. Thank you.
Thank you, Darius, for underlining this point. I also think people’s perception is important. A lot of people hate/fear mathematics because they’ve never seen that side of it. That in turn is because most of their teachers have also never seen it. It’s usually not until college that you can meet someone who can show you how it can be an art, unless you were very, very lucky in you earlier school, or had a brilliant neighbor (as I did).
Tamarah, I’m finding myself wanting to print out all of your essays on poetics so I can have them to highlight and underline and scribble in the margins.
They might be the best book on poetics I’ve read. At the very least the book that I need to be reading right now. They have a freshness and immediacy that speaks directly to my craft even though they are mostly covering ground that is already quite familiar. I hope you eventually gather and publish them.
Oh, this made my day. The image of you printing them out to highlight and scribble in the margins is genuinely one of the loveliest things a reader could say, and I am so glad they are meeting you where you are right now. And yes, this is going to be a book, I am quite certain. The shape of it is already forming, and messages like yours make me want to sit down and get to work on it sooner rather than later. I am enjoying this journey enormously, as well. It's good work to be doing.
More to come, I promise.
Warmly,
Tamarah
I echo Melanie! I want to read and teach that book.
I also really appreciate being able to read it in serialized form. The entries come at just the right pace. Any more frequent and I’d fall behind and give up. And less frequent and I’d forget. A book I might get distracted from and forget to finish. But a series of posts keeps it fresh and gives the proper dopamine boost.
Yeah, I've already been doing that!
I hope it's okay for me to quibble on just one detail, Tamarah!
"Keats is working...with an iambic pentameter base he loosens as the poem moves."
There is only one metrical departure from iambic pentameter: in common with the remaining stanzas, the 4th line of the sestet is a trimeter.
I'd call that trimeter a tightening, rather than a loosening (especially as it shrinks the default enlarged 3-beat rhythm of the pentameter to the bare three beats). And in this opening stanza it creates an *overlapping* of pentameters: read one way, far from loosening, the pentameters become so condensed they lie on top of each other!
"In some melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,"
Up to the comma, "Of beechen green" forms the last two beats of a pentametric phrase, while also forming the first two beats of a pentameter line.
The interweaving of the long EE & OH vowels is superb:
.
"That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless
Singest of summer in full-throated ease."
.
Between the bookending rhymed end-lines, "...trees...ease.", the doubling up of "beechen green" secures the hinge joining pentametric phrase & pentameter line.
On one side of this hinge, the first OH is lifted and encased within "melOdious"; on the other, expressively, it lands on the falling syllable of "shadOWs".
And the two vowels unify at the end, in service of the nightingale's song!
"Singest of summer in full-thrOAted EAse."
The deftness and variety with which he exploits that single short line from stanza to stanza is immensely satisfying.
.
This is the kind of observation that takes years of close reading to develop (which is so much fun).
Three things you said that I am still thinking about: first, that the trimeter is a tightening rather than a loosening, which is so interesting and such a different perspective of line than what I wrote. Second, the overlapping pentameters, the way "Of beechen green" completes one rhythmic phrase while simultaneously initiating the next, is a hinge observation I had not seen before. Third, the vowel tracking across "trees," "melodious," "beechen green," "shadows," and "ease" is the kind of sonic architecture that definitely rewards the kind of attention you are giving it. I’ve noticed this in many poems, obviously, but notably in hymns written in the 90s used this method much more than the consonant-reliant hymns of the past. Just an interesting observation!
Two things I want to add to the conversation: the trimeter's consistency across every stanza interests me as a kind of recurring breath like where the poem compresses before expanding again, and I wonder whether that compression is doing different emotional work in each stanza even as it holds the same formal position. And your phrase "condensed they lie on top of each other" is something…I’m thinking about for an essay on ekphrasis, so that’s interesting.
What a pleasure this has been, thank you for quibbling!
"...hymns written in the 90s used this method much more than the consonant-reliant hymns of the past." That is intriguing, and I wonder why that should be.
"...the trimeter's consistency across every stanza interests me as a kind of recurring breath like where the poem compresses before expanding again, and I wonder whether that compression is doing different emotional work in each stanza even as it holds the same formal position." Yes. Yes, it is! When I have the time, I'll map it out for you.
I'll look forward to reading that essay on ekphrasis!
Thank you for this helpful elucidation and reminder. I enjoyed it. I do, though, have a doubt, especially regarding this on poesia: “Something in the making of it went wrong at a deeper level: the poem was constructed rather than discovered, or the poet was performing feeling rather than moving through it”. It seems to me if this is considered a poetic fault, then one is ruling out for example Alexander Pope (and indeed much of eighteenth century poetry). Augustan poetry just doesn’t value feeling in this way; so either it’s a defective form (and it’s certainly not very fashionable today) or else the theory is flawed. I note in this respect that your main examples (Keats, Hopkins) are both post-eighteenth century.
Thank you again, though, for a thought-provoking read.
Thank you for this reflection! I feel like you've caught something very real in this. You're right that "discovered rather than constructed" and "moving through feeling" tilt toward a post-Romantic aesthetic that would quietly exile half the Augustans. Pope being the obvious casualty: the couplets of the Essay on Criticism or The Rape of the Lock are so skillfully architectured, and wit, not inwardness, is their animation. To call that a fault would be to mistake our own tastes for poetic truth.
I’m currently reading “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama,” and CS Lewis's chapter on the Drab Age captures the shifting nature of poetic breath better than anything I’ve read. He describes a mid-sixteenth century caught between tameness and bombast, verse that was, in his phrase, the coarsest fustian when it tried to rise, and then the surprising late-century ascent: the sudden return of fantasy, conceit, paradox, color, incantation. What Lewis registers there is this unpredictable arrival of a new inspiration…a return to youth… and the way register itself revolves across generations, is pretty much also what my framework needs to hold space for. Different eras breathe differently, and a taxonomy calibrated to Keatsian or Hopkinsian respiration will miss what a Pope or a Dryden is actually doing.
So let me restate the distinction I was reaching for. Construction and architecture itself is not the fault. The Augustan couplet is nothing if not beautifully constructed. What I meant is register-specific: within any mode a poem chooses, there is a difference between inhabiting that mode and merely performing it. A bad Augustan poem fails by wooden prosody or flaccid reasoning, not by insufficient sincerity; a bad confessional poem fails by performed feeling. The "deeper level" wrongness shifts its shape across eras. This is also, I think, why the poet needs to study the terminology of poetics carefully, so that the breath appropriate, or even proper to each mode can be heard for what it is rather than measured against a single imported standard.
Larkin, Pope, Millay, O'Hara: yes, entirely. Four distinct breaths, four different registers of what poesia is doing when it is doing its work. Again, thank you for this reflection!
Thank YOU for this long and thoughtful response. He has limits, but I always appreciate Lewis. As I drove home this evening, coincidentally, I was thinking more about the Augustan/Romantic dilemma… it occurred to me that if one values both Augustan-type couplets (and classicism) and also romantic poesia, then perhaps - just perhaps - Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” is the greatest poem in English - an odd thought, not least because it’s incomplete… I don’t recall Lewis’s verdict on the poem, but somehow I feel he would have disapproved…
I certainly find value in Aristotle's Poetics. But it hasn't much to say about lyric poems such as "Ode to a Nightingale" or "God's Grandeur." Most of what it discusses is tragic drama, which of course WAS written in verse in Athens, but is a different genus than lyric poetry, starting with lyrics not having plot, characterization, or spectacle. (For that matter, Dorothy Sayers wrote an ingenious essay on the Poetics as a theoretical analysis of the detective story!)
I'm not sure if you plan to confine yourself to lyric poetry, or also discuss narrative poetry such as "La Belle Dame sans Merci" or dramatic poetry such as "My Last Duchess," though it seems as if you're focusing on shorter verse forms, rather than prose or long verse. But if you have a book specifically on the lyric to recommend I would be interested.
You make several excellent points, and I appreciate the rigor of your thinking here. You're right that Aristotle has little to offer for understanding lyric poetry since the structural and philosophical concerns of drama are simply another beast. The Sayers essay is wonderfully ingenious, exactly the kind of repurposing of classical frameworks that shows how alive these texts remain when we ask them the right questions.
My primary focus, though, is on the vocabulary and terms themselves. The working language of the Poetics that writers and readers continue to use every day, often quite vaguely. So much of what we say about poetry, we've inherited from Aristotle through centuries of transmission and reshaping, and I think there's real value in excavating that vocabulary to understand what we actually mean when we deploy these terms. You're right that I won't be attempting to apply Aristotle's dramatic categories to lyric work; that would be a category error. But the philosophical and theoretical scaffolding beneath those terms, the way he thinks about language and form and pleasure and effect, seems worth examining even as poetry's purpose has shifted its lenses so radically across the centuries.
I think this is why we continue to read those who came before us. The purpose has shifted, yes, but the essential work of honing our craft through reading, study, and writing remains imperative. We stand in a conversation with Aristotle, even when we're saying no to him.
Okay, that's a position I can work with. I do use Aristotle's categories in thinking about the various forms of literature, and dianoia and lexis clearly apply to lyric poetry.
I must second what Melanie said. These essays are marvelous, and I enjoy each one. I also appreciate the choice to structure them around terminology, because clarifying terms is a great way to elucidate the concepts behind them. I have been writing poetry for many years, but I have not done any formal studies in poetry, depending on the occasional article but mostly on my own observation. The result is that there are things I know which I do not know discursively, only through praxis.
This is going to sound like very odd praise, but I already knew everything in this essay; I just didn't know that I knew it until I heard you say it. It's all a bit Platonic, as in the sense that he thought that the forms of knowledge were present, inherent in people, and were recollected rather than learned. Thus "education" comes from "educe," to draw out, not to teach. So thank you for the education. The inner understanding precedes words, but they bring it to birth.
Aside: I contribute to a humor page elsewhere, and one day I decided to write a long post defining the precise differences and relations between parody, lampoon, pastiche, travesty, and burlesque. The response was remarkable, with quite a few people exclaiming that they never knew humor had so much theory, and some swearing that they were going to print it out and keep it. It was of course a much lesser thing than your essays on poetry; I mention it to let you know that I understand just how happy you were over Melanie's similar reaction!
And because I can't shut up when I should, two more items: I tend to think in metaphor even when not doing poetry, so my immediate reaction was to formulate your remarks in an image: the poem is a door; poetics is the carpentry which allows it to swing open. Poesia is place to which it opens.
In my other life, I do mathematics, and there is a similar relation of terms there: mathematics is the organized study of knowledge; mathesis is the knowing itself. I am always after mathesis, which can only be reached if the mathematics is done correctly, but not all correct mathematics leads to mathesis, just as not all faultlessly constructed poetry leads to poesia. This is one reason why mathematics is properly considered one of the arts, not one of the sciences.
Briefly: I saw the word “poesia” on an instagram picture the other day, and I thought…I can’t define that. All of these vocabulary items that we are all familiar with are equally as elusive to practically define. 🌻
your last paragraph has a lot of truth in it. if people realized mathematics as an art, it would fare a lot better in people's vision of what Math really is, and there is not mere calculation, analysis and logical pedantry. Thank you.
Thank you, Darius, for underlining this point. I also think people’s perception is important. A lot of people hate/fear mathematics because they’ve never seen that side of it. That in turn is because most of their teachers have also never seen it. It’s usually not until college that you can meet someone who can show you how it can be an art, unless you were very, very lucky in you earlier school, or had a brilliant neighbor (as I did).
This was an inspiring read. I need to save it somehow, so I can go through it again.