A First Measure of the New "Measure"

Happy day—the new issue of Measure has arrived! We haven't been this excited for the mail since we ordered that decoder ring from the back of Archie Comics. (That was...what, 5-7 weeks ago? It should arrive any day!) We haven’t had time to read through the entire issue carefully yet, but are looking forward to exploring (and writing about) its contents over the next couple of weeks. This one opens with six poems by Mary Jo Salter, followed by an interview with Salter conducted by Papa Baer. The issue also includes twelve finalists of the Howard Nemorov Sonnet Contest. The winner is A.M. Juster’s “No”:

No, not this time. I cannot celebrate
a man’s discarded life, and will not try;
these knee-jerk elegies perpetuate
the nightshade lies of Plath. Why glorify
Descent into a solipsistic hell?
Stop. Softly curse the waste. Don’t elevate
his suffering to genius. Never tell
me he will live on. Never call it fate.

Attend the service. Mourn. Pray. Comfort those
he lacerated. Keep him in your heart,
but use that grief to teach. When you compose
a line, it is a message, not just art.
Be furious with me, but I refuse
to praise him. No, we have too much to lose.

Frederick Turner’s introductory note to the poem—and what he calls the poem's “searing denials, its noble ethical ruthlessness barley suppressing its grief and denials, its noble ethical ruthlessness barely suppressing its grief and pity”—captures the poem’s moral force and critical relevance:

The absolute naturalness and idiomatic force of its dramatic monologue is perfectly constrained within the form—not a beat is missed—just as the love the speaker has for the suicide is constrained by the terrible Dantean judgment the speaker must recognize. The poem…reminds us that art—even art as great as Sylvia Plath’s—is also irreducibly a message, with the responsibilities of any message. The poem is then an important critical document, rebuffing both the moral relativism and sentimentality of much contemporary literature and the shallow aestheticism of some of its critics.

Formal excellence, “Dantean judgment,” and moral seriousness—a Mahwahvian’s dream!

By the way, here’s subscription information for Measure. The price is right, and the editors have announced that they will now be publishing two issues a year. And here’s information about this year’s Nemerov Sonnet contest, judged by Timothy Steele.

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The English Language Is In a Bad Way

Note to Self: add Ian Robinson's Untied Kingdom to Self's summer reading list. Self likes what he learned in B.R. Myers's recent review in The Atlantic. According to Myers, Robinson writes that the U.K. "has 'lost its mind, a state that prevents it from taking anything seriously.'" Robinson associates this state with what Myers calls "the spread of careless language" debasing our culture and politics. Robinson, who has harshly criticized recent translations of the Bible, associates the decline of language with the dire state of religion in England. But even Myers, who wishes that "Robinson had made a little less of his faith in this book," concludes that "when it warns against slovenly language, the voice of faith sounds to this heathen ear a lot like the voice of reason." Self, this is remarkable -- faith and reason NEVER agree!

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Fanny's Blog

As we all know, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, essays, and letters stand among the greatest achievements in twentieth-century American literature. Unfortunately, these works over-shadow her contributions to the blogosphere. Enjoy.

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Wordsworth's Legacy

I too have found some thoughts originally intended to be a comment grow to a greater length, so let me go ahead and post them here. I think the topic merits the extended discussion; the influence of Romanticism is still very much with us, and we will be well served as writers to recognize which aspects of that influence are beneficial, and which are otherwise.

I think there is considerable agreement here. I share C. Seamus' love of Wordsworth's poetry; in fact, he is one of the few Romantics whose work I appreciate more, rather than less, as I get older. I agree that all young poets working in English should put themselves to school with his craft at some point in their development. Likewise, I agree that his efforts towards a revival of the ballad form were an invaluable enrichment of the formal repertoire of English poetry, an enrichment which had its origins in a reverence for tradition. I am not trying to form an estimate of Wordsworth's accomplishments as a poet, which I think were tremendous; I am trying to discern what elements of his legacy may bear a disadvantageous sway over contemporary poetry. Great artists leaving dangerous precedents are a common phenomenon. Think about Milton; his style has proven to be both sublime and inimitable, and the eighteenth century is littered with unintentional parodies of the Miltonic tone, from Young to Thomson to Akenside. Or, in another art, consider Beethoven; his undeniable masterpieces are in large part a consequence of his expressive innovations, but by the time we get to the narcotizing moodiness of Debussy and Mahler, we wonder if it was not time for Western music to put Beethoven's expressivity aside and search for models elsewhere. I think Wordsworth's legacy may be something like this.

I mentioned parenthetically the discrepancy between Wordsworth's theory and his practice, and of course, I should have considered this fact at greater length. It is the theory I find much more pernicious, and the poetry is most excellent, I think, precisely where it departs from the theory, which is, as Coleridge asserted, in "two-thirds at least of the marked beauties." The unhealthy legacy of Wordsworth's actual compositions, I think, is in his very frequent thematic choice of "incidents and situations from common life." I have no objection to this kind of poem in and of itself, but I find this mode of writing has arisen to monotonous exclusivity in our times, and often with some very ridiculous results; after all, to find the "unusual aspect" in commonplace things takes an unusual mind on the level of Wordsworth. Put simply, I think a distinct lack of variety in contemporary verse can be traced to Wordsworth's compelling precedence, which is, of course, no indictment of Wordsworth himself; in this respect, to imitate Wordsworth is certainly not to imitate Wordsworth.

As I said, it is Wordsworth's theories with which I take the greater issue, and I think the considerable disregard for them displayed in his own compositions tells against these ideas quite a bit. Throughout the Preface, I perceive a continuous opposition of what is "natural" and "spontaneous" and "simple" to what is merely the effect of "false refinement." The passage quoted by C. Seamus from the Appendix seems to imply a kind of literary Rousseauism, according to which ancient poets wrote from a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" which their corrupt descendants could only imitate with insincere tropes. Poetic traditions necessarily decline as they continue. This subtle primitivism, neglectful of the grand dictum of Burke, that "art is man's nature," is what I mean by an "embarrassment at art" and "suspicion of artistry."

In his Preface, Wordsworth states, "if my conclusions are admitted, and carried as far as they must be carried if admitted at all, our judgments concerning the works of the greatest Poets both ancient and modern will be far different from what they are at present, both when we praise and when we censure." This appears to me to be identical to the claim that, recognizing his principles cannot be reconciled to the practice of many acknowledged masters, Wordsworth has chosen to prefer his principles to the precedent of those acknowledged masters. This is what I mean by a "hostility to tradition."

I agree that these words could be interpreted as C. Seamus did. Coleridge himself tried to interpret the seeming hostility to tradition in Wordsworth's claim as a specific challenge to neo-classicism, "the gaudy affectations of a style which passed too current with too many for poetic diction." But I think its fair to say that they could be interpreted far differently as well; the choice here between Coleridge and Wordsworth may be less a choice between who is right and who is wrong, as opposed to a choice between who is clear on these topics and who is ambiguous.

The question is, which reading of Wordsworth, with which influence, has passed into our time, and again, I think it is fair to say that it is the reading of Wordsworth which I put forward in my first post which has prevailed, the Wordsworth who emphasized the commonplace and the commonplace language, in defiance of poetic tradition. The animus to tradition in modern poetry hardly needs to be argued for. The commonplace, as I said, is so frequently recurring in contemporary poetry as to seem (to myself at least) rather tedious. The commonplace language, devoid of tropical and figurative effect, predominates.

Of course, there is not space enough here to produce samples as evidence, and I am speaking from a general impression of contemporary poetry, but let me cite one example of contemporary criticism, from a source familiar to C. Seamus, the Reaper Essays. In the essay "The Death of the Lyric," one of the points of culpability of the contemporary lyric (which, unquestionably, is culpable in many, many respects) in the eyes of the author is the fact that "they do not remotely sound like the words that real people in real situations would ever say." Doesn't this at least sound like the remnant influence of Wordsworth's most dubious tendencies?

Now, I think one response to this statement is the response which Coleridge essentially made - neither Pindar nor Virgil nor Petrarch nor Spenser nor Keats nor Tennyson "sound like the words that real people in real situations would ever say." This is just not a standard which can fairly be derived from even the most cursory reading of the masters. And this was my point in preferring Coleridge’s revolution. If we find contemporary poetry stagnant and unsatisfactory, and if we as writers wish to create really excellent works, a reconsideration of Coleridge and the principles upon which he wrote (and C. Seamus is right that I am focusing here only on one part of his work, but I think it is the better part) will be wonderfully beneficial towards guiding us out of the present morass. Particularly, his compelling critique of those tendencies in Wordsworth's ideas which are still quite prevalent will serve to remind us that present canons of taste may not always have the greater part of truth in them.

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How Wordsworth Helps

We were originally going to post this as a comment to Signor L.E.’s recent post about Romantic poetry, until it grew into a post of its own. Long story short, we disagree with much of what our fellow Mahwahvian says about the value of Wordsworth’s poetry.

It is true that a lot of contemporary poetry is too much like Wordsworth at his most solipsistic. While “Tintern Abbey” is one of our absolute favorite poems, and we love The Prelude, it would be nice if contemporary poets moved outside of their own minds to explore other lives and other minds. But many of Wordsworth’s poems were narratives about extraordinary events of ordinary people (that is to say, common and rural rather than aristocratic and urban), such as “The Idiot Boy,” “The Thorn,” “Goody Blake” (just to name a few from Lyrical Ballads), and modern readers tend to overlook major, un-personal efforts like Ecclesiastical Sketches (a sonnet series about the history of Christianity in Britain) and The White Doe of Rylestone. (And it’s also worth noting that his most insular work, The Prelude, was never published in his lifetime.)

Most importantly, it’s not fair to say that Wordsworth expressed “embarrassment at art,” that he was “hostile to the [tenets] which had prevailed in the Western tradition from its beginning,” or that he was suspicious of “artistry in all its forms.” Wordsworth displays strict artistic discipline, and there’s nobody better to look to as a model for formal craftsmanship and artistry in blank verse, the sonnet, and the ballad. In fact, one of the central purposes of the Lyrical Ballads (as the title suggests) was to revive the ballad, which was of course an ancient medieval form, by incorporating lyrical elements to varying degrees. So, in at least that case, he was trying to bring new life to a Western tradition.

The sort of artistry Wordsworth was attacking was narrow and well-defined. He was not challenging all artifice but what he called “poetic diction,” or “the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers.” He explains this in an appendix to the Preface of Lyrical Ballads:

The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring, and figurative. In succeeding times, Poets, and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of these figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connexion whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially from the real language of men in any situation.

He concedes “that the language of the earliest Poets was felt to differ materially from ordinary language, because it was the language of extraordinary occasions; but it was really spoken by men, language which the Poet himself had uttered when he had been affected by the events which he described, or which he had heard uttered by those around him.” He also acknowledges that the earliest poets added “metre of some sort or other” (which he of course does himself) which “separated the genuine language of Poetry still further from common life, so that whoever read or heard the poems of these earliest Poets felt himself moved in a way in which he had not been accustomed to be moved in real life, and by causes manifestly different from those which acted upon him in real life.”

He also approves of that distance between the poetic and the common, but also calls it the “great temptation to all the corruptions which have followed: under the protection of this feeling succeeding Poets constructed a phraseology which had one thing, it is true, in common with the genuine language of poetry, namely, that it was not heard in ordinary conversation; that it was unusual. But the first Poets, as I have said, spake a language which, though unusual, was still the language of men. This circumstance, however, was disregarded by their successors; they found that they could please by easier means: they became proud of modes of expression which they themselves had invented, and which were uttered only by themselves.”

Put more simply, Wordsworth was annoyed with the clichéd phrases and abstractions that populated eighteenth-century poetry especially. One can prefer the more abstract and artificial (in the negative sense) style Wordsworth was resisting, but he certainly was not throwing out centuries of English poetry with the bathwater.

One last thing. While Coleridge’s most famous poems (Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Kubla Khan,” and Cristabel) are supernatural or dream-like, much of his poetry was very much like what Wordsworth was writing at the same time, both in subject matter and form. His conversation poems (“The Aeolian Harp” and “Frost at Midnight” are my favorites) and “Dejection: An Ode” are very personal and, while metaphysical in some regards, are certainly not supernatural tales.

We say all that to say all this: Mahwahvian poets should look to Wordsworth as a model, because his technique was superb, he understood the power of poetic tradition—and wasn’t afraid to reject what was false and phony in fashionable poetry. His arguments about poetic language are still important, especially for younger poets, who tend to resort to abstractions and stock phrases. Nor would it hurt us to emulate the variety of his subject matter and style, as he explored not only his own consciousness in exciting ways through his lyric poems, but also presented the lives of other people, and evokes powerful emotions, through his narratives.

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"The Ballad Rode Into Town"

As long as we're posting about ballads...Here's one by the Godfather of Mahwah himself, Dr. Baer.

“The Ballad Rode Into Town”

The ballad rode into town one day,
wearing his deadly gun,
and his Mexican spurs jingled along
in the heat of the mid-day sun.

He wore his blacks, he wore his boots,
he wore a Colt on his hip,
with a re-bored barrel, its trigger filed,
and a custom black-butt grip.

He’d come across the desert heats,
like Dante through his hell,
over the mesas, day and night,
through the sage and the chaparral.

Right up the only street in town,
he and his Morgan came,
as the free-verse rummies scattered,
and slithered away in shame.

But at the saloon, the rondels came out,
with the pretty villanelle,
“Now, that's what I would call a man—
a man with a story to tell.”

And even the gambler couplet agreed,
“That's a mighty heroic chap,
who'll face them alone, and fire his Colt,
with the crack of a thunderclap.”

They followed him past the Sheriff's door,
abandoned back in June,
then passed the burned-out Weekly Press,
in the silent afternoon.

The ballad rode into town that day,
wearing his deadly gun,
and his Mexican spurs jingled along
in the heat of the mid-day sun.

He rode his Morgan up the street,
and stopped at the only birch,
where all the decent blank-verse folk
were coming out of church.

“Where is she?” he said and waited,
under the Texas skies.
“I'm here!” the lovely sonnet called,
and lit up the rider’s eyes.

“They've terrorized this western town,
and bullied us all, my dear.
So set things right and proper,
then take me away from here.”

Right then, the critics gang rode up,
a motley crew of thugs,
with .38s and rifles cocked
with lethal dum-dum slugs.

Quickly, the fearful crowd dispersed,
to hide and watch and wait;
the gang boss sneered, “Any last words?”
as he aimed his .38.

But the ballad blew a bullet hole
right through the de-con's eye,
and dropped the freud and marxist crits,
and then the gender guy.

There were, when his chambers were empty,
six dead in the Texas heat;
there were, when he holstered his .45,
six thugs on the dusty street.

And when the celebration peaked,
Miss Sonnet reappeared,
and she and her man rode off to the west,
and even the rummies cheered.

So the ballad rode out of town that day,
still wearing his deadly gun,
and his Mexican spurs jingled along
in the heat of the mid-day sun.

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Two Romantic Revolutions

I have been covering the Romantic period with my class over the last few weeks, and consequently, have been spending a good deal of time thinking about the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge. And since I know the literature of this period is a matter of special interest and expertise to at least one member of the Review's illustrious staff, I thought a few reflections on these two authors might be of interest here.

The publication of the Lyrical Ballads is recognized, I think, as the most revolutionary event in the history of English poetry. That revolution was almost entirely of Wordsworth's making; that is to say, the principles of taste which have arisen to precedence since the publication of that book were drawn from Wordsworth's work, both from his poetry and his theoretical musings in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (I am ignoring for now the very real inconsistencies between the two). Some of the most famous of these principles are the well-known focus on "incidents and situations from common life," a preference for the "language really used by men," and a general suspicion of artistry in all of its forms.

But we should remind ourselves that another, and very different, revolution was undertaken by Coleridge, both in the poems he published in the Lyrical Ballads, and in his own critical reflections later presented in the Biographia Literaria. It is interesting to note one place where he and Wordsworth concurred; they both agreed that the tenets laid down by Wordsworth in his Preface were radically hostile to the ones which had prevailed in the Western tradition from its beginning. For Wordsworth, this was cause enough to reevaluate that whole tradition, including the work of many long acknowledged masters; for Coleridge, this was self-evident proof that these principles were themselves inadequate.

Coleridge's revolution was specifically against the stultified mannerism of late neo-classicism, but it took the form of an appeal to the long tradition of poetry preceding the neo-classical period; in this sense, it was more a reform than a revolution. The masters to whom Coleridge appealed "placed the essence of poetry in the art," who aimed at an "exquisite polish of the diction." The language they used had a greater affinity with the language of the philosophers than the language of the common man. His own great contribution to the Lyrical Ballads, the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," is unquestionably one of the most artificial - in the true sense of the term - works in the entire history of English poetry.

Over the last two centuries, it is Wordsworth's revolution that has carried the day. True to his boast, he has indeed established the taste by which not only his own works, but, to a great extent, all poetic works, are judged. The contempt for artistic tradition, implicit in Wordsworth's theory, has become overt and prominent in the modern age. The language of ordinary life is the only language employed by contemporary poets; an "exquisite polish of diction" would be regarded now as something merely archaic or pretentious. The embarrassment at art expressed by Wordsworth can still be recognized in the lack of stylistic effect so common in contemporary poetry; the death of rhetoric has been both a cause and an effect of this figurative deprivation. The concern with the quotidian remains central; the latest click on the Eratosphere reveals poems written on the following, very mundane topics: the poet's backyard, the poet's driveway, a pigeon, aftershave, garbage floating in the ocean, a dog burying a bone, and (believe it or not) sheet protectors.

But if we want to restore poetry to a flourishing condition, we might want to consider reviving Coleridge's revolution instead, and seek, as he sought, a poetry of rich artistry, with all the freedom that such artistry bestows; a poetry which does not flatter the reader with a familiar language or thematic content, but which attempts to elevate the mind of the reader through extraordinary language and extraordinary insight; a poetry, above all things, formed and directed by the same principles which have formed and directed the tradition of Western poetry, and the works of the incomparable masters so plentiful in that tradition.

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