Form and Essence in Poetry

Literary expression, judged by its highest requirements, does not admit of hard and fast distinctions such as prose and poetry. The very peak of poetic excellence has been attained in some of the masterpieces of prose, and some of the academically accredited works of poetry have been found to be destitute of all creative passion. The existence of the two extremes, and various grades in between, is sufficient proof that literary forms such as prose and poetry have no intrinsic and pre-ordained specificity in themselves. The only criteria of literary excellence are the vitality, the significance and the concreteness of experience sought to be expressed, communicated or evoked in the mind of the reader. There is a generic unity between both forms of literary expression. The medium of poetry holds out nothing new and strange which the medium of prose is not capable of. The excitement of writing poetry is comparable to the excitement of writing prose, drama or narrative or even a scientific or philosophical treatise, for the excitement could only mean, after all, the vital absorption, creative fervour and zest of self-expression which are the attributes of not only minds with a fascination for the verse-form but of all original, sincere and effective authorship. That poetry is the highest form of self-expression and that a supreme masterpiece of poetry is intrinsically greater than a supreme masterpiece of prose are the crazy notions of a coterie of literary dilettantes who have developed a lopsided infatuation for the metrical structure of poetry.

A basic confusion prevails in current discussions in respect of the form and essence of poetry. Modernist truancies from conventional poetics have caused not a little inquietude in the minds of the protagonists of traditionism. The late John Drink-water, playwright, poet and critic, has recorded, in his last work¹ published after his death, the impressions that English poetry has made on a mind to which poetry has meant the natural habit of a lifetime. It is full of valuable comments, and all through suffused with a passionate appreciation of poetry as gloriously embodied in the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Wordsworth, Keats and Arnold. But in his treatment of the ‘Nature and Function of Poetry’ Drinkwater’s perception loses its moorings and enters into snags uncontrollably.

"With some majestic passages in prose in mind, it cannot be asserted out of hand that the apocalyptic speech of poetry must of necessity assume the metrical pattern of verse, but the fact is that it almost invariably does so. The exalted mood of poetry turns naturally to the formal rhythms of verse that have been beating in the minds of men though the ages. Difficult as this may be to explain, it is impossible to explain it away. For the practical purposes of discussion, poetry and verse, while they are not synonymous, may be taken to be inseparable, and when I speak of poetry the vehicle of verse is implied."

Thus observes Drinkwater in discussing Poetry. His criticism wavers between a half-hearted recognition of prose as a medium of literary expression quite on a par with poetry and an unjustifiable bias towards the pattern of verse which he gradually erects into an impersonal and inevitable truth when he says that poetry implies verse. Poetry and verse have long been associated with each other down the ages of cultural tradition such that what originated as an incidental embellishment has come to stay as a vital characteristic. For centuries verse has been the form in which both dramas and stories continued largely to be written. The natural rhythms of verse were easy aids to memory and recitation, and consequently of great survival value for literature in the ancient times. Moreover, in the infancy of human culture, poetry as couched in verse-form, music and dancing were all merged into one composite whole. As the powers of the human mind became more and more differentiated, music and dancing gradually separated out from the composite organization of poetry and established themselves as independent artistic ideals. Verse-form, which was indispensable to the poetic literature of old, lost much of its significance and suitability with the withdrawal of music and dancing from their early association with poetry. The seeming inseparability of poetry and the formal rhythms of verse is after all vestigial of their traditional association, and it is no indication that poetry implies verse. Drinkwater proceeds:

"In the works under consideration (namely ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Mayor of Casterbridge’), Milton and Hardy may be allowed to be equally master of their material, the difference lies in the nature of the material mastered. At least it is from this point of view that we must set out on our search for the solution of our problem. Superficially, Milton’s material has an appearance of being sublimer, more cosmic in character, than Hardy’s; but superficially only. On examination the homely Wessex life of Hardy’s novel is found to be as deeply rooted in what our human perception takes to be eternal verity as the heavenly hierarchies of Milton’s poem……..But the contemplation of his Wessex chronicle does not affect Hardy in the same way as the contemplation of heaven and hell affects Milton."

Drinkwater falters and fumbles in his appraisal of the true distinction between ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Mayor of Casterbridge.’ By a sort of immediate intuition he lays down that the difference lies in the nature of the material mastered, allowing Milton and Hardy to be equally master of their material. But the next moment he inverts the whole framework of .his thought when he declares that the nature of the material mastered is the same in both, but the difference lies in the nature of the mastery over the material. For it is the only meaning that could be read into his assertion that the contemplation of Hardy’s Wessex chronicle does not affect Hardy in the same way as the contemplation of heaven and hell affects Milton.

We are faced again with a critical indiscretion when Drinkwater writes, "The four or five hundred lines of ‘Michael’ taken as a whole, are a notable indication of Wordsworth’s poetical theory. That theory, however, includes the startling assertion that ‘there neither is, nor can be, any ‘essential’ difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.’ When a great poet says something about his art that seems to be strangely wide of the mark, we confidently expect that he will somehow explain himself, and sure enough, within a few lines, Wordsworth is stipulating that the poet in making ‘a selection of language really spoken by men’ must make it with ‘true taste and feeling’ such as will ‘entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life.’ Here then, after all, is surely the essential difference which Wordsworth himself underlines." Drinkwater seems to grow panicky over Wordsworth’s disturbing pronouncement and seeks to assuage himself by twisting to his own advantage the significance of Wordsworth’s later stipulation. He artfully evades the import of the Wordsworthian argument by setting Wordsworth against himself. He has damaged his artistic conscience by attributing to Wordsworth the predilections and prejudices that cloud his own perception. The subtle hint that Wordsworth has explained the essential difference between prose and poetry by linking prose with the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life and associating poetry with true taste and feeling is as mischievous as it is nonsensical.

Drinkwater stands without a rival in his skill in exalting the palpably simple into the inscrutably obscure. A quotation will prove it true. "Verse has a life of its own which cannot be explained by reference simply to its literal meaning or its diction or its cadence. In my book on Shakespeare I claimed that his verse was in itself a sovran element of his drama, and Lytton Strachey in his essay on Pope pointed out that, beyond his intellect and wit, his command of the Heroic Couplet was the secret of his genius. Verse, in other words, is not merely a way of saying something, it is itself something said. Verse, and I mean good verse, since, in our reckoning, bad verse is a contradiction in terms, has its own integrity in literature as surely as light upon a landscape has in nature." Drinkwater’s theory of verse is couched in such seductive language that it compels emotional assent at the cost of intellectual clarity. Verse shorn of its concrete aspects such as its literal meaning, diction, cadence and rhyme is a vacuous inanity. It is puerile phrase-worship to refer to the peculiar excellence of verse apart from its manifest qualities. The life of the verse is derivative not inherent. It derives its existence and meaning from something other than itself, from the nature of the poetic thought it embodies. Metre, verse-pattern and rhyme were the natural accent in which Dryden and Pope voiced their peculiar sense of life. But the same became a hampering restriction to the poets of the Romantic Movement and increasingly so to the poets of our own age, the two greatest of them being D. H. Lawrence and Walt Whitman. After all, verse-pattern is a mere convenience and a poet is at perfect liberty to adopt or reject it according as he finds it salutary or detrimental to his sincere interests. Verse is as much a way of saying something as letter-form or the essay. Lytton Strachey, in his reference to the Heroic Couplet, elucidates the secret of Pope’s genuis in having been able to command that particular verse-pattern which, in combination with an intellect and wit of his compass, epitomized the age in which he had his being. The elaborate and leisured civilization of the 18th century discovered its appropriate instrument in the Heroic Couplet, so much so the uniqueness of the Heroic Couplet is not something of its own but is the reflection of the spirit of the age. The landscape of poetic literature is the variegated experience of mankind; the light that irradiates it is the light of one’s sensibilities, and if at all rhymed verse has any role in poetic literature it is that of a pair of garden-shears stunting the shooting tendrils of human emotion into a thick-set conformity to a prescribed pattern. No doubt the metallic click of the implement affords the rhythm of the whole process.

Drinkwater sets himself not only against the departure of the moderns from the strict rectitude of poetic form but also against their imagery. For instance, he considers the image of T. S. Eliot–

‘Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table’–

as simple-minded nonsense. He calls it striking, adroit, but also upstart and fugitive. The image of Wordsworth that the evening was ‘breathless with adoration as a nun’ gives him supreme satisfaction as an image that would never tarnish. The image of T. S. Eliot is a typical example of not simple-minded nonsense but up-to-date sense. The impression of it being up-start and fugitive is the result of the mental distance between the poet and the critic, the poet voicing the culture of the age, and the critic remaining an antique stick-in-the-mud unwilling to assimilate the knowledge and experience of contemporary existence. "What will have become of it two hundred years hence when its novelty has gone and its meaning has probably long been out of date," questions Drinkwater. The answer is simple. The arresting novelty will abate into a sober plainness and, as time rolls on, the image may become mythical and obsolete, yielding place to newer ones. But what then? This is the natural end of all images originating from and participating in the prevailing cultural context, and no imagery other than the basically sensuous connected with the human personality and the sublimely wonderful connected with external nature can circumvent this lot. When Wordsworth says that the evening was breathless with adoration as a nun, the image he uses obviously comes under the category of these drawn from socio-religious context. A nun is no natural object as a mossy rock in the glen or a narcissus on the river-edge, nor an unmistakable sensuous impression as the thrill of a kiss or the sweetness of a rose. If not in two hundred years atleast within twice that time, the self-same doom may overtake this image too. But if the effect of the Wordsworthian image seems to be mightier than that of the image of T. S. Eliot, it is for reasons other than the foregoing. The emotion which Wordsworth seeks to arouse is the familiar one of reverential wonder. The atmosphere Eliot strives to create is of a cosmic coma at once placid and ominous. Both images are well-conceived so far as their pure art value goes, for both of them tend to communicate absolutely sincere apprehensions of what were most real to the poets, each in its own style. But the image of Wordsworth indicates mystical religiosity while that of Eliot signalises intellectual disillusionment. Hence the apparent sublimity of Wordsworth and the simple-mindedness of Eliot.

That Drinkwater has not progressed beyond the schoolboy notions of Rhyme is the impression one gets on being faced with such metaphysical flummery as this:

"And here, I think, we come up on the obscurest but nevertheless the profoundest secret of rhyme as a figure in poetry. In the evolution of language as used by the masters, words have fallen into groups in which wide extremes have been brought into fundamental correspondence. For this, as for most of the larger intepretations of life, the poets are chiefly responsible. ‘Death-breath,’ ‘cease-peace,’ ‘rest-best,’ ‘earth-birth,’ ‘lost-cost’……why are these and an infinity of other rhyming couples found, through six centuries of English poetry, in endlessly well-matched union? It cannot be attributed to accident. Nor will any law of averages account for it. There is only one explanation, which is that in the evolution of experience to the mould of words, the mind of man has been constantly inspired to an alchemic subtlety of associative sound.……‘Time- Rhyme’: there is no literal affinity between the two words, and yet as we hear or read them here they are united in our minds by something more than similarity of sound. Used thus in conjunction each acquires for the other an associative meaning which is drawn from the unsearchable mines of our linguistic knowledge."

This is nothing short of crass wish-fulfillment. The language of Drinkwater works like an incantation and the most incompetent of his deductions scintillate with the light of well-conceived truth. The role of rhyme in poetry, its ambit and limitations have never been so ably put forth as by Milton in his note on the verse of ‘Paradise Lost’:

"The measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek and of Virgil in Latin; Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of poem or good Verse, in longer works, especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set of wretched matter and lame Meeter……Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected Rime both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English Tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious eares, triveal and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllabus, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned Ancient both in poetry and all good Oratory."

Drinkwater dismisses the argument of Milton as so much rubbish. It was Bernard Shaw, I remember, who made the brilliant observation that the quantity of truth the average man can bear is still very small and that every increase of the dose is met by piteous protests. The modicum of truth that Drinkwater could bear with ease is very little indeed and the Miltonic overdose has upset his understanding. Poetry is antecedent to Rhyme and sure to outlive it. The persistent habit of rhymesters has perpetuated it as a traditional observance. There is no mystery attached to the existence of rhymed couples of words, for their existence inevitably follows from the fact that the poets have been so faithfully following the traditional practice of pairing words off like endings and utilising them suitably in the structural pattern of poetry. The words do not pair off in rhyme by an inner affinity of meaning as chemical elements combine by an alliance of atoms. The words rhyme for the simple reason that they are deliberately assorted to be what they are desired by the poets to be. There is no inspiration to an alchemic subtlety of associative sound’ but the ordinary craving for rhyming words. The elan of poetry takes precedence over the rules of rhyme and verse, and the rigidity of established moulds must wait upon the creative urge of the individual poet. Herbert Read, in his study of Gerard Manley Hopkins, says:

"The terrible sincerity of the process of Hopkins’s thought inevitably led him to an originality of expression which rejected the ready-made counters of contemporary poetics. His originality in this respect is both verbal and metrical, and perhaps the innovations he introduced into meter prevent more than anything else the appreciation of his poetry. Except for a few early poems, which need not be taken into account, practically every poem written by Hopkins presents rhythmical irregularities."

And Hopkins is no mean poet. The correspondence of Hopkins reveals revolutionary conceptions of poetic measure, a challenge to the tradition of running rhythm. Drinkwater forgets that the essence of great poetry is deeper than all the subterfuges of art-form; and it is bad taste to make a fetish of a formal element, to propound a theory of that fetish, and to make a natural law of that theory, destined to govern the creation of poetry.

Drinkwater holds that poetic energy is the rarest and highest manifestation of intellectual power and defines it as the profound emotional sensitiveness to material as distinct from profound intellectual control of material, the capacity for ordering great masses of detail into a whole of finely-balanced and duly related proportions. From the fact that the word ‘material’ stands unspecified in the definition, we have to take for granted that ‘material’ refers to the entire experience of mankind with-out stint or reservation. If we survey the vast range of poetry we come to recognise that there is not one shred of human experience that cannot be treated poetically. The essence of poetry is the mood not the material, the glow of experience not merely the experience itself. Human experience, whatever it may be, abstract metaphyical speculation, religious ardour, moral insight, social conscience, heroism of action, sordid lusts, genial trivialities, amiable follies, wild fantasies and what not, could be lit up by emotional fire into poetry of the purest order. Drinkwater is under the fallacious impression that energy of intellectual control of material is second to poetical energy. An analysis will aid in correcting it. Poetic energy is only one mode of that whole category of human energy devoted towards the attainment of that plenitude of awareness of experience in all its variety, extensiveness, intricacy and depth, the end being nothing but mere delight in the awareness itself. Energy of intellectual control of material is quite another category of human energy, employed in the rational correlation of the data of consciousness, a comprehension of reality as manifested in the domains of Matter and Mind, the end being not mere delighted contemplation of experience but a rational comprehension of reality. Therefore, to set poetic energy on a higher level than that of profound intellectual control of material is an error of judgment born of a confusion of categories. If we do not rid our thought of this confusion, we have to commit ourselves to monstrous absurdities such as the supremacy of emotion over reason, sensibility over ratiocination, and poetry over natural philosophy.

There is an irrepressible tendency in Drinkwater’s trend of criticism towards establishing the sovereignty of poetic form over every other literary technique and thus win for it an undeserved hegemony over the domain of letters. Poetry is not the only literature. There are the Drama, the Essay, the Novel, Biography, History and Oratory, Humoristic and Humanistic literature. If the essence of poetry be mood and not form, then any literary form may be suitable for embodying poetical feeling. Lawrence hit the nail quite on the head when he wrote:

"The most superb mystery we have hardly recognized: the immediate, instant self. The quick of all time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self. Poetry gave us the clue: free verse…..In free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment……It is the instant; the quick; the very jetting source of all will-be and has-been. The utterance is like a spasm, naked contact with all influences at once. It does not want to get anywhere. It just takes place."

The very utterance of Lawrence is pulsatingly poetical; it is "like a spasm, naked contact with all influences" of poetry. The truth is that literary techniques are tools which the masters of self-expression always alter in adapting them to their best service.

Ruskin’s moral fervour is not any the less memorable than Wordsworth’s for Ruskin revelled in prose and Wordsworth wrote in rhyme. The pantheism of Wordsworth can only come up to the pantheism of Thoreau though Wordsworth voiced it in verse and Thoreau in simple prose. "Madame Bovary" and "The Divine Comedy" impress the mind with equal power and significance though Flaubert was a stylist in prose and Dante a master of verse. Havelock Ellis confessed to have felt a cadence, to thrill along the nerves, in that sentence of Temple:

"When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."

Lord Morley felt the breath of poetic inspiration in Carlyle’s description of the bloody horrors that followed the fall of the Bastille in 1789:

"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on balls at the Orangerie at Versailles, where high-rouged dames of the palace are even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar officers;–and also on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hotel de Ville!"

But these passages shall not be called poetry, so the critics say, for there is no ‘alchemic subtlety of associative sound’ manifest in rhythmic termination, and Temple and Carlyle shall rest satisfied that they have at best managed to embody poetic thought in prose!

1 "English Poetry–An Unfinished History" Methuen, 1938.