Fragments of a New Essay

Tom Bredehoft

     Our sons their fathers’ failing language see,
     And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be,
     And Wycherly and Congreve, Behn and Scrope,
     Shall prove as fallible as any Pope.

It’s a project I don’t know if I even want to see to completion: a modern sort of Essay on Criticism in a verse style I might hope that Pope himself could approve of. It’s a file on my computer named “Popery,” and I turn to it, now and again, when I’m bored, when I’m frustrated with some aspect of what I see in criticism, when I want to entertain myself or test my skills as a versifier. It has been a kind of private amusement, and I greeted the appearance of Creative-Critical’s “Verse Criticism” sub-heading with delight and trepidation. Do I really want my private amusement to be public?
     And yet I am certain that there are pleasures in regulated, metered verse that no other textual form I know can attempt.

     How long it’s been since Alexander Pope
     So clearly wrote of criticism’s scope!
     An update, then, has long been overdue,
     And criticism is much changèd, too,
     Which opens space for new interpretations
     And new ideas, new considerations.
     New follies, too, have grown up all too fast—
     As many fools today, as in the past!—
     So many one can’t catalogue the lot,
     Don’t blame me if there’s some I have forgot.

One of those pleasures, I am convinced, is humor—or at least delight. More than a mere potential for humor, I think that rhyme in particular works by linking sound and sense. A poet may reach for rhymes primarily for their sound, but the very best ones (rhymes? or poets?) evoke some slanting semantic sense that often can catch us off guard. The shock of surprise that might result can be the very essence of humor. And if humor is not wanted—in, say, a serious poem on a serious subject—the effect can still be delightful. A poem may move me to tears, rather than laughter—but I am (perhaps in retrospect) almost always delighted to have been moved.

     Now Jakobson’s “Linguistics and Poetics”
     Has much to teach of poetry’s aesthetics;
     For definitions, one could do much worse
     Than what he gives us there regarding verse:
     Recurring sonal figures must define
     All verse, whatever’s used t’adorn the line:
     Alliteration, rhythm, silence, rhyme.
     (On this, do note, is Hopkins Jakobson’s source;
     And well acknowledged, as is right, of course.)
     Repeating figures, then, are all the rule,
     No meter’s scanned by any other tool.

     Thus verse without a meter seems but prose,
     Delightful to the eye as any rose,
     And laden with an author’s words and sense,
     Yet lacking all the virtues of its scents.
     Unmetered poems, undisciplined, lacking measures,
     Refuse to offer one of verse’s pleasures.
     The echoings of words that poets rhyme,
     Says Jakobson, produce effects that chime,
     Linking like-sounding words with echoed meanings
     Like kernels drawn from roots by poets’ gleanings,
     Semantic webs, acoustic, morphologic,
     Anchor all words by differential logic,
     Their sounds and meanings not some mere convention,
     But stretched and crowded by Saussurian tension,
     So one cant word evokes the whole thieves’ argot,
     The lot set thrumming, though th’arrow strikes one target;
     And thus do Spoonerisms and Freudian slips
     Emerge from unintending speakers’ lips:
     Aiming to speak our meaning every time
     Out comes a lass, a rantonym, a crime.

One doubts that my Essay fragments will move anyone to tears, unless they are tears of frustration. But surely humor and surprise might have a place in criticism.
     From my author’s point of view, one of the real delights in attempting an Essay on Criticism is the explicit acknowledgement that poetry can and may critique, and that the critic might be a poet, even a creative one. The artificial separation of these domains has certainly done harm; I have yet to be persuaded that it has done any good. That is not to say that every critic should also be a poet, any more than to say that every poet must also be a critic, but merely to point out that verse is a form, and criticism is a mode (or even a topic) of discourse. It is just as clearly an act of art (or artifice) to draw a boundary line between verse and criticism, as it is to perform verse critique.
     And there are good reasons why critics of verse might well be practitioners of verse. Though I now consider myself a mere former academic, when I was more active in the field of Old English studies, I was confronted by a critical problem few but poets have squarely faced: how can we tell verse from prose? In Old English, most manuscript records make no visual distinction, and there are few explicit genre labels attached to specific works. There is no contemporary ars metrica, either, no native account of verse and form.
     To its credit, my field had correctly identified Beowulf and a slew of other poems as verse, and—for poems like Beowulf—had produced an inductively derived metrical description. Unfortunately, that inductive account was then used haphazardly to include and exclude various other texts from the category of verse. A handful of meaningless labels were invented to cover difficult cases: debased verse, irregular verse, mongrel verse, rhythmical prose. In each case, the claim was more or less explicit: these kinds of things have no rules, therefore we need not approach them inductively, to see if they have rules. This was, from my perspective, a radical failure of the scientific method. Once we must fall back on the inductive method, we are required to identify the corpus of verse before ever initiating inductive description. The only way to do this, of course, is to understand clearly in our minds what the difference between verse and prose is.
     It was a freeing experience when I admitted to myself that I did not yet know the difference, though in the moment I may have uncharitably blamed some (all) of my teachers for never having taught it to me. Living in a state of unknowing was my first step toward learning.

     All poets, then, make better play or worse,
     From sound-and-meaning echoes in their verse:
     From some, we no more hear their heart’s desire,
     Than know they’ll burn with all-consuming fire.
     While others are a wholly different order,
     As Byron, Hopkins, Dylan, or Cole Porter.
     The best of poets can make an old rhyme new
     Revealing more than lesser poets do,
     “Some say the world will end in fire,” writes Frost
     Desire’s taste: destructive holocaust!
     And when one reads Frost’s mesmerizing lines,
     Transformed are all the fire/desire rhymes:
     And withered old examples in that hour
     Bloom like a new-engendered springtime flower
     All reinvigorated by Frost’s power,
     As if new liquor flowed within their veins,
     Brought back to life by warming April rains.
     The individual talent, Eliot said
     Reshapes the whole tradition, toe to head;
     Nor is that just some empty metaphor,
     But what the work of criticism’s for:
     To understand one poem, one must be
     Conversant with the world of poetry.
     No poem is an island, that’s to say,
     As well involved right now as in Donne’s day.
     If we insist a poem’s a well-wrought urn,
     To understand it shall we never learn:
     Not standing free, complete within itself,
     A poem connects to all that’s on the shelf.
     Pope may have been the genius of his age,
     But even my poor verse reshapes his page.

     And yet it seems some critics have no sense
     Of verse and prose’s basic difference,
     And they refuse to say what Ælfric writes
     Is even verse at all, and by their lights
     A term like ‘rhythmic prose’ will suit it fine,
     Though rarely do they such a term define.
     It seems to mean a kind of brilliant prose
     That has quite every feature poetry shows,
     But not quite those the Beowulf poet uses,
     Though any such distinction quite refuses
     To recognize the way that poets might
     Have more’n one way to make a poem right,
     Or that verse form could change or grow through time,
     And use alliteration and some rhyme,
     And cease to use traditional resolution,
     All by a kind of formal evolution.
     Or worse, they hint by tacit implication,
     “What difference makes it?” in this situation:
     “In prose or verse,” that is, “his words remain,
     The ways they build their meanings just the same,
     For syntax and semantics operate
     To make up sim’lar sense in either state.”
     But words in poetry echo slantingly,
     And make their meanings more enchantingly:
     Cantare is the root of incantation
     And charming magic’s poetry’s operation.
     To read around, or worse, entirely miss
     The songlike spell of verse is t’go amiss:
     No crime is worse than calling poems prose.
     No critic’s failure’s greater, I suppose,
     Than those who see poor Ælfric’s rhythmic writing
     As only prose and nothing more exciting.

Perhaps such a phrasing is too condemnatory, but I think the central claim is true. Just as criticism of comics must take care to attend not only to the words, but also to the images and panels and other structural features of the form, so too our critical responses to verse should explicitly attend to its structural features. If we’re not talking about the lines, and the rhythms, and the alliteration or rhymes or other figures of sound, are we even talking about verse?
     Magic, enchantment, humor, delight, play, and the endless striving to understand: I’d bring these all to criticism’s table, if I could.

     The rules of football make the beautiful game,
     And so with metered verse, it’s just the same:
     Without the rules, the players will become
     Mere hooligans, the match a lawless scrum.
     What generates the brilliant runs and passes,
     The moves that thrill th’assembled cheering masses?
     The offside rule it is, a plain constraint,
     That makes a hooligan into a saint.
     And “handle not the ball”: who said it fairer,
     Than Thomas Wyatt’s “Noli me tangere”?
     It’s football after all, and such a rule,
     Serves only to define the proper tool,
     By which the game’s most beautifully played,
     And with such simple rules are poems made.
     Like “lines of verse are five iambic feet,
     Each pair of lines to rhyme”: so short and sweet!
     Offsides and handballs, use them only fewly
     Or readers else will find your verse unruly,
     And play that breaks the rules is never fair,
     And casts in no good light th’offending player.
     The feet should flowingly be seen to dance,
     A pass from foot to foot no random chance,
     But something done with wit and elegance.
     Both players and audience must know the rules,
     And those who don’t are little more than fools:
     They cheer their team and know when goals are scored,
     The rest of th’play, though, leaves them merely bored.
     But those who understand the regulations
     Appreciate the subtle variations
     That make the game seem poetry in motion;
     The gap between the two is like an ocean.