Image: Paul Klee, Gespenst eines Genies (1922)

By Christopher Norris

Tommy Karshan, Gabriel Flynn and Irina Dumitrescu have very kindly invited me to initiate a new branch, section or segment of creativecritical.net devoted to the practice and discussion of verse criticism. Rather than writing a full-scale introduction to the critical verse-essay genre I’ve decided to post this extended version of a prospectus I wrote for the staff and postgraduate students when teaching this topic at a Summer School in Colorado a few years ago. I shall also put up some additional material including examples of my own work in the field which has occupied much of my writing time since retirement.

In brief: we’ll be open to submissions of critical essays in verse, prose essays on the verse-essay, discussions of the genre and its possibilities and/or limits, meta-discussions such as, for instance, an essay (verse or prose) on William Empson’s essay about Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’, or verse pieces written from the viewpoint of some real or imaginary, past or present-day poet-critic with pertinent ideas on the subject.

Do send submissions along to Dooling61 [at] gmail [dot] com and let me know where your special interests lie.

Prospectus 

1. Likely question: why revive a practice – that of the critical verse-essay – which hasn’t had much of a presence on the literary scene since its heyday in the (roughly defined) eighteenth-century Britain of poets like Pope, Dryden, and Dr. Johnson? My own reasons for taking it up around twelve years ago and producing quite a lot of them since then. A few possible reasons for the genre’s (apparent) eclipse over the past two centuries.

2. The essay: generic features. Etymology: something provisional, tentative, the opposite of a finished or self-sufficient work. Montaigne as exemplar – self-aware, sceptical, ironic, at times deflationary, investigative, open-minded, anti-dogmatic, anti-systematic, etc. Essay the opposite of the treatise. Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’ – the watchword of post-structuralism although post-structuralists (Barthes included) have mostly ignored poetry and focused on the novel.

3. Adorno on ‘The Essay as Form’. Non-dialectical (or negative-dialectical?). Role of the essay in Adorno’s work and broader question of the relationship between essay-writing and speculative (as opposed to large-scale system-building) philosophy or criticism. Verse-essays most often share this characteristic although there are some seeming exceptions to this general rule, e.g., Lucretius who writes at great length and expounds a pretty substantive body of doctrine. But recent scholars like David Sedley have shown how complex is the play of conflicting or ambiguous ideas and attitudes behind that appearance.

4. Romanticism and Modernism: anti-discursive genres where the main emphasis falls on metaphor, image, autotelic form, doctrines involving a radical distinction between prose and poetry, reason and intuition/imagination, allegory and symbol, metonymy and metaphor, etc. Some key thinkers here: Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, the American New Critics. But worth noting the conceptual tensions in their writing – those distinctions turn out to be less stable or rigorous than doctrinally required. 

5. Examples of that tension and the way it is negotiated in and through the essay-form, whether in prose or verse. Coleridge (Conversation Poems, ‘Dejection’ Ode, verse and prose fragments, episodic character of Biographia Literaria). German Romanticism – the Jena school (Friedrich and August-Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis) – again, cult of the fragment. Opposition to systematic philosophy (Kant and Hegel). Irony as a main preoccupation, especially Schlegel’s idea of ‘Romantic irony’ (infinite or ‘abysmal’, as distinct from ‘stable’). Keats on ‘negative capability’ – includes (if not synonymous with) the ironic capacity to stand back and critically examine one’s own ideas or feelings.

6) But again: why the verse-essay? What could be the advantages of adopting a verse-form to make the kinds of statement or put the sorts of argument that would normally be addressed in prose? Possible answers:

i. Concision or epigrammatic ‘point’ – Pope’s idea of ‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’. Problem with this for present-day readers – too neat, self-confident, smug, or dogmatic. Constant succession of end-stopped couplets – can become almost intolerable to modern ears and minds. Enjambment a possible answer (Agamben on this). Creates a more tentative, exploratory, anti-definitive effect. This and other verse-techniques – e.g., ambiguity, paradox, undecidable syntax, shifting caesurae, tonal ambivalence, etc. – can help to avoid any sense of hectoring over-assurance.

ii.  I.A. Richards on poetic ‘pseudo-statements’. Background to this (1920s Cambridge, Logical Positivism, present-day ‘defences of poetry’ that are really updates of Sidney on poetic ‘feigning’). Weaknesses of this idea – emotivism (cf. emotivist ethics and its problems). Risks trivialising poetry by removing it altogether from the realm of genuine, i.e., veridical (or at least falsifiable) statements. Other versions leave more room for talk of truth, and not just in a vaguely emotive, uplifting or ecumenical way.

iii. Empson on Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Prelude. Elusive or deceptive logic and grammar – we shouldn’t (Empson says) too readily take refuge in critically-sanctioned notions like that of poetic ‘paradox’ because they licence or encourage irrational habits of thought. Empson on Keats, Housman, Milton, and others. If Eliot thought that poetry should be at least as well-written as prose then Empson thinks it should at least meet certain basic standards of plain-prose sense. Cf. his wonderful chapter on Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’.

iv. Poetic personae, voices, implied narrators, assumed identities, etc. ‘Essays’ in the sense: ways of trying out such borrowed or projected voices by way of poetic-narrative ‘impersonation’. Browning the great nineteenth-century exponent. If it works this allows the poet to inhabit the subject’s experience, thoughts, feelings or lifeworld and – at the same time – stand back at certain points to take a more detached (maybe ironic) view.

v. The verse-essay, on whatever scale, as a means of discovering what you (the poet and hopefully also the reader) actually think or feel in and through the process of writing. Applies to both elements (‘verse’ and ‘essay’) in so far as they both encourage and promote thinking in poetry – purposive, articulate, even truth-apt thinking – while at the same time working to subdue or offset what Keats (irritably) described as an ‘irritable reaching after fact and certainty’.

vi. The verse-essay as political-social-ethical intervention, as with the eighteenth-century verse-satirists (especially Dryden) though without their weight of presumptive authority or air of occupying the moral high ground. Advantages of verse-form (rhyme, meter, stylistic devices, non-standard linguistic patterns) to focus attention and point up satirical intent. Juvenalian and Menippean forms – very different ethoi and ways of making their point.

vii. Challenge or counterweight to the virtual hegemony of lyric in current mainstream poetic practice. Importance of this: lightens the load of subjectivity along with the sometimes dangerous prevalence of confessional modes. Frees the narrator/presenter/speaker to see all around a topic and engage in a process of quasi-dialogical self-examination. Bakhtin on ‘heteroglossia’ and the polyphonic text. The novel was Bakhtin’s paradigm for this, but he seems to have had lyric verse in mind when he set up his famous opposition between the novel and poetry.

7. More specifically, the function of rhyme as a stimulant to creative thinking across a range of subjects from philosophy to politics, ethics and the human condition at large. Rhyme not at all, as is frequently held against it, an artifice that forces thinking into merely conventional forms or that imposes all kinds of arbitrary structure on language and thought. Rather it is precisely the constraint of rhyme that leads the poet out of her or his customary tracks of thought into new regions opened up by the need to find a good rhyme-word and to seek it, sometimes, in wholly unexpected directions.

                 Compare Adorno on the frequent predictability of jazz improvisation and the way that other, more formal structures – such as those to be found in Beethoven, or Mahler, or Berg – are just what enable musical thought to break with purely reflex or habituated routines. Formal ‘composition’, whether in music or the verse-essay, is the prerequisite for any creativity that goes beyond the formulaic.

The verse-essay below by Christopher Norris is presented as a taster for future readers and contributors, though it is not intended to be prescriptive in form or length.  

* 

In Praise of Parables (Keatsian sonnets)

 . . . so that seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest at any time they should turn, and their sins be forgiven.

                                                         Mark IV, 11-12

We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. But unless we are extremely naive, as some apocalyptic sects still are, we do not ask that they progress towards that end precisely as we have been given to believe. In fact we should expect only the most trivial work to conform to pre-existent types.

                                                            Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

Each of them makes the parable a bit like a riddle in a folktale, where to get the answer wrong means perdition; but [Mark] and [Matthew] distinguish them. One says the stories are obscure on purpose to damn the outsiders; the other, even if we state it in the toughest form the language will support, says that they are not necessarily impenetrable, but that the outsiders, being what they are, will misunderstand them anyway.

                                                            Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy

By parables alone we hit the mark.
Go wide, oblique or slant if truth’s your aim,
Not straight like those who’d get the sense off pat.
Best leave at least some readers in the dark
If light’s to dawn for others; if your game
Of hunt-the-symbol’s not to see the sheep
Outnumber goats by millions: can’t have that!
It’s up the Eden-tree straight readers bark,
Their trust in honest dealers that’s to blame:
Why think you’ll get the point right off the bat?
Let parables ensure you always keep
Some secrets in reserve, don’t rush to spill
The beans in one enigma-busting heap,
But let the truth-curve stretch out as it will.

It’s truth’s long odyssey, that lengthening arc,
Or error’s asymptote, the traveller’s name
For never ending up quite where it’s at,
Not having – wanting – anywhere to park
Your nostos-seeking self without the same
Old sense of compass-points that start to creep,
Directions wide of any habitat
You had in mind, or memories that hark
Back to a point just wide of whence you came
And call it ‘home’, though with the caveat:
‘Go that way and your surest route will sweep
The largest area out, a space they fill,
Those quicker options that may overleap
Your parabolic curve yet fall short still’.

That shortfall tells the plain-truth seeker why
It’s parable, not allegory, they chose
To share the gist with readers fit though few,
Those riddlers, Christ to Kafka, who’d supply
No four-fold exegetic key, or those
With truths to tell who none the less preferred,
Like Kierkegaard, to have their point of view
Not come across directly, eye-to-eye
With all-too-trusting readers, but disclose
Itself by stages, carrying them through
Successive modes of error till each word
Bears its intended sense, each mise-en-scène
Assumes its proper role, and truth deferred
Strikes home in souls elect or born-again.

Still let’s admit it’s Kafka’s tales that try
The patience of a saint, or one who goes
The Kierkegaardian long way round yet who,
When the salvation-chips are down, gets by
On Søren’s word for it. ‘Let God dispose’,
They think, ‘and let the author’s statements gird
My leap of faith, not have me join the queue
Of pseudonyms, those weaker souls who fly
To some face-saving doctrine that bestows
Both states, the Godly and the well-to-do’.
What’s more: ‘If Søren’s notions seem absurd
To common sense or reason, then amen
To that – faith rules!’. Yet Kafka shows they erred,
Those fideists with their plain-truth-telling yen.

A grievous fault, misreading, if it’s thought
To go straight to the heart of things, the one
And only truth, by closing every route
That might proceed by way of errors caught
And held in mind, or insights that have run
The gauntlet of misprision, or – the case
With artful exegetes – the overshoot
Of subtlety that sells intention short
Yet learns thereby how justice may be done
Through parable; how its provisions suit
Our need that text and reading have the grace,
Between them, to conserve what room for doubt
Or second thoughts might yet require we face
Continued calls to wait the meaning out.

Just think how those Romantics fared who bought
So deeply into it, the doctrine spun
By advocates of Symbol who’d recruit
The powers of mind and nature in support
Of their transcendent vision – let’s have none
Of those prosaic allegories! – yet base
Their claim on time-bound details that confute
The notion of a language somehow wrought
To such high ends. Read on, and they’ve begun:
Those tell-tale metonymic slides that mute
That crucial metaphor; the covert trace
Of allegory in symbols that, without
Its aid, would gesture vainly to embrace
The mystic state they strive to bring about.

Still best admit that parables can serve
The obscurantists and the mystagogues,
Those who, as with Mark’s gospel, make a prime
Consideration of the need to swerve
So far from plain intent that one who logs
On as the handbook says, or deviates
Back into sense so insights come on time,
Will thereby end up way behind the curve
And apt to call down a new plague of frogs,
Or show they’re stuck in some old paradigm
Whose literalism clearly indicates
A navigator tight-bound to the mast
Of allegory that, line by line, dictates
Old bearings, routes and sea-maps long surpassed
(Parabolists declare) as sense migrates
And classic readings find themselves out-classed.

Acknowledge, then, the peril every oeuvre
Confronts in parable; how clever-clogs
Or wily exegetes can always mime
Its passage en abyme, keep in reserve
All the interpretative wheels and cogs
That allegory supplied, and see what waits
Beyond the next omega-point, sublime
Or trite. Here Godot’s messages unnerve
The shrewdest hermeneut and failure dogs
Ecumenists who’d have new readings chime
With old as love’s text-ministry sedates
Odium scholasticum. No built-to-last
Consensus but some parable creates
Lacunae and enigmas fit to cast
All things in doubt, disturb the going rates
Of currency, leave no foundation fast.

Take them as parables, those tales of woe,
Of visions interrupted, dreams that fade
On revelation’s cusp, prophetic tones
No sooner struck than forced to undergo
Some gross quotidian mishap, such as made
Poor Coleridge break his reverie and quit
The road to Xanadu (now mobile phones,
Back then the Porlock call). Just goes to show,
Like those semantic games that Wordsworth played
With his great keyword ‘sense’, how logic groans
Beneath the strain of finding syntax fit
To put across a pantheist doctrine bound,
Should it hold good, to heal the aching split
Of soul from body: paradise new-found!

Let parables instruct us: what we know
Most surely is how often we’re betrayed
As much by visionaries who make no bones
About the wondrous insights they’ll bestow
(‘One life, within us and abroad’), conveyed
Through symbol’s agency, as by the writ
Of sober sense which runs: when language owns
No Porlock-share, denies what it must owe
To mere contingency, the daily trade
Of poetry with commerce in the zones
Of chance, metonymy, or mother-wit,
Then you’ll find cracks in any vision crowned
By symbol’s vain refusal to admit
What ties all thought to its material ground.

It’s in the lifelong run-up to life’s end
They draw apart, those symbolists who’d seize
A glimpse of the eternal at each stage
Of temporal existence and so lend
Their finite lives a vision fit to ease
Death-jitters; and parabolists who deem
It best to count their blessings, not assuage
Such fears by some false promise to transcend
Life’s element, some angel-eye reprise
Of body’s mortal span, but let old age
Pay its respects to both (the late-Yeats theme),
Count flesh a ‘tattered coat upon a stick’,
Bid soul to ‘clap hands and sing’, yet team
Them up as body slows while soul stays quick.

A primal rift, not one that thought could mend
By taking body’s part, or body tease
Adroitly out of thought by having sage
Reflection grant how sense may apprehend
Such truths as must elude the devotees
Of Geist, res cogitans, or the old dream
Of some panpsychist ruse to disengage
From such disputes by having mind extend
Beyond the human skull. How then appease
Soul’s yearning for its rightful appanage
If not by parable’s benign regime?
No false epiphanies; accept the tick-
Tock pace of time; and let no punctual scheme,
Like allegory, have scholars cherry-pick.