Cathy has drawn my attention to a very interesting article in the December 27 – 28, Weekend Australian Review. She has, by now, possibly passed it on to all the members of ExStanza, if not do contact her. It is written by Kerry Cue and it questions the quality of today’s poets and the poetry they write, which she points out is written, in the main, without due diligence to the reading public.
The appreciation of poetry is so personal that it is very difficult to write in such general terms as has Cue but she may have had in mind the fundamental rules, which I would think, anyone who aspires to write meaningful poetry must take into consideration and indeed abide by, otherwise the end result can not and must not be taken as poetry.
Our group, I do believe, puts in an enormous amount of creative effort, working with a dedication and sincere commitment, with automatic focus on the ‘rules’ to allow each piece to be called or understood as ‘lyrical poetry’, though some among us do disagree on a particular poem, its style, construction and by times, an ultimate meaning. That is how it should be, must be. Thank goodness for the freedom to be critical. That brings me to the vexed question of what actually constitutes a lyrical poem or in fact good poetry. Is there bad poetry? What might appear good to one may be bad to another. Subjectivity again; it will keep rearing its head.
S. M. Schreiber, (a very short bibliography is included at the end of this little essay) in his book An Introduction to Literary Criticism, has some very strong words to say on the subject of ‘good poetry’. He uses a number of high powered poets to back up his argument. In the chapter titled, WHY DO POETS WRITE IN VERSE? SOUND IN POETRY, he states, and I quote. ‘So habitually do poets write in verse that it is not uncommon to find the two words, verse and poetry, used as if they were interchangeable. Yet, of course, “Thirty days hath September…” (which is Coleridge’s example of verse, which is not poetry), or:
In sixteen hundred and sixty-six
London burnt like a bundle of sticks
have no more relation to poetry than would the same two statements were they made in prose. And, conversely, the prose translation of the Song of Solomon in the Authorised Version of the Bible is as much poetry as in any verse poem which we read. Whether any piece of writing is poetry or not depends upon its content, (although, as you will see later, it is true that the poetic content does not become “a poem” until it has found its appropriate form): “verse” and “prose”, on the other hand, have reference solely to form. The word “verse” simply indicates any piece of writing in which the syllables are so arranged as to produce a recurring rhythm, regardless of what that rhythmical arrangement of words in used to convey to us. Any piece of writing in which the rhythm does not recur *(Free verse apart. See note below) is prose, again irrespective of its content. Yet, nevertheless, two facts remain: not only have the vast majority of poets, major and minor, chosen verse as their medium but – even more significantly – every one of the greatest has done so; there is no prose poem in existence which can challenge comparison with the verse-poetry of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. This cannot be by chance; great poets are not sheep, unthinkingly following the herd; were it possible to transmit the supreme poetic experience in the form of even the most “poetic” of prose some one or other of them would, by experiment, have made the discovery. Hence the verse form must possess some virtue which, when a poet uses it, can transmit “poetry” to us as no prose is able to’.
Schreiber includes a note on “Free Verse” at the end of the chapter but suggests that it will complicate the issue this early in the piece and we should ignore it. If these little essays continue I will include it at a later date.
He details a significant amount of material in a not too intellectual discourse on the various attributes of poetry; its construction, form, sound, ear-training for the correct reading and thus understanding of a poem and under a separate section, deals in great detail with imagery but I shall leave that for another day.
I would like to quote him further on his discussion of, What is Poetry? This section, which I will not print in full is a rather enlightening piece and I wonder if anyone else will agree with him or find some of his comments rather old and out of date? He says, ‘Poetry, in the general sense, is the expression of the imagination” (Shelly, A defence of Poetry). The content of pure pose is facts or ideas directed to our understanding; it tells us something. Poetry, on the other hand, however much our understanding may be engaged (and it may have profound intellectual content), sets out not primarily to tell us something but to make something happen to us. And what “happens” is the re-creation in our imagination, as a first-hand experience, of something which the poet’s imagination has created. When we remember a prose book we remember what the author said in it or if it is a novel, what happened to the characters; when we remember a poem we remember something which that poem has made us ourselves see, feel, experience’.
Here, I would like to digress, for in the above I have to take issue with him, particularly with reference to the characters in a novel. I have read many a novel in which I have not just remembered what happened to the characters, I have been deeply affected by descriptions of scenes: places of great beauty or of devastation, in which no character was actively participating, involved or engaged in any activity. Prose writing often does create its own very special emotional reaction and is that not seeing, feeling and ultimately experiencing?
He goes on in the same section, ‘When we have read Keats’s Ode to a Grecian Urn what we remember is not that Keats, in the year 1818, saw (in his imagination) an urn with certain scenes depicted upon it, that he so felt its unchanging beauty that he underwent the experience of passing out of time into eternity; rather it is what we ourselves, in proportion to our capacity for response, have seen the “still unravish’d bride of quietness”, changeless beauty untouched and untouchable by time and that we in our own person have, momentarily, passed out of time into timelessness where beauty is the eternal absolute’.
I have to leave it there for now because I think Mr Schreiber has gone a bit over the top. Yes, Keats Ode is a superb poem but I certainly did not drift of into the ether when I read it at school, nor did I when I read in as a young adult, even though I could sense its greatness and when I read this particular piece, I once again took to the Ode, hoping to finally break through the mist of ignorance and be touched by the brilliance of the work. Well Mr Schreiber, I have failed once again. I find the poem, long, difficult to come to grips with, uneven in its metre and certainly noting of the beauty which Keats discovered. Obviously I am missing something either very basic or perhaps the quality of superb poetry eludes me still. I much preferred his Isabella.
Now I know full well that Keats observed all the ‘rules’ and ‘regulations’ in his poetry writing. I know full well that the Ode is recognised as a masterpiece. But yet, I fail to be emotionally snared by its beautiful words and I have to admit, though even still reluctantly that there are plenty of excellent words in amongst the majority, which do not touch me so much. Let me quote a few. The last two lines in of the second stanza,
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Indeed I can see the painted figures, black against the earthen background, so I suppose I am able to accomplish some of what Schreiber has said, but it is far from going into a state of ecstasy about the blessed thing. I have been much more moved by more down to earth topics.
In stanza three there are lines which I fine quite touching.
And happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy, happy love!
There is a soft, gentle rolling off the tongue in the second line, which make me feel pleasantly calm, though spoiled somewhat by the repetitive happy in the next. I accept the fact there are many who find this poem a delight. I think that because I find it so damn difficult to have my imagination work on any idea I might dig up for a poem that I might feel a bit of envy for Mr Keats and his, when it delivers a poem that the world of well educated, well read, literary boffins declare is a masterpiece.
Now a bit of information on S.M.Schreiber. I do not know what the two initials stand for but will hunt him up on the Internet and advise later. He is or was, (I do not know if he is still working in the field of education, I would doubt it) a lecturer to students who were preparing for the Oxford and Cambridge Entrance Examinations in Classics, Modern Languages and English and the book from which I have taken his comments was produced under the auspices of the Commonwealth and International Library and published by Pergamon Oxford English Series in 1966. Over forty years ago yet the same rules and fundamentals for writing poetry hold good today as they did then. Do they? I wonder.
I wonder what, if any comments, this piece might inspire? Surely, there must be some argument about whether the ‘rules’ are applicable today or whether we can go hell for leather and write whatever we like and call it poetry, prose poetry, free verse, abstract or whatever. Do we think the philosophy that Aristotle, in his seminal work ‘Poetics’, ascribed to poetry is alive and well in the lyrical poetry of today’s writers? Closer to home, do we think that we, as a poetry group, display the quality and standard in our poems that would make Kerry Cue change her comments from those in the article that started me off on this quest?
