[Alex Pepple]

Dear museful Erastophereans,

It is my pleasure to announce that our current moderator here, Tim Murphy, will concentrate on what he's been excelling at, His Lariatness, & cede the reins of this forum to a new moderator -- one who is a master in his own rights, who is already familiar to you & me in these parts & needs no introduction.

So, everyone, please join in in giving a warm welcome to our first ever CFO -- no, I don't mean high finance, just Chief Formalism Officer (but you can call him Moderator,) Professor Robert Mezey!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Tim Murphy]

I just want all of you to know that I have been summarily fired for shutting down one too many threads. But I ride into the sunset, twirling my lariat, with a song in my heart. For my successor has forgotten more about poetry than the rest of us will ever learn!

[robert mezey]

Thanks for the extravagant remark, Tim.
I thought I would introduce a topic that hasn't
been discussed nearly as much as the meters,
and that is rhyme. It's not just that I love
rhyme passionately---I really do think it is
an abundant source of energy in a poem, and of
course it's not an accident that most of the
good lyric poems in English employ it. I don't
mean to say that one cannot write very well
without it---the blank verse of Shakespeare,
Milton, Frost etc. is as good as anything we
have. But a few people were denying recently
that a poet writing in rhyme and meter has
more resources, more tools, more aid than
someone working outside those traditions. I don't
want to argue about it---I think the denial is
too patently wrong for argument---but since we're
musing on mastery, let me quote a little from
Sam Johnson's life of Milton. (We very often
don't share Johnson's taste or agree with his
judgments, but he is one of the masters of poetics,
and very rewarding to read.) Here he is on rhyme:

Rhyme, he says [he is referring to Milton's
little preface to PARADISE LOST], and says truly,
is no necessary adjunct of true poetry. But
perhaps, of poetry as a mental operation, metre or
musick is no necessary adjunct: it is however by the
musick of metre that poetry has been discriminated
in all languages; and in languages melodiously con-
structed, by a due proportion of long and short
syllables, metre is sufficient. But one language
cannot communicate its rules to another: where metre
is scanty and imperfect, some help is necessary. The
musick of the English heroic line strikes the ear
so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the
syllables of every line co-operate together: this
co-operation can be only obtained by the preservation
of every verse unmingled with another, as a distinct
system of sounds; and this distinctness is obtained
and preserved by the artifice of rhyme. The variety
of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank
verse, changes the measures of an English poet to
the periods of a declaimer; and there are only a few
skilful and happy readers of Milton, who enable their
audience to perceive where the lines end or begin.
Blank verse, said an ingenious critick, seems
to be verse only to the eye.
Poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English poetry
will not often please; nor can rhyme ever be safely
spared but where the subject is able to support itself.
Blank verse makes some approach to that which is called
the lapidary stile; has neither the easiness of
prose, nor the melody of numbers, and therefore tires
by long continuance. Of the Italian writers without
rhyme, whom Milton alleges as precedents, not one is
popular; what reason could urge in its defence, has
been confuted by the ear.
But, whatever be the advantage of rhyme, I cannot
prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer;
for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is; yet,
like other heroes, he is to be admired rather than
imitated.....

It should be added that Dr. Johnson considered verse
spoken on the stage to be a different case, and as you
know, he is one of the great critics of Shakespeare.
Now, the above passage undoubtedly sounds rather alien
in the present climate of literary opinion, but even
allowing for overstatement and error, it has a great
deal to say to us. One of the epidemic defects of
contemporary poetry is that the verse is uninteresting,
slack, empty of energy, and this is at least partly
because young people think free verse is easier than
metrical verse, when it is very much harder, and they
don't know or have forgotten that poetry is written in
both sentences and lines, and that the line must be a
real thing, continuously modulating the meaning and
emotion. You can certainly write in nonmetrical lines,
but the subject must be "able to support itself," and
you'd better have something to say, and the best words
in the best order to say it in. (The failure to do this
is probably why so many poets nowadays read or say their poems in an odd and artificial way. What Frost called
"church intoning." I'll quote the whole passage:

I claim to be no better than I am.
I write real verse in numbers, as they say.
I'm talking not free verse but blank verse now.
Regular verse springs from the strain of rhythm
Upon a metre, strict or loose iambic.
From that strain comes the expression strains
~~~~~~~~of music.
The tune is not that metre, not that rhythm,
But a resultant that arises from them.
Tell them Iamb, Jehovah said, and meant it.
Free verse leaves out the metre and makes up
For the deficiency by church intoning.
It has its beauty, only I don't write it.
....

If you want to write it, you'd better have good command
of rhythm and all the tropes of sound, and of tone and
plot and logic.) It goes without saying that if Dr.
Johnson were alive and presented with vers libre,
he would not regard it as poetry as all. We see, and
hear, things differently and tolerate many things once
felt to be intolerable, but it would be a mistake to
think that we are wiser or more enlightened than men and women of earlier ages, (especially a great scholar and critic like Dr. Johnson).
Well, that's more than enough for one day.

[Tim Murphy]

I wouldn't want to dispute a point with a man who writes Latin better than I write English.

[Alex Pepple]

Originally posted by Tim Murphy:
I just want all of you to know that I have been summarily fired for shutting down one too many threads. But I ride into the sunset, twirling my lariat, with a song in my heart. For my successor has forgotten more about poetry than the rest of us will ever learn!

I'm afraid to say, that Tim is right about all of it - not only the, errr, 'fired' part, but especially, that our new Mastery forum moderator has forgotten more about poetry than the rest of us will ever learn. With that he's title has been rightly modified to, "Master of Memory"!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Tim Murphy]

"Tell them in Lacedaimon, passerby,
That here obeying their commands, we lie."

Simonides wrote that famous epigram for the defenders of the pass at Thermopylae, and in his old age he was respectfully addressed as "Master of Memory." Now that he is in charge of defending Western Civ from the barbarians, Professor Mezey is the second distinguished poet to receive that title.

[robert mezey]

Well, gee, gosh, golly, thanks. I wish my memory were
better than it is, but I'm getting to be an old man and
it takes a long time to bring things up from wherever
they are stored. (I still have several hundred poems by
heart, but I can't remember whether I got any mail
yesterday or not; or if I did, whether I've answered
any of it yet or merely imagined that I have.) But in
any case, I prefer your title (or any title) to
being called a formalist. I am not a formalist, Old
or New, except in the sense that any poet worth his
salt (or hers) is a formalist by definition, among other
things. The technique is sine qua non, it goes
without saying, but as you know, when you're actually
composing, you're thinking of everything at once. As
Larkin once said, and no one needs to be told what a
magnificent technician he was, "Content is everything."
Right on.

[Brett Thibault]

Congratulations on your appointment Mr. Mezey.

It goes without saying that the poet, regardless of form, wishes to control the voice’s rhythm so that certain sounds occur in concordance with content and a normal speech pattern, among others. Everyone here knows what tools are used to achieve these things. The human voice follows prescribed rhythms, language notwithstanding, but these are better described as complex or variable rather than metered or regular. Both free verse and prefigured verse have the same devices, resources and tools at their disposal, but they are used differently because the desired result in sound and on paper are different.
Free verse has form; it makes use of rhythm, but does not depend on a regular pattern, or predictability. Prefigured verse sets up a tension between the rhythm and the meter by deviating from expectation, but these variances occur so regularly, that they have become in large part customary and so remain predictable. Free verse strives to establish alternate rhythm and structure using all the same tools prefigured verse uses, but leaves behind the predictability and therefore opens up new possibilities of expression. The capacity of free verse to access these possibilities is not available to writers of prefigured form. I believe it’s the regularity, the predictability that appeals to those who say “The best this and that has always been formal bligety blah” because it satisfies their expectations of what verse should encompass. Rhyme in all its forms can be used to shore up loose meter in either prefigured or free verse, can be used to create and support rhythm in either, bring attention to certain words or thoughts and all the rest, in either. To be free verse then, the litmus is not lack or abundance of resource, but a lack or abundance of a recognized, customary or traditional pattern, a pronounced regularity that usually results in predictability. The presumption should be that both forms have all the same tools available for their construction, and that it is more the matter of predictability that creates the distinction.

[robert mezey]

Brett, I hope I can say this without being invidious,
but I don't think you quite know what you're talking
about. I'd guess you haven't written metrical verse--
if you had written it at least competently, you would
know, immediately, even physically, that you give up
a world of resources when you drop meter. You say the
variations in regular meter have become so common that
they are completely predictable, but in fact variation,
or perhaps I should say the possibilities of variation
are infinite. And many modes of thinking and feeling
are available only, or let us say largely, in that con-
tinuous tension between the sentence sound and the
meter. As Henri Coulette once said, "Meter is the basis
of intimacy between writer and reader." You seem to be
saying that metrical verse is available to one writing
in free verse, but that is rarely true. Yes, one sees
a lot of contemporary poems that mix metrical and non-
metrical verse, either intentionally or (more commonly
I'd guess) because the writer cannot really hear the difference, and the result is usually awful. And you
imply that rhyme can be used in free verse. Yes, but
how often do you see it? One reason it's infrequent is
that unmetrical rhymed lines tend toward doggerel, or
the comic, as in Ogden Nash. In any case, a good poet
does not use rhyme to "shore up loose meter"---rhyme
is not there to "shore up" anything: it exists in its
own right and works with other elements to achieve a
wide range of effects. As for the word form, we
use it very loosely when we talk about free verse, or
as a courtesy. The term open form (which I
unfortunately once used in one of my anthologies, one
I regret) is a sort of oxymoron. A form is a pattern,
a certain structure, a configuration, the essential
principle of a thing; part of its essence is that it
can be repeated endlessly. Cunningham spoke of form
in these terms and went further: he reminded us that
metrical form is the communal, objective aspect
of the poem, without which the poet is in danger of
solipsism. In the sacraments, the content is the wine,
water, bread etc, or, if you like, the body and blood
of Christ; the form is the words, the same words every
time, century after century. Kant thought of it as
the formative principle that holds together the elements
of a thing; or it might be thought of as a determinant
principle, as in Plato's forms.
As Tim said, I have written a good deal of free verse
(some of it pretty good, I think), and I still write it
occasionally. I keep in mind Pound's advice, that one
should almost always write in meter, should abandon it
only when the thing keeps insisting on some rhythm that
can't be gotten in meter, as happens now and then. (Unfortunately, he did not follow his own advice, but
that's another story.)

[Alan Sullivan]

Welcome to your new post, Robert. Your title is well-turned and well-earned.

I am glad to see you initiating a discussion of rhyme. I have a small observation regarding your remarks on rhymed free verse. It shows up surprisingly often on the metrical poetry boards here. Sometimes the posters are so unaware of meter that they think they have written metrical poetry because it rhymes. What is taught in the schools these days? I shudder to think of it.

Alan Sullivan