In a recent comment at The Deep End on Richard Wakefield’s "High Desert, Winter", Wiley Clements (Golias) applied his "Razor" to the relationship between Richard’s modifiers, verbs and nouns.

It would be of interest to me - and perhaps to other members, too - to have Wiley set out the "rules" for the use of that critical instrument.

With Tim’s permission and support, I therefore invite Wiley to describe his Razor and to set forth for us its rationale.

Clive Watkins

Yes, I'm particularly curious to know how passive verbs and pronouns figure into the equation.

Perhaps Golias could make it clear by giving some examples, perhaps his sweet Autoepitaph or, especially, his delicious Memento Mori?

Curtis.

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[This message has been edited by Golias (edited February 21, 2003).]

An excellent occasion for the use of a series of fore-modifiers is displayed in "Memento Mori." The penultimate stanza ends with leafy list--a description of Frost's oeuvre--

<dir>...who thought to find more verse, but don’t complain
at this one line from all your leafy list.

How quiet, fresh and warm this upland glen
to stop within for sleep.
I think it must be warm here even when
the snow is drifted deep.</dir>

For the span of quiet, fresh and warm, the adjectives seem to be describing Frost's "leafy list," or at least the one line from the list.

Curtis.



[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 21, 2003).]

I suppose in the future there will be computer analysis of all sorts of sytlistic and grammatical constructs, and that we might develop "rules" for more things than just modifiers. Already the programs used to "compress" data have been applied to do textual analysis that permits computers to recognize who wrote the text in question based on the frequency of certain words and word combinations that a human critic would not have been able to notice. And so there may be a germ of truth in Golias's Razon. But my first reaction, which I offer respectfully to a poet whose work I admire, is that the razor is just a fanciful and fun bit of thought-inducing hokum, and that its foundation in sound advice ("avoid too many modifiers") doesn't mean, nor should it mean, that the numerical approach is sound.

Among many other things, it occurs to me that one formula covering dimeter lines and heptameter lines alike is unrealistic, since there's a lot more room in longer lines for modifyers than there is in shorter lines. It's possible to write an entire poem without modifiers, but not without nouns and verbs, and so shorter lines need to use fewer modifiers. The fact that nouns and verbs are mandatory, and modifiers are "optional", doesn't necessarily suggest that modifiers are to be avoided.

Of course, there are countless instances of fine lines of verse that use modifiers, and there's no confusion or disconnect in "deferring" the noun until after the modifiers have run their course. "Oh that this too, too solid flesh..." My mind can hold "too too solid" and register the terms even before I know that Hamlet is talking about flesh. "Oh stormy, stormy world!" is clear enough even though I have to read through a repeated modifier before I know what it is that Frost thinks is stormy. The reader's perception isn't "delayed," in my opinion. Words have to come one at a time, of course, and my perception isn't "delayed" but ordered by the poet. If "world" came first, then my perception of "stormy" would be "delayed."

I think the main "problem" with modifiers is that they often cause the poet to choose a noun that isn't up to snuff or specific enough. "A stupid man" isn't bad because "stupid" is a modifier, but because "fool" could have been used instead, and it would have encompassed both the "stupid" and the "man." If you then wrote, "a sly fool," however, the modifier would start to get very interesting, since the phrase becomes an oxymoron of sorts.

So I'm skeptical of treating the matter as a question of ratios. Not all modifiers are alike, of course, or are used with equal skill or appropriateness.

Anyway, my mind is certainly not made up, and I suspect that my views may be modified in the coming discussion.

I'm delighted to be hosting this discussion, because I love Golias' Razor, which I'd never heard of, of course, until Wiley introduced me to it here. I think it is not infallible, but I'll be damned if I can think of a great poem which would flunk the test. I just ran through Nightingale in my head, checking out the lushest of the lush. I haven't enough fingers to count very far, but the first two stanzas pass with flying colors. Then I did a couple of Shakespeare sonnets. Same result. I suspect I could find some Hopkins which would flunk, although so many of his modifiers are OE kennings, containing nouns, that surely some allowance must be made.

I can't say I've made use of The Razor, but I'm partial to it perhaps because I always score so high. Here's the shortest poem in The Deed of Gift:

Center Pivots

Fields of canola
on the plains of Montana:
slices of banana
in a bowl of granola.

Here, with no modifiers (no verbs even!) the Ratio is Infinity. I think it was Bob Clawson who posted Last Sodbusters over at Mastery, and Wiley pointed out that it scored 23. And yes Roger, there is less room for modifiers in short lines. Thinking about that I counted some pentameters, such as this poem in Deed I wrote 20 years ago:

Razing the Woodlot

Here stands the grove our tenant plans to fell.
The homesteaders who planted this tree claim
fled North Dakota when the Dust Bowl came.
Their foursquare farmhouse is a roofless shell;
their tended shelterbelt, a den for fox
and dumpground for machinery and rocks.

The woodlot seeds its pigweed in our loam,
and windstorms topple poplars on the field;
but for a few wasted acres' yield
we'll spare the vixen and her cubs their home
and leave unburied these decaying beams
to teach us the temerity of dreams.

Correct me if I've miscounted, Wiley, but I think it's 40 to 8 or 5 to 1. (Lineation freak that I am, I notice that by age 32 I've a poem in which ten lines end in nouns, two in verbs, none in modifiers, or God help us, pronouns or prepositions.) So I thought hard, and searched old drafts, and sure enough, most of the pentameter I wrote in my twenties flunks the test. You don't see that in the book, because when Alan edited the Early Poems section of Deed, he cut most of the pents to tets by eliminating guess what? The excessive modifiers.

When I was 28 Wilbur told me "Just because you're writing on the themes of Cavafy doesn't excuse from the charge of sufficiently charging your language." At the time, that comment felt like a bullwhip in the face, but I set about taking his advice, and I succeeded in no small part because over the course of five years my Razor Ratios rose from, say, a flabby 2.5 to 1 to an austere 5 or better. A very useful tool, old friend, and one which I think we can all profit from.

Forgive me for simply talking about the poet I know best. I challenge our members to identify some great poetry which proves the fallibility of the Razor.

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[This message has been edited by Golias (edited February 21, 2003).]

Does this mean that French verse, say, is automatically more effective than English, because the natural position of the adjective in that language is not as a fore-modifier?
I feel that the idea that a fore-modifier somehow delays the impact of an image is not borne out by the way we read. I think we take in more than a word at a time.
Regards,Maz

We cross-posted, Wiley. No, don't even think of rewriting the tribute to Frost, it's an exception to the rule. I was hitherto unaware that you made a distinction between fore and aft modifiers, so I'd better let you tackle grasshopper's question.

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[This message has been edited by Golias (edited February 21, 2003).]

W/G,
I think you have to compare like with like, or it gets silly. What you are demonstrating there is not the weakness of a fore-modifier, but the strength of a verb. That's surely not the point at issue.
Regards,Maz

[quote]Originally posted by Roger Slater:

"... first reaction, which I offer respectfully to a poet whose work I admire, is that the razor is just a fanciful and fun bit of thought-inducing hokum..."

Whole lot of modifying going on here, where "hokum" would do the work. However, if it's "thought-inducing hokum," I suppose it's not all bad.

"Among many other things, it occurs to me that one formula covering dimeter lines and heptameter lines alike is unrealistic, since there's a lot more room in longer lines for modifyers than there is in shorter lines."

Roger, this sounds like an excuse for padding. "Room" shouldn't justify flabby writing no matter the line length.

Thomas Lux asks his students to put on their adverb lenses and their adjective lenses as a device for finding weaknesses in language, mainly nouns and verbs that lack precision. I find the "Razor" a useful tool, especially in revising metrical poetry, where padding the meter is an obvious danger.

Bob

Well, I have to acknowledge that most fine poems are relatively light on the modifiers; I resisted the numerical notion only because many of the great moments in poetry also happen to involve modifiers, and I feared a rule that might discourage people from using modifiers to powerful effect.

Of course Frost's line is better with its noun before the adjective, but which do you prefer, "Thou still unravished bride of quietness" or "Thou bride of quietness, still unravished"? Maybe it's more difficult to use modifiers than other parts of speech, but that doesn't mean that one shouldn't do it and try to make it come out right. Sonnets are difficult, too, but we don't conclude that poets therefore shouldn't write them. If your modifier is "still unravished" or something equally interesting, it's unfair to compare it with weaker words like "slightly" or "red", for example.

Of course, Wiley is only saying not to use too many of them, not to use none at all. But I wouldn't want this caution to mean anything more than "be careful using modifiers" or to serve as a justification for inversions unnatural.

What I said about the difference between longer and shorter lines did not sanction the padding of longer lines with modifiers, of course. I merely suggested that it's easier to find room for any word, modifier or not, if you have four or five feet rather than two or three. Since nouns and verbs are essential, and modifiers are expendible in terms of being able to create real sentences, it follows, I think, that modifiers could get in the way when writing shorter lines. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep" has three modifiers that take three of the four metrical beats. These modifiers could not have found room in a dimeter line, and it would take some doing to clear a whole line of trimeter for them. Given the difference between longer and shorter lines in this regard, it stands to reason that "acceptable" ratios should differ as well.

But I know I'll be more alert to modifiers in my own work as a result of this conversation, so the Golias Razor has succeeded in raising my consciousness on the issue whatever the merits of its specific arithmatic.

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[This message has been edited by Golias (edited February 21, 2003).]

Dear Wiley / Golias

Thank you taking up my invitation to explain "Golias’ Razor". Having initiated the thread, I feel I ought to throw in my own three ha’p’orth.

The injunction that modifiers (in this context, single-word adjectives and adverbs) should pull their weight is sound advice for all of us. Golias’ Razor offers a way of quantifying this advice and thereby helping us, as readers and writers, to focus more sharply on the issue. As you make clear, setting the value at 3:1 expresses a critical choice. Though other choices and other values are possible, this does not, in my view, make the Razor less instructive. Rather, it encourages to think, always a good thing.

Maz’s question about French verse is interesting and opens up a wider topic. Roger put it like this: "Words have to come one at a time, of course, and my perception isn't ‘delayed’ but ordered by the poet". I take it that the process of reading (and of listening to) an utterance is one in which the reader (the listener) is constantly guessing from verbal and other clues what will come next and of revising his guess in the light of what actually follows. This process of expectation modified by continuously deferred fulfilment (it is tempting to eroticize the process) is powerfully influenced by word-function and by the dynamics of syntax. Languages vary in the degree to which they require us to postpone what I have just called fulfilment. Of the languages I am familiar with, Latin and German make the greatest demands of this kind - that is, on someone for whom these are not first languages and for whom, therefore, by comparison with English, there is always a residual strangeness involved. I suspect, however, that it would be unwise to assume that a Roman or a German experienced things in the same way. To attribute critical value to the fact that adjectives tend to follow nouns in French seems, therefore, to merit closer thought.

To return to Roger’s remark, I suppose I differ from you in this, that I am not convinced that the writer’s task is simply to move the reader forward without anything which might be "obstructive" or which might create "delaying effects". It is, rather, the task of managing the reader’s attention while at the same time allowing "space" for the intelligent imagination to expand into. Of course, since readers come in all shapes and sizes, this is not easy; but then if it were, it would not be fun either.

Thank you once again for describing for us how your most useful Razor works.

Best wishes!

Clive Watkins

Thanks, Clive and Wiley, for this interesting thread. Stylometrics is a very old part of classics, used to argue authorship, date, and so on. An interesting thing about the field is that early results are often wrong!

I have always told my students that great writers, like Shakespeare, generally write in a ratio of at least 2 to 1, noun to adjective or verb to adverb. Perhaps I was understating the ratio. I don't remember offhand where I first read about this, but I do know that my own informal counting seemed to be consistent with this result for Shakespeare.

I don't totally agree with you, Wiley, on the importance of the placement of a modifier, since I don't think that we process individual words, typically. With highly inflected languages, like Latin and Greek, there is no doubt that language gets processed in bigger chunks than in languages with fairly rigid word order, but even in English there is "chunking".
In conversations like this I think we are missing a subject of great importance if we neglect the way in which adjectival and adverbial phrases and clauses figure in the economy of an utterance. A poem can muffle its essential statement in vast folds of adjectival and adverbial clauses without exceeding a desirable ratio of adjectives to nouns. Unless purposive, this can undermine a statement, and is often invisible to writers who don't think in these terms.

Tony

Thank you for a most interesting discussion. May I as, a postnote, throw in a thought which you may or may not feel is relevant to issues of 'expectation' etc in reading.
I apologise for not quoting exactly, but I recall in one of Thomas Love Peacock's novels, the hero is escorted round a garden by a rather pretentious architect, to a certain prospect.
'Here' says the architect 'I have added an element to the view, which I call Surprise,'
'Really?' the hero replies drily 'and what do you call it the second time round?'

Regards,Maz

[quote]Originally posted by Roger Slater:

"... many of the great moments in poetry also happen to involve modifiers, and I feared a rule that might discourage people from using modifiers to powerful effect."

Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang...

Yes, Roger, MANY of the great moments, so your fear is justified. However, better to think of the RAZOR as a tool than as a rule. It's utilitarian, especially for novices and writers too dependent on modifiers. But we ought to know, if we use it, that it can't add grace. For that we need Golias's Bay Rhum.

Utterly Shameless O'Clawson

Snowy
Flowy
Blowy
Showery
Flowery
Bowery
Hoppy
Choppy
Droppy
Breezy
Sneezy
Freezy

An exception to Golias' razor, perhaps?

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[This message has been edited by Golias (edited February 21, 2003).]

Golias,

I admire your Razor concept. One question:

Should an adverb that precedes a verb receive the same credit as adjectives that follow nouns?

Glenn

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[This message has been edited by Golias (edited February 21, 2003).]

I don't want to renew any brouhahas over the use or avoidance of excessive modification--Golias' Razor, as it has been explained, seems like a good guideline imo--but the argument that nouns and verbs are somehow "more concrete" than modifiers always gets my goat, for two main reasons.

I suppose the argument is related to the argument against abstractions: who can say with certainty and agreement what "beauty," or what "lugubrious" is? But nouns are also abstracts--we don't often picture the same "bed" when we hear that word. Often, I experience fore-modification in a pleasant way: first, my mind is given abstract qualities; then, my mind is "brought down to earth" by the noun being modified; and the effect of this construction is similar to the way a telescope or microscope is focused onto an object, except that these abstract qualities are given body without being themselves erased from my mind. It's a union of Heaven and Earth, whereby the heavenly is given form on Earth. The effectiveness of this method will depend on the modifiers which have been used as well as the noun or verb, and upon how well these combinations work to blend the two abstracts of modification & noun/verb. The opposite construction, of aft-modification, often appears to be the ascription of the heavenly upon the mundane--and is not always as effective, because I am given a "bed," for instance, which I have already pictured one way but am now suddenly to imagine in a quite different way than I had imagined. Again, so much depends on the choice of modifier and noun; and modifiers, like nouns, fit in so many different categories.

The second reason I am hesitant to ascribe to nouns and verbs a superiority is similarly related to the concept of abstraction: exotic nouns and verbs often seem, to me, more abstract than common nouns and verbs, and therefore, less "concrete." Arguments can be made for the use of cliché--primarily, that cliché is immediately recognizable, familiar--and the same arguments can be made for the use of common nouns and verbs over their exotic synonyms. This is likely to be a matter of taste as well as a matter of personal familiarity, of course. I have read abominations which displayed the exotic for the sake of exoticism--which nonetheless kept within the prescribed/proscribed bounds of Golias' Razor--and have been left cold by those attempts at "the concrete." Frost might be a good example of good use of common nouns: tree, flower, sky, spider, etc. Of course, any argument will fall back on the idea of le mot juste, whether the right word is a noun, verb, or modifier; but because nouns and verbs can often seem more abstract than some modifiers, I have difficulty naming one class of word "superior" to another.

Incidentally, I'd say that verbs tend to be less abstract than nouns, in their use--"running" via legs will seem much the same whether the creature is a human or an alligator, whereas "human" and "alligator" can be imagined in so many guises--but this is probably due to the already-abstract quality of verbs: they describe more-or-less universal processes rather the variegated real objects described by nouns.

Curtis.

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[This message has been edited by Golias (edited February 21, 2003).]

a very interesting discussion and the reason I am now a member. (thanks, grasshopper)

Golias, please email me at garydawg@msn.com.

I have an offer you can't refuse.

Thanks.

Gary



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