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.
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