[Chris Childers]

I've held off responding for so long because I really wanted to see what people would say, and you guys haven't disappointed me! (Though I was kind of hoping someone would show up and say, "I write in organic form, and my idol is Charles Olson," but I guess those people either don't post on Eratosphere or don't read this board.) Anyway, anyone who hasn't responded because you felt unqualified or intimidated, I really am interested in what organic form means to you, assuming it has meaning--not what it meant to Coleridge, or what it really means, or what it should mean, but what you think it means. I'm just curious about what this term now means to the average contemporary reader. I want to know whether, if I say, "Now THAT's organic form!" you'll think I'm praising or criticizing. (I mean, if someone told me they found my form organic in the manner of Robert Duncan, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't feel complimented.)

Ralph, as soon as I saw your name on this thread I knew we'd be hearing from Emerson. Those are great passages and I need to sit down and read "The Poet" before I comment too far in depth. However, it seems to me in my current half-drunken state (well, it seemed the same when I was sober several hours ago, so if I was Persian I'd stamp and seal it), that Emerson bears a lot of the blame for the degeneration of "organic form" as a meaningful term in criticism. The emphasis on "process," to be sure, is already there in Coleridge; but Emerson fixed on it with a Yankee extremism, a Puritanical lust for purity, the desire to weed out anything a priori (e.g., meter), to weed and whack and trim down until all that's left is pure inspiration, the voice of the bard spontaneously channeling the Muse--one can see how the need for an organically integrated product could get lost in ideas about the organic process. But boy, could the guy turn a phrase! That's actually a big part of the problem, with both him and Pound: the well-turned metaphorical vagueness (e.g., the "metre-making argument") which can be interpreted in just about any way the reader wants.

By the way, one of my favorite bits I ran into from Emerson: he considered Poe a bad poet who occasionally wrote good poems, and Thoreau a good poet who usually wrote bad poems. I think most of our modern organicists are probably good poets who write bad poems.

I should say that not all of these latter-day Coleridgeans are as intellectually bankrupt as this thread assumes; Levertov's explanation (for example) of what she's up to is quite subtle and interesting, and not at all far from what Coleridge said. But the problem is the emphasis on process, and the implicit assumption that the use of any traditional element must be necessarily mechanical. I think the example of Dante (beautiful explication, Andrew!) pretty clearly shows how traditional elements can be used in the service of 'organic form.' Whether the poet views the form as spontaneously generated from within or determined from without seems immaterial to me: the evidence is in the poem that was written.

This, to me, is the key; all the description of how to make it happen is a red herring. A poem exhibits organic form when there is a certain inextricability of form and content--how the poem got into that state is of no consequence. The poet could have started from the material and worked slowly outward, finding the form as she went along; or she could start with the abstract form, and generate material to fill it. What's important is that the one be fitted to the other. A form is mechanical (I say) when it's just what you do without thinking: as pretty much everybody in the 18th century wrote heroic couplets, no matter what they had to say. Sometimes the form can take over the thought to the extent that the two appear molded together, as in pretty much all of Pope; and maybe somebody out there writes so damn many sonnets that they dream in sonnet form, and the thought seems organically molded to it. That's fine, but I (and I think Coleridge) would come down on the side of a more thoughtful, adventurous approach to form, one that seeks to match each idea to its form, and each form to its idea, regardless of what comes first.

Edward, thanks for the Byron. You do a lovely job of explicating the meter but I'm not sure that goes deep enough to be what I think of as "organic form." The meter conveys the poet's psychological state. That's a lovely trick, but organic form seems more philosophical to me, something about an equivalence between what the poem does and what it says. However imperfect it is, I may post tomorrow what I've written about Frost at Midnight, whose organicism, as far as I can tell, has little to do with the meter; it's rhetorical layerings, mirrors within mirrors.

Heidi, I've bought that book. Sounds like Kirby Smith has already done the research I've been doing! Wish you'd made that post yesterday, when I was still at Columbia, so I could have photocopied the relevant chapter. Anyway, I'm interested to read his argument; he sounds very Winters-like. Thanks again for your thoughts, all; I shall return.

Chris

PS: Allen, I currently have no opinion on the Simonides fragment you mention. Do you consider it organic form? (It was clearly preserved as a metrical riddle.) Do you want to explain?