[Chris Childers]

"Organic form" seems to me one of the most protean terms in poetics, in that it can be used to mean more or less what anybody wants it to mean. Though it has its origins in Plato's Phaedrus, the touchstone for its use in literature is Coleridge's distinction between mechanic and organic form in his Shakespearean Criticism. Here is the relevant passage:

No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes it genius- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination. How then is it that not only single Zoili, but whole nations have combined in unhesitating condemnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters- as a wild heath where islands of fertility look the greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without snapping the flower?- In this statement I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire, save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakespeare's own commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material;- as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it developes, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms;- each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within,- its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror;- and even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare,- himself a nature humanized, a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.

MH Abrams has observed that Coleridge's distinction is a metaphorical one, rooted in the opposition of machine vs. plant, and that Coleridge's criticism is a virtual jungle of botanical metaphor. Poems spring from seeds, they grow and develop and take in nourishment (from life and literature, presumably, as plants from sun, soil and air) and evolve spontaneously from within, "effectuate their own secret growth," as Coleridge puts it elsewhere. Be that as it may, Coleridge clearly believed that he discerned organic form in Shakespeare's writings, that it was a quality visible in the finished work, not only implicit in the subjective process of composition. He also did not feel it incompatible with traditional form; for him, "organic form" is a principle of organization to supplement, rather than replace, the traditional ones of meter and, sometimes, rhyme.

It seems to me, however, that since Coleridge the idea of "organic form" has been taken up to provide the theoretical backbone for a very different kind of prosody than anything Coleridge would have envisioned. Today it seems to be a kind of free verse, is even referred to, by poets like Denise Levertov and Hilda Morley, as a different (and superior) kind of verse to "free verse." Levertov has said that "most free verse is failed organic poetry," though she later qualifies that statement; according to Morley, "free verse" is "less personal, more public, more like the chanting of voices together," while organic verse "stays close to the poet's personal voice, that inward noise that makes use of intensely personal rhythms." Anyway, in this thread I'm curious about three things:

1. How do Sphereans understand the term "organic form?" Does it simply denote a kind of poetry with which you may or may not have any sympathy, or is it something you strive for in your own work, and if so, what does it mean to you?

2. What poets or critics, in interviews or essays, have written illuminatingly or interestingly about "organic form?" Are there any accounts of it or quotes you've found particularly helpful?

3. What poems (formal or free, classic or contemporary) do you feel have organic form, and what makes their form organic?

Obviously, this topic has affinities both with the thread we just had on depth as well as with the slightly disingenuous and half-hearted discussion of product vs. process over on GT right now. (The problem there is that pragmatic considerations overshadow the theoretical.) It belongs in Mastery because I hope it will involve discussion of individual poems of organic form; I myself will come back at some point and try to show the organic form implicit in Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight."

C

[RCL]

Emerson was very much aware of Coleridge’s distinction between mechanic and organic form.

Here is one of many comments Emerson made about organic form, The Poet (1844):

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.

He considered Whitman that poet in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

An example in Emerson's poetry:

The Snowstorm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of snow.

[RCL]

Here's Thoreau in Spring, Walden:

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.

And here's the final paragraph of Walden:

Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.


I just remembered an ancient essay on the organic metaphor in PMLA, by an Adams? Also check Emerson bibs.

[Alder Ellis]

Hi Chris,

here's another bit from Coleridge (Aids to Reflection, as quoted by Owen Barfield in What Coleridge Thought):

"… in the world we see everywhere evidences of a unity, which the component parts are so far from explaining, that they necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition of their existing as those parts; or even of their existing at all. This antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each union, it has since the time of Bacon and Kepler been customary to call a law."

This ties in to the definition of genius as "acting creatively under laws of its own origination."

I think the choice of molded clay to exemplify "mechanic" form was dubious on STC's part: the only "organic" form clay could assume is that of a shapeless blob. The more challenging distinction is between machine and organism. The parts of a machine & the organs of an organism are similarly describable in terms of functional relation of part to whole, and of course in scientific contexts organic bodies are often treated as being, not just metaphorically, but literally, machines. STC's distinction therefore depends acutely on the process by which the product is arrived at, as in your quotation: "it shapes, as it develops, itself from within." Is this a "botanical" metaphor? In a way, perhaps, but the assertion of this self-shaping power applies to the process of plant growth as well as to the process of imagination. It is really, for STC, the same process: the theory of imagination is also a theory of life. Or so Barfield convincingly argues -- if you're truly interested in this stuff you might want to look at What Coleridge Thought, it's a great book. (Many years since I read it, so I'm probably misrepresenting it.)

In the historical context, Coleridge is arguing against a tradition of intellectual condescension to Shakespeare which no longer exists, so it's kind of hard to appreciate where he's coming from. Shakespeare was bracketed off as being wild, untutored, remarkable in his way but not worthy of completely serious regard. Coleridge was among the first to take Shakespeare seriously in a way that we take for granted.

Regarding the appropriation of the "organic form" banner by latter day poetical schools or ideologies: one can only yawn. There is an all-too-obvious potential distinction between the "mechanical" regularity of formal verse and the "organic" irregularity of free verse, & no doubt this has been asserted many times, even though, as you point out, this is clearly not what Coleridge had in mind. The "mechanical" versus "organic" dichotomy and the "formal" versus "free verse" dichotomy have certain resemblances but are not the same: a tempting opportunity for lazy or unscrupulous rhetoric, but a difficult topic for serious thinking. As you say, the "organic" idea can be made to mean just about anything. But taken seriously, it is a subtle & challenging idea.

Re. RCL's posts: puts me in mind of Fahrenheit 451, where, in a world where all the books have been burned, people survive who have memorized the books. RCL would be the guy who has memorized Emerson & Thoreau. What brilliant quotations! Note to self: really gotta read Walden again before I die (or before it gets burned) ….

[Allen Tice]

Chris, what do you think about the Danae fragment of Simonides?

[Gregory Dowling]

Thanks for starting this thread, Chris. A fascinating subject.

Here is Timothy Steele, in Missing Measures, commenting on the use that Charles Olson makes of the concept of organic form:

Nature does not produce in free-form fashion. Its products exhibit definite and predictable formal characteristics [...] If the poet is like a tree whose fruits are poems (or like a gardener whose tomatoes, cabbages and carrots are poems), he presumably more resembles Wyatt writing sonnets, epigrams, and songs than Olson composing the Maximus Poems.