[oliver murray]

Richard,

De gustibus indeed. One would hardly object to inversions in Whitman – if one takes him one takes the whole kit and caboodle , the sensation of being carried away, as by a tornado or a flood tide, either inspired or inflated, but we are unlikely to find him a useful model for all sorts of reasons. It is probably pointless to try to justify (or otherwise) the past, particularly the very much past, use of inversions in otherwise successful poems as a guide to current practice. In my view there is a case to be made for NEVER using them, and also a case for their occasional use (my position, more or less) if done really well, but NO case to be made for their wholesale and unconsidered use. So far as I know most if not all of us contributing to this discussion are more or less agreed on that.

Mark,

Quote:

“This example very much proves my point: “

Which example? The one I gave? This seems to me a classic case of begging the question, Mark, as you haven’t justified that line at all. It proves the opposite, so far as I am concerned.

Quote:

“we need to get away from the knee-jerk response that all inversions, indeed all variations from the norm, are sinful perversions, not to be tolerated. There are good uses of inversion, just as there are bad uses, and we as readers need to discriminate between them.”

“Perversions” was perhaps an unfortunate phrase, in that you may have taken it literally and it has now given rise to your claim that inversions are thought “wicked” and “sinful” and accuse anyone who objects to them of intolerance and “knee-jerk reactions.” Quasi-religious terms like this are inappropriate for what is really a matter on which readers will make up their minds whatever you or I say. In general, even with the ordinary reader (or should that be non-reader nowadays?) Poetry goes through periods of artificiality and periodic readjustments to contemporary speech. Perhaps it needs more artificiality now, but not the tired inversions of the past. Regarding criticism of poems using inversions on the boards here, it is common for such pieces to contain other faults as well, an allover whiff of the fustian, so it would be difficult to give any sort of general absolution to their use.

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“If Hardy needs to secure his rhymes by twisting syntax, why aren't all of his poems like this?”

Who knows? Can we use his other poems to justify this one? In fact, what has Hardy got to do with this discussion at all? Is even Larkin’s poem, "At Grass" quoted above and written fifty-four years ago, particularly relevant to the use of inversion in the year 2005? It is very much to Larkin’s credit as a poet that we still think of him as contemporary, and I am sure nobody would object to his use of inversion here, but care must be taken in using the past as precedent. How far are you prepared to go?