[grasshopper]

Albert,
You seem to like to make sweeping statements, but where is your authority for:
'Whereas, it would have been a common reply in the mid 19th Century to say. "I wrote poetry last night." ' ?

Actually, apart from a small moneyed class, who had the leisure, as well as the inclination, I suspect most people were far too busy working long hard hours, trying to make a crust to keep them and their families alive to have time to write poetry.

I find it interesting that you specify writing poetry, rather than reading poetry, but this needs a separate thread, I think.

Regards, Maz

[Alexander Grace]

Janet, I think language can be said to be artificial, though I don't really like making distinctions between natural and artificial phenomena - they only make sense from our perspective, not objectively.

Alex

[albert geiser]

grasshopper-


Sure, I can find sources for you on how poetry writing was a common practice in the 19th Century. Offhand I have here the foreward to a recent translation of Heinrich Heine's love poems, translated by Walter W. Arndt, with the foreward by Jeffrey L. Sammons:

"... In those days Germany was full of verse, Everyone wrote it, from schoolchildren to government ministers, even the King of Bavaria, and, if possible, published it in Almanacs, calendars, journals, and newspapers. It had become too easy to write; the ubiquity dulled critical discrimination..."

You would find it was the same throughout Europe. I believe that in the U.S. there was relatively less verse writing. Americans fell in love with the camera. However, verse was still much more frequently written in the U.S. then than now. But academic criticism had not been a part of American life to be dulled in the first place. Nevertheless, American literature was at a high point circa 1850, and I'll bet you more American Presidents wrote verse for pleasure in that period through Abraham Lincoln, than since.

You can catch me in one of my sweeping statements sometime, but not this one...

[This message has been edited by albert geiser (edited April 19, 2005).]

[Janet Kenny]

Alexander,
But we are programmed with our birth language. Poetry begins there I think. Well poetry that pleases me anyway. I'm not saying we can't experiment with language. It's just that the umbilical is the birth language.
Janet

Hello ‘Sphreians:

When working with any type of form, I try to see how the form ought to be used to best advantage. It seems like the features of the form ought to be able to define the form to some extent. The obvious features of the cinquain are the gradually increasing line lengths, followed by a sudden decrease: 2-4-6-8-2 syllables, or, as I’ve heard it is more correctly 1-2-3-4-1 stresses, preferably iambic (though AC herself did not rigorously stick to iambics). I assume relief feet could be applied in this form as in any iambic form, though obviously with less opportunity due to the brevity. The increasing line length followed by the cut off implies lines of increasing importance, or weight, followed by…something—say a turn, an ironic twist, a throwback to the first line, a letdown, or some kind of tension/anticipation between lines 4 and 5, created by the choice of word to break on.

As has been stated by others, the form itself is perhaps neither inherently good nor bad. It is suitable for some subjects, and unsuitable for others. It has challenges that other forms don’t. No, it can’t achieve the melodic rhythm of a sonnet nicely crafted. Not can it have the repeating beauty of a villanelle. But it can maximize tension between lines. It can provide a sharp twist or turn, or highlight the use of irony. It can demonstrate how brevity is sometimes superior to…the alternative. It seems like it is one more form to add to the poet’s toolbox. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. I don’t like free verse, and I don’t use it, but I don't denigrate it. Perhaps someday I’ll grow up and add free verse to my toolbox. I do like the challenge that cinquains give: writing metrical verse that maximizes the use of line breaks and seeks to select subject, phrases, and words that fit the form—or that the form fits.

It is a shame that Adelaide Crapsey died so young. Who knows what she might have done with the form if she had lived a few more decades.

Best Regards,
DAT


[This message has been edited by David A Todd (edited April 20, 2005).]

[Peter Chipman]

Hi, Maz.

I think it depended where you were. There was an unusual degree of cultural development among the young women working in the factories in New England; in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, the "mill-girls" had their own literary magazine, publishing fiction, non-fiction, and a whole lot of poetry. They lived in boarding-houses whose parlors boasted pianos or pianolas, and many of them attended lectures at the local lyceums. (In the mid-19th century, New England boasted the highest literacy rates in the world, and exported schoolteachers to the rest of America.) Dickens, who had witnessed the squalor of English factory workers' lives in Manchester and Birmingham, writes with amazement of all this in his "American Notes."

The fact that he was so amazed by it, of course, suggests the degree to which these conditions were the exception rather than the rule throughout Anglophonia. I suspect there's at least as much truth to your position as to Albert's.

-Peter

(apologies to all for further digression from thread topic)

[grasshopper]

Albert,
'Everyone wrote it, from schoolchildren to government ministers, even the King of Bavaria,'

Overlooking the obvious hyperbole there, there is that whole spectrum of people between schoolchildren (who are still made to write poetry as part of their education) and the genteel and aristocratic classes. What of the working class who were busy working and labouring?
And even if I accepted as a fact that Everyone in Germany at that time was writing poetry, I don't see that can be simply extrapolated to the whole of Europe, with all its varied educational and social systems.


Michael,
I've just read some of the latest issue of Amaze, and I must say I've moved closer to your position on cinquains--lol. I'm not at all impressed.

Regards, Maz

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

I think Maz has it right regarding the monied classes of the 19th century and the writing (and reading) of poetry, though to find what actual attitudes were, perhaps it might be best to turn to a period source?

From Jane Austen:

<STRIKE>Capable Anne Elliot quickly rushed to his aid, casting an irritated glance at the naval hero who was looking on in total ineptitude, and instructed Mr Ferrars to carry Caroline to the nearest farmhouse where she was put to bed. She then sent him off to fetch the apothecary post haste. When he returned and the apothecary said Caroline could not be moved, Anne Elliot swiftly pulled a book of sonnets from her reticule, handed them to a bewildered Mr Ferrars, and ordered him to sit watch over Miss Bingley until what time she should awake. Edward Ferrars took her at her word, and was two weeks in that chair. Long enough to have memorised all the poems in the book; he had accomplished this by reading them out loud, and later Marianne Dashwood was heard to say that Miss Bingley should have woken much sooner if he had desisted. He did have a very lack-lustre reading style.

and elsewhere:</STRIKE> {Note: Perils of web research. The above is not from Austen herself, but a really good imitation from a novel called "Sofie" published at the Austen.com website . Thanks to Peter for the catch. The later two are actually from Northanger Abbey, however.}

So far her improvement was sufficient -- and in many other points she came on exceedingly well; for though she could not write sonnets, she brought herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte, of her own composition, she could listen to other people's performance with very little fatigue.

and Jane Austen in rant mode about the poetry publications of the time:

The progress of the friendship between Catherine and Isabella was quick as its beginning had been warm, and they passed so rapidly through every gradation of increasing tenderness that there was shortly no fresh proof of it to be given to their friends or themselves. They called each other by their Christian name, were always arm in arm when they walked, pinned up each other's train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the set; and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding -- joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens -- there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader -- I seldom look into novels -- Do not imagine that I often read novels -- It is really very well for a novel." Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss -- ?" "Oh! It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.

I think Austen reports, quite credibly, that at the cusp of the 18th-19th century (the above from Northanger Abbey, scheduled for publication in 1803, but as I can say as a novelist, obviously started sometime earlier), that the practice of reading and writing poetry was considered genteel and fashionable, but not generally something that people actually did in everyday life, even those of the leisure and monied classes.

An awful lot like today, in fact.


[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited April 20, 2005).]

[nyctom]

Actually the last piece of writing Austen did--written three days before her death--was a piece of very amusing light verse about St. Swithin. And she was a big fan of Cowper.

I don't think she's decrying verse so much as she is defending her turf as a novelist, particularly as a writer of domestic comedies, not precisely the hottest genre of fiction at the time.

[Alexander Grace]

The strange thing is that while people don't talk about it that much, most people I know either write or have written some poetry, and when I mention the subject, again a majority of people will cite a favourite poet or poem - often Tennyson, Poe, Plath, Shelly, Yeats, Benjamin Zephania, Lear, Byron, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Larkin etc etc.

I think people do have an appetite for poetry, but other media forms such as TV are more immediate and allow the viewer to be passive (as Proust suggested, the brain is a very lazy organ except in times of stress, which perhaps explains the number of confessional poems around).

But then again, I was watching the excellent Taxi Driver the other day, an extremely popular film amongst cinema literate young people, and De-Niro's monologues are pure poetry. How much more charged with meaning can you get than:

'All the animals come out at night -
whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens,
fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal.
Someday a real rain will come
and wash all this scum off the streets.'

or

'The days go on and on...
they don't end. All my life needed was a sense
of someplace to go. I don't believe
that one should devote his life
to morbid self-attention,
I believe that one should become
a person like other people. '

I have taken the liberty of applying line breaks to found text, both in the tradition of Yeats and because I'm worth it (snigger).

Cinema is an extremely assimilative artform. It often failed to hold itself in high regard during its formative years and was perhaps less ashamed to magpie from other forms. More fundamentally, its very nature enabled it to incorporate elements of all other non-interactive artforms.

So maybe people are going elsewhere for the same fix?

However, I think standalone poetry has so much potential because it offers the reader an experience that is uniquely his, precisely because he is forced to do the hard work. The poem gives you the bones, but you must put flesh on them through an exercise of the imagination; more so than with any other form, the audience is the artist.

In a culture like ours where we have had our imaginations blunted through an excess of passively received sensation I think poetry is needed more than ever - it is the difference between a roller coaster ride and flying.

Alex