[Robert Swagman]

In the Metrical Forum I posted a piece which I consider metrical - each stanza had 4 lines of different metrical length, basic iambic with substitutions, and in each stanza the lines rotated position until they returned to their original position. {Glaring Lights and Critters]}

Thanks to some excellent critiques, questions came up about the differences in formal poetry, metrical poetry and non-metrical. Where's the line? All poetry has rhythm and meter, doesn't it? Is rhyme necessary to a formal piece? When does formal poetry become merely metrical?

Curtis and Chris gave some ideas on the other forum, and Chris and I would like to see the discussion continued.

What's your opinion?
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...ML/002768.html

I'll be out of town for the weekend, but look forward to any commentary.

[chris]

Yes Jerry and others,

I would like to pose some questions to the metrical pandits about het-met verse which uses irregular metrical lines in non-patterned order, along with rhymed or unryhmed conventions.

1) There are many examples of patterned stanzaic het-met verse from literature. When did this trend toward the above-mentioned style emerge?

2) Does it have any ancient antecendents?

3) Are there any examples of IP blank verse which uses some short-footed lines?

4) Is it the closest link-form between MV and FV?


If any one can illuminate of any of these points I would be grateful.


Chris

[This message has been edited by chris (edited November 08, 2002).]

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by Robert Swagman:

" Is rhyme necessary to a formal piece?"

No, unless we consider blank verse (Paradise Lost) informal.

"When does formal poetry become merely metrical?"

When it exploits no alternative feet, when meter doesn't make meaning, when it's metronomical and boring.

Bob

[Kevin Corbett]

This feels a bit like an essay test, but I'll bite.

1) There are many examples of patterned stanzaic het-met verse from literature. When did this trend toward the above-mentioned style emerge?

Well, "trend" isn't really the best word, because it suggests that this is the predominate thing in verse in general, which it isn't. Anyhow, it has, like you say, a lot of precentents, but I see the irregularly metered, but still metered, poem as coming up through Browning, then moving on to Hardy and on from there. Example:

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England--now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge--
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
--Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!



But I'm still a bit confused, because, to tell you the truth, I don't believe there are many poems written in a form of strophe with the same number of lines that don't have a repeating metrical order. Hopkins maybe. For the most part, if the author flips around between meters a lot and is still using meter, he's doing something like Milton did with Lycidas and later, to an even greater extent, with Samson Agonistes, which is borrowed from Italian Canzoneri. Otherwise, verse paragraphs like in Prufrock are a lot more congenial. Lafourge is the same way.

But, if I understand what you're talking about, then the only true example I can think of is pure free-verse, like this one by William Carlos Williams

Poem

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot.


Each stanza has three lines and no particular metrical order.

2) Does it have any ancient antecendents?

I don't think the strophes do. Heterometrical verse, but in long block lines, not strophes. Maybe Pindar, but I can't read Greek. They say Cowley's imitations thereof of pretty loose metrically.

3) Are there any examples of IP blank verse which uses some short-footed lines?

If you'd like to call Greek and Latin quantitive "blank" verse, yes, but not in strophes, at least not if the missing foot doesn't come in the same place in every line (like, the "sapphic" stanza. If you mean English blank verse, then yes, but again, not in strophes--Shakespeare and his contemporaries used three-foot lines here and there to shake things up now and again (they were imitation Virgil in the Aenid).

4) Is it the closest link-form between MV and FV?

Maybe. Lafourge and later Eliot are probably have the most (as Eliot said of himself) vers in their verse libre. Nothing at all like Whitman or Williams.

Before I finish, I'd just like to recant on one matter: there is one very famous poem that uses a quatrain of irregular lines a lot: Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. i.e.--

For three years, out of key with his time
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "The sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start--

No hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half-savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;


I know that many of the poets (and a lot of other people) of today with whom I have a lot in common in my views on meter and form have a lot of reason to hate Mr. Pound, but I still think that, for the most part, Mauberly is still an excellent poem that should be read by anyone who wants to study poetry as much as Prufrock or Sunday Morning and a lot of others that have a lot of clout.

I hope it was as good for you as it was for me.

-Kevin

[Kevin Corbett]

Okay, I think I get the question beter now. By "above mentioned" you meant the "patterned" stanzas. I'll stick with Browning as being the grand, high, mucky-muck thereof (at least, he used it most and best after it had been long abandoned, and he is relatively reccent), which Hardy picked up and passed on to a later generation like Wilbur and Hetch (see, "La Condition Botanique" for a real wild example). The romantics (mainly Keats in his Odes) used it too, but more as a rebellion from the heroic couplet. Then there are the Metaphysicals, and Shakesheare's and a million other Elizabethean's songs, all of which harkens back to Italy and from there back to Provence.

[Tim Love]

"All poetry has rhythm and meter, doesn't it?" - Rhythm yes. Meter not necessarily. Same applies to prose.

"Is rhyme necessary to a formal piece?" - No way. I suspect that of the dozens/hundreds of forms, relatively few use rhyme. Although line-breaks may be significant to a form it's not always clear that the form's a poetic one. Muddying the water further, a friend of mine got their students to write metered prose (to raise their awareness of rhythm, I suppose).

[Robert Swagman]

Some excellent comments here that have given me a lot to think about, but also raise new questions.

For example, Bob, you seem to imply, and forgive me if I'm wrong, that a formal piece needs alternative feet (substitutions} to be interesting - that the quest for, let's say, perfect IP, would result in a less satisfactory piece (in general}than one that use well thought out alternatives.

This is an area I've having trouble developing - proper use of substitutions.

Somewhere I read that coincidence of line tends to work towards a stable (and boring) piece, but that by stretching the phrase or sentence beyond the line, and making use of natural caesura, this would break the metronome effect you mentioned.

So what's the 'ideal'? Perfect meter or meter alleviated with well placed substitutions?

[RCL]

Jerry, if you haven't looked at Browning's "My Last Duchess" lately, you might find another look instructive. Its perfectly rhymed IP couplets never call attention to themselves due to adroit enjambments and uses of cesurae. A tough act to follow.

Cheers,

------------------
Ralph

[This message has been edited by RCL (edited November 10, 2002).]

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by Robert Swagman:

"So what's the 'ideal'? Perfect meter or meter alleviated with well placed substitutions?"

Well, neither. The ideal is a rhythmic poem. The "alleviations" should be felt rather than "well-placed." I think "well-placed" implies something more contrived than a felt rhythm riding over a metrical substructure.

I think of it as dance or jazz, where pauses and duration of sounds are as important as the backbeat. On any dancefloor you can tell the Arthur Murray students, dutifully following the prescribed steps. The "hot" dancers are creating, making art.

Recieved forms are fine requirements, but the rhythms you create within them are the art. A prescribed meter is a wonderful trigger to making the art, but not the art.

As Alicia has pointed out somewhere on these boards, most of our multi-syllablic words are essentially trochaic. We'd expect , then, to see plenty of trochaic verse. But we don't because we expect to hear prescribed iambic constructions, the trochee becoming a substituion. But there's nothing wrong, IMO, with substituting trochaic runs or cataleptic lines for enhanced rhythms. I don't think a poem should necessarily retain the same pace throughout.

I guess I'm saying that I don't want to get bogged down by meter, to become an Arthur Murray dancer. I want my own work to sound original, like fine pop songs, say, "Eleanor Rigby" or Randy Newman's "Sail Away." Newman's a master at running beautiful, ironic rhythms over a traditional beat.

Alan Sullivan is (or was) a songwriter. You might ask him to chip in here.

I must say that I'm surprised at how many critics here pick away at minute points of metrical technique. My attitude is often, "You've got to be kidding!" The critical behavior runs quite contrary to the critics-turned-poets who claim to write according to their ear without considering scansion. I sometimes feel that what I present is read by scansion radar.

HOWEVER, I receive plenty of excellent suggestions that I feel enhance the rhythm of my piece, and often the suggestions focus on meter. One can stray TOO far from meter.

Bob

[chris]

Kevin,

Thanks for the excellent het met background and I am chasing up some of the Cowely at the moment. I will be back to respond to some of your points soon.

Chris