NOTES ON
POETRY
(Mostly taken from 'Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, 4th
Edition)
Filmmakers and Poets on the use
of imagery
There is a famous sequence at the end of Lewis Milestones All
Quiet on the Western Front
in which the hero, Paul, a German solider, is shot by a French
sniper. The sniper is shown carefully aiming his rife but all we
see of Paul is his hand stretching out to try and touch a butterfly
that has come to rest. We recognize it as Pauls hand because we
already know he is a butterfly collector, and, because of the
sniper, watch it stretching farther in anxious suspense. Then there
is a shot, the hand jerks, slowly drops, and lies still. Pauls
death is as vivid as if we had seen a full picture of him
dying.
The rife, the hand, the butterfly these are the kind of images
the poet also uses. Agood way to check on the visual imagery in a
poem is to ask: What kind of
camera work would it take to present this image? Could it be filmed
at all?
(R. Stephenson and Jean R. Debrix, The Cinema as Art (Baltimore: Penguin,
1965), p. 207.
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Poetry and
verse
The word verse refers only to the shape an expression takes, not
to its content or quality. Poetry may be in verse, and often does
use some kind of verselike structure. Many poets, for example, have
been attracted by the shape of the sonnet, which arranges rhythms
and rhymes in a definite formation. But the sonnet in itself is
only a verse-form; a sonnet may be poetry or it may no.
Poetry is not poetry because it is in verse; to the shape of verse
it has to add qualities of imagination and emotion and of language
itself.
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Poems are made out of words, the
right words.
The painter Edgar Degas, not content with doing his graceful
paintings of dancing girls, also wanted to write poems. Finding the
literary work difficult, he complained to his friend, the
celebrated poet Mallarmé, that he could not seem to write well,
although he was full of ideas. Mallarmés famous answer was: My
dear Degas, poems are not made out of ideas; theyre made out of
words.
The best ideas, even though they turn into images, are of no avail
as poems unless the words are right just as a statue of even the
noblest subject is a failure if the wood cracks or the marble
shatters.
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On adjectives and
adverbs
Some parts of speech are more necessary than others. Nouns and
verbs are the most important, the most existential nouns
referring to the forms that being can take, verbs to their
activity.
Adjectives and adverbs are hangers-on, with little independent
existence of their own. Used weakly, they are decorative rather
than structural, hence attractive to the apprentice writer, who
needs surface decoration to cover up the architectural flaws.
In his writings on style, Pound constantly warns against
adjectives. Perhaps nothing so weakens a poem as to have the nouns
chaperoned (as Pound said) by adjectives, or the verbs by
adverbs.
What we have been saying about modifiers is a caution, not a rule.
Adjectives and adverbs tend to run to fat, to be sagging appendages
on the bone and muscle of poetry. But just as we need some fat for
the health and contour of the body, so we need some adjectives in
poetry: for precision, for luxuriance, sometimes even for a needed
of muchness.
The most useless adjectives duplicate the meaning of their nouns,
or express a quality implied by it. We have no need of them in such
expression as
celestial stars
fragrant flower
vernal spring
deep abyss
empty chasm
cold winter sun
flaming pyre
fair beauty
soft whispers
sweet perfume
loud strife
bleak waste
stimulating wine
dark forebodings
nobly enshrined
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Inspiration
The ratio between inspiration and deliberate effort differs in
different artists. Music came easily to Mozart, but not to
Beethoven, who had to jot down his ideas, rework them again and
again, sometimes completing a theme twenty-five years after the
idea for it struck him. His way of composing compared with Mozarts
was stodgy and plodding, but the music that resulted was no less
inspired.
So too with poets. Some work rapidly, some slowly. The number of
flashes of inspiration that go into the process may have little to
do with the quality of the poem that results. Frost considered
unfinished one poem he had begun to work on fourteen years before;
he left another lying around nameless for forty years because he
could not find a fourth line that suited him.
It should be stressed again that our inspirations are as
specialized as our minds are. If our whole bent is toward Romance
philology or football strategy, we will not come up with
inspirations in the field of economic theory. Inspirations follow
common-sense rules: We get only the inspirations we are qualified
to receive. And unless we have laid the groundwork by conscious
planning and hard work, there is no inspiration to be hoped
for.
Chance, said Pasteur, favors the prepared mind. Poets have to
condition their minds to produce and handle inspirations. If they
have a vocabulary of only a few hundred words, the unconscious has
very little to work with. If they have taken little notice of the
world around, their minds will suffer from a poverty of images. If
they have not read other poets, they will not know then they are
original and when they are not as if a young physicist, scorning
the achievements of the past, were to spend his time reinventing
the wheel.
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Their own
emotions!
There are literary aspirants who think that the strength of their
own emotions is enough to invigorate the poems they write. But I
felt it so strongly! So sincerely! It came from my heart! they are
likely to protest when the worth of their work is questioned.
Unfortunately their own feelings are beside the point.
Readers are not mind readers or heart reader; they will feel only
what the words and rhythms tell them to. Genuine feeling guarantees
nothing. All bad art, said Oscar Wilde, springs from genuine
feeling genuine feeling, that is, which the artist does not have
the skill, the technique, to put on canvas, to show in stone, or to
embody in a passionate work of words.
Significant emotion, as T.S. Eliot said, is that which has its
life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. Our
expression of an emotion may be so clichéd, so incoherent, so
fulsome as to be wholly inadequate to what we really feel, or think
we feel.
The Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina has warned us about this: When
struck by what seems a brilliant inspiration, she admitted in an
interview, she immediately grew distrustful of it, was careful not
to confuse the intensity of the feeling with the worth of what Ive
written.
The two are not the same, much as some apprentice writers wish they
were. Often when we are carried away by what seems the inspired
quality of any work of art, we forget that only technique enabled
the artist to share those raptures with us. The dancer Rudolf
Nureyev seemed wild and spontaneous when dancing Swan Lake
with Margot Fonteyn, yet, as Miss Fonteyn tells us in her
Autobiography, It was paradoxical that the young boy everyone
thought so wild and spontaneous in his dancing cared desperately
about techniques.
Technique is how we communicate passion in the arts but we need
hardly say that passion has to be there to begin with.
