Notes on Poetic Form (III) by David Lehman

III.

The question of measure and meter has been undergoing reexamination of late -- inevitably, as poets discuss and dispute their ideas about form. Brad Leithauser, in a controversial essay entitled "Metrical Literacy", has argued that "poetry is a craft which, like carpentry, requires a long apprenticeship merely to assimilate its tools" and that meter is a true and perhaps indispensable implement in the trade. "Metrical illiteracy is, for the poet, functional illiteracy," Leithauser concludes. Nor is he alone in taking arms against plain speech: more than one poet has noted, with pleasure or alarm, that their contemporaries have brought back meter as a vital concern. The debate on the question is far from being one- or even two-sided. Douglas Crase, for example, doesn't place any the less value on finding a true measure even if he is little concerned with anapests and dactyls. What Crase wants is a meter suitable to an American vernacular and an American reality. He proposes "the 'civil meter' of American English, the meter we hear in the propositions offered by businessmen, politicians, engineers, and all our other real or alleged professionals. If you write in this civil meter, it's true you have to give up the Newtonian certainties of the iamb. But you gain a stronger metaphor for conviction by deploying the recognizable, if variable patterns of the language of American power."

Perhaps it would help to clarify the question of prosody, without simplifying it too much, if we rephrased it as an issue involving the desired amount of resistance that the poet wishes his medium to exert. Let two English poets argue the question for us. Here is Craig Raine defending his preference for unrhymed couplets in his book A Martian Sends a Postcard Home: "Technique is something you learn in order to reach a point where you're writing what you want with the minimum of interference. The unrhymed couplet interested me as something in which I could write fluently. Any verse, however, with a fair amount of freedom in it is actually much harder to write than strict verse." By contrast, Geoffrey Hill endorses "the proposal that form is not only a technical containment but is possibly also an emotional and ethical containment. In the act of refining technique one is not only refining emotion, one is also constantly defining and redefining one's ethical and moral sensibility." What Hill wants is more resistance, not less; he distrusts the very fluency that Raine prizes, and opts for a "harder" severity than "freedom" allows for. Hill endorses C.H. Sisson's remark: "There is in Hill a touch of the fastidiousness of Crashaw, which is that of a mind in search of artifices to protect itself against its own passions." Form as artifice or form as the path of least resistance, a maze or a straight line, a way of reining in the imagination or a method for letting it roam free, a container or a ceaseless stream: the permutations are endless.


[from The Line Forms Here (Poets on Poetry series, University of Michigan Press, 1992); adapted from the afterword of Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, ed. David Lehman (Macmillan, 1987)]