A Study of Poetry, Bliss Perry [books to read to improve english .txt] 📗
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The need here is to look at an old subject with fresh eyes. Teachers who are fond of music or painting or sculpture can invent many illustrations following the hint given in the Orpheus and Eurydice passage in the text. Among recent books, Fairchild’s Making of Poetry and Max Eastman’s Enjoyment of Poetry are particularly to be commended for their unconventional point of view. See also Fairchild’s pamphlet on Teaching of Poetry in the High School, and John Erskine’s paper on “The Teaching of Poetry” (_Columbia University Quarterly_, December, 1915). Alfred Hayes’s “Relation of Music to Poetry” (Atlantic, January, 1914) is pertinent to this chapter. But the student should certainly familiarize himself with Theodore Watts-Dunton’s famous article on “Poetry” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, now reprinted with additions in his Renascence of Wonder. He should also read A. C. Bradley’s chapter on “Poetry for its Own Sake” in the Oxford Lectures on Poetry, Neilson’s Essentials of Poetry, Stedman’s Nature and Elements of Poetry, as well as the classic “Defences” of Poetry by Philip Sidney, Shelley, Leigh Hunt and George E. Woodberry. For advanced students, R. P. Cowl’s Theory of Poetry in England is a useful summary of critical opinions covering almost every aspect of the art of poetry, as it has been understood by successive generations of Englishmen.
This chapter, like the first, will be difficult for some students. They may profitably read, in connection with it, Professor Winchester’s chapter on “Imagination” in his Literary Criticism, Neilson’s discussion of “Imagination” in his Essentials of Poetry, the first four chapters of Fairchild, chapters 4, 13, 14, and 15 of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, and Wordsworth’s Preface to his volume of Poems of 1815. See also Stedman’s chapter on “Imagination” in his Nature and Elements of Poetry.
Under section 2, some readers may be interested in Sir William Rowan Hamilton’s account of his famous discovery of the quaternion analysis, one of the greatest of all discoveries in pure mathematics:
“Quaternions started into life, or light, full grown,
on Monday, the 16th of October, 1843, as I was walking
with Lady Hamilton to Dublin, and came up to
Brougham Bridge, which my boys have since called the
Quaternion Bridge. That is to say, I then and there
felt the galvanic circuit of thought close, and the sparks
which fell from it were the _fundamental equations between
i, j, k; exactly such_ as I have used them ever since.
I pulled out on the spot a pocket-book, which still exists,
and made an entry on which, at the very moment, I felt
that it might be worth my while to expend the labor of
at least ten (or it might be fifteen) years to come. But
then it is fair to say that this was because I felt a problem
to have been at that moment solved—an intellectual
want relieved—which had haunted me for at least
ifteen years before_. Less than an hour elapsed before I
had asked and obtained leave of the Council of the
Royal Irish Academy, of which Society I was, at that
time, the President—to read at the next General Meeting
a Paper on Quaternions; which I accordingly did, on
November 13, 1843.”
The following quotation from Lascelles-Abercrombie’s study of Thomas Hardy presents in brief compass the essential problem dealt with in this chapter. It is closely written, and should be read more than once.
“Man’s intercourse with the world is necessarily formative. His
experience of things outside his consciousness is in the manner of a
chemistry, wherein some energy of his nature is mated with the energy
brought in on his nerves from externals, the two combining into
something which exists only in, or perhaps we should say closely around,
man’s consciousness. Thus what man knows of the world is what has been
formed by the mixture of his own nature with the streaming in of the
external world. This formative energy of his, reducing the incoming
world into some constant manner of appearance which may be appreciable
by consciousness, is most conveniently to be described, it seems, as an
unaltering imaginative desire: desire which accepts as its material, and
fashions itself forth upon, the many random powers sent by the world to
invade man’s mind. That there is this formative energy in man may easily
be seen by thinking of certain dreams; those dreams, namely, in which
some disturbance outside the sleeping brain (such as a sound of knocking
or a bodily discomfort) is completely formed into vivid trains of
imagery, and in that form only is presented to the dreamer’s
consciousness. This, however, merely shows the presence of the active
desire to shape sensation into what consciousness can accept; the dream
is like an experiment done in the isolation of a laboratory; there are
so many conflicting factors when we are awake that the events of sleep
must only serve as a symbol or diagram of the intercourse of mind with
that which is not mind—intercourse which only takes place in a region
where the outward radiations of man’s nature combine with the
irradiations of the world. Perception itself is a formative act; and all
the construction of sensation into some orderly, coherent idea of the
world is a further activity of the central imaginative desire. Art is
created, and art is enjoyed, because in it man may himself completely
express and exercise those inmost desires which in ordinary experience
are by no means to be completely expressed. Life has at last been
perfectly formed and measured to man’s requirements; and in art man
knows himself truly the master of his existence. It is this sense of
mastery which gives man that raised and delighted consciousness of self
which art provokes.”
I regret that Professor Lowes’s brilliant discussion of “Poetic Diction” in his Convention and Revolt did not appear until after this chapter was written. There are stimulating remarks on Diction in Fairchild and Eastman, in Raleigh’s Wordsworth, in L. A. Sherman’s Analytics of Literature, chapter 6, in Raymond’s Poetry as a Representative Art, and in Hudson Maxim’s Science of Poetry. Coleridge’s description of Wordsworth’s theory of poetic diction in the Biographia Literaria is famous. Walt Whitman’s An American Primer, first published in the Atlantic for April, 1904, is a highly interesting contribution to the subject.
No theoretical discussion, however, can supply the place of a close study, word by word, of poems in the classroom. It is advisable, I think, to follow such analyses of the diction of Milton, Keats and Tennyson by a scrutiny of the diction employed by contemporary poets like Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg.
The following passages in prose and verse, printed without the authors’ names, are suggested as an exercise in the study of diction:
1. “The falls were in plain view about a mile off, but very distinct,
and no roar—hardly a murmur. The river tumbling green and white, far
below me; the dark, high banks, the plentiful umbrage, many bronze
cedars, in shadow; and tempering and arching all the immense
materiality, a clear sky overhead, with a few white clouds, limpid,
spiritual, silent. Brief, and as quiet as brief, that picture—a
remembrance always afterward.”
2. “If there be fluids, as we know there are, which, conscious of a
coming wind, or rain, or frost, will shrink and strive to hide
themselves in their glass arteries; may not that subtle liquor of the
blood perceive, by properties within itself, that hands are raised to
waste and spill it; and in the veins of men run cold and dull as his
did, in that hour!”
3. “On a flat road runs the well-train’d runner,
He is lean and sinewy with muscular legs,
He is thinly clothed, he leans forward as he runs,
With lightly closed fists and arms partially rais’d.”
4. “The feverish heaven with a stitch in the side,
Of lightning.”
5. “Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are
the wine of the bloodshed of things.”
6. “Dry clash’d his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels.”
7. “As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; their dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there:
Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud.”
8. “For the main criminal I have no hope
Except in such a suddenness of fate.
I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night’s black was burst through by a
blaze—
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and
bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.”
A fresh and clear discussion of the principles governing Rhythm and Metre may be found in C. E. Andrews’s Writing and Reading of Verse. The well-known books by Alden, Corson, Gummere, Lewis, Mayor, Omond, Raymond and Saintsbury are indicated in the Bibliography. Note also the bibliographies given by Alden and Patterson.
I have emphasized in this chapter the desirability of compromise in some hotly contested disputes over terminology and methods of metrical notation. Perhaps I have gone farther in this direction than some teachers will wish to go. But all classroom discussion should be accompanied by oral reading of verse, by the teacher and if possible by pupils, and the moment oral interpretations begin, it will be evident that “a satisfied ear” is more important than an exact agreement upon methods of notation.
I venture to add here, for their suggestiveness, a few passages about Rhythm and Metre, and finally, as an exercise in the study of the prevalence of the “iambic roll” in sentimental oratory, an address by Robert G. Ingersoll.
1. “Suppose that we figure the nervous current which corresponds to consciousness as proceeding, like so many other currents of nature, in waves—then we do receive a new apprehension, if not an explanation, of the strange power over us of successive strokes…. Whatever things occupy our attention—events, objects, tones, combinations of tones, emotions, pictures, images, ideas—our consciousness of them will be heightened by the rhythm as though it consisted of waves.”
EASTMAN, The Enjoyment of Poetry, p. 93.
2. “Rhythm of pulse is the regular alternation of units made up of beat and pause; rhythm in verse is a measured or standardized arrangement of sound relations. The difference between rhythm of pulse and rhythm in verse is that the one is known through touch, the other through hearing; as rhythm, they are essentially the same kind of thing. Viewed generally and externally, then, verse is language that is beaten into measured rhythm, or that has some type of uniform or standard rhythmical arrangement.”
FAIRCHILD, The Making of Poetry, p. 117.
3. “A Syllable is a body of sound brought out with an independent, single, and unbroken breath (Sievers). This syllable may be long or short, according to the time it fills; compare the syllables in merrily with the syllables in corkscrew. Further, a syllable may be heavy or
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