Poetry is Not the Lever and Fulcrum of Archimedes
“The full-flowering Scottish tradition of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas was defeated when Scotland was defeated.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The Story of Poetry
War changes poetry. Old English verse
Had reached an apogee of polished shapes
When William came along. A Norman curse
Crushed English poetry with Frankish rapes
Of language. Chaucer’s day brought English back.
Then history repeated evil. Wars
And despot threats brought crushing ruin, black
Like swastikas and turned the arts to whores
From 1913/14 onwards. Gas
Attacks revived true poetry again
But briefly. After that the arts en masse
Went mad as if in concentrated pain.
The problem is that artists cannot lift
The world. They cannot cause the slightest shift.
July 22 and 23, 2018
NB This sonnet was originally entitled “Poetry and the World”
I mean, if we stay (in stasis? really? for how long?) in the achieved “apogee” of Old English verse, before the Norman invasion, not only do we never get Chaucer, we never get Shakespeare either, right? Shakespeare’s own energy and the consciousness of a new “golden age” is part of a historical moment that necessarily comes as part of . . . change, right? What we NOW look back on as traditional was once the new thing. To achieve his own “apogee” Shakespeare himself had to progress as a writer, beginning, for example, with a more standard or easily scannable blank verse line which then develops further by actually becoming more flexible, more inventive, less constrained during the period of Lear and Macbeth etc. Shakespeare’s career is a sort of microcosm of that need to always be making it new, reinventing the language of poetry, pushing it to new limits, then exploding those limits and finding something new. Even as Cervantes was reinventing what prose fiction could be, exploding the old romance in the creation of the novel, which MEANS “new,” so . . . I still don’t understand the sense of a generic reaction against modernism, against innovation, in the arts, including poetry. Go back far enough and the classical forms you are now championing were once the avant-garde thing which traditionalists were pooh-poohing. Language itself is constantly in flux, which refreshes it. Your own diction shows this. Within the capsule of the sonnet form the actual language of your own poetry often sounds much more modern (even subversive) than traditional. Indeed, you consciously work to subvert those formal boundaries through your preference for enjambment.
I agree. But this does not REQUIRE changing the sonnet. Clearly several forms of the sonnet in English have been tried out. Most have been pretty much left behind. I have my own estimation about why that is. I have told you why I am opposed NOT TO CHANGE, but to Modernism. Modernims rejected change. It opted for destruction. I have never seen anywhere a doctrine that says the quatrains in a sonnet must each have in it only one thought (as it were). I have never seen anywheres a doctrine that says lines in a sonnet must be end stopped. I have never seen anywhere a doctrine that says enjambment is forbidden in a sonnet. I have never seen anywhere a doctrine that says that in a sonnet each thought/line must have in it a full and self-contained point or that a thought in a line must not be carried over into a subsequent line or into subsequent lines. If any of these doctrines does actually exist, then they have never to my knowledge been stated. For what it’s worth, my experience is that a combination of the rigid rhyme scheme and rigid rhythm of the lines WITH a free flow of thought over the ends of lines causes a very pleasant product. If you find some authoritative expert source on sonneteering who as a complete outlier asserts any of the above doctrines, I suggest you sneer and pitch it into the garbage can. Wordworth disgustingly and arrogantly dispensed with the usual iambic pentameter of sonnets because he set out, like a protoModernist, to destroy the sonnet. He wanted poetry to be written in the speech of the common man. No thanks. Piss off, William. I am and will remain opposed to destruction. I have clearly given you permisson to tinker with poetry. I have asked only that you not try to take me along on that erratic journey. Yes, language changes. That means there will be freedom to use recent language in a rigid form of poetry. Of course. DUH.