A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

This distinction is essential to the understanding of poetry. A poem is not primarily a series of printed word-signs addressed to the eye; it is a series of sounds addressed to the ear, and the arbitrary symbols for these sounds do not convey the poem unless they are audibly rendered—except to those readers who, like the skilled readers of printed music, can instantly hear the indicated sounds without any actual rendition of them into physical tone. Many professed lovers of poetry have no real ear for it. They are hopelessly “eye-minded.” They try to decide questions of metre and stanza, of free verse and of emotionally patterned prose by the appearance of the printed page instead of by the nerves of hearing. Poets like Mr. Vachel Lindsay—who recites or chants his own verses after the manner of the primitive bard—have rendered a true service by leading us away from the confusions wrought by typography, and back to that sheer delight in rhythmic oral utterance in which poetry originates.

2. How Words convey Feeling

For it must never be forgotten that poetry begins in excitement, in some body-and-mind experience; that it is capable, through its rhythmic utterance of words which suggest this experience, of transmitting emotion to the hearer; and that the nature of language allows the emotion to be embodied in more or less permanent form. Let us look more closely at some of the questions involved in the origin, the transmission and embodiment of poetic feeling, remembering that we are now trying to trace these processes in so far as they are revealed by the poet’s use of words. Rhythm will be discussed in the next chapter.

We have already noted that there are no mental images of feeling itself. The images recognized by the consciousness of poets are those of experiences and objects associated with feeling. The words employed to revive and transmit these images are usually described as “concrete” or “sensuous” in distinction from abstract or purely conceptual. They are “experiential” words, arising out of bodily or spiritual contact with objects or ideas that have been personalized, colored with individual feeling. Such words have a “fringe,” as psychologists say. They are rich in overtones of meaning; not bare, like words addressed to the sheer intelligence, but covered with veils of association, with tokens of past experience. They are like ships laden with cargoes, although the cargo varies with the texture and the history of each mind. It is probable that this very word “ship,” just now employed, calls up as many different mental images as there are readers of this page. Brander Matthews has recorded a curious divergence of imagery aroused by the familiar word “forest.” Half a dozen well-known men of letters, chatting together in a London club, tried to tell one another what “forest” suggested to each:

“Until that evening I had never thought of forest as clothing itself

in different colors and taking on different forms in the eyes of

different men; but I then discovered that even the most innocent

word may don strange disguises. To Hardy forest suggested the sturdy

oaks to be assaulted by the woodlanders of Wessex; and to Du Maurier

it evoked the trim and tidy avenues of the national domain of France.

To Black the word naturally brought to mind the low scrub of the

so-called deer-forests of Scotland; and to Gosse it summoned up a

view of the green-clad mountains that towered up from the

Scandinavian fiords. To Howells forest recalled the thick woods that

in his youth fringed the rivers of Ohio; and to me there came back

swiftly the memory of the wild growths, bristling unrestrained by

man, in the Chippewa Reservation which I had crossed fourteen years

before in my canoe trip from Lake Superior to the Mississippi. Simple

as the word seemed, it was interpreted by each of us in accord with

his previous personal experience. And these divergent experiences

exchanged that evening brought home to me as never before the

inherent and inevitable inadequacy of the vocabulary of every

language, since there must always be two partners in any communication

by means of words, and the verbal currency passing from one to the other

has no fixed value necessarily the same to both of them.” [Footnote: Brander Matthews, These Many Years. Scribner’s, New York, 1917.]

But one need not journey to London town in order to test this matter. Let half a dozen healthy young Americans stop before the window of a shop where sporting goods are exhibited. Here are fishing-rods, tennis racquets, riding-whips, golf-balls, running-shoes, baseball bats, footballs, oars, paddles, snowshoes, goggles for motorists, Indian clubs and rifles. Each of these physical objects focuses the attention of the observer in more or less exact proportion to his interest in the particular sport suggested by the implement. If he is a passionate tennis player, a thousand motor-tactile memories are stirred by the sight of the racquet. He is already balancing it in his fingers, playing his favorite strokes with it, winning tournaments with it—though he seems to be standing quietly in front of the window. The man next him is already snowshoeing over the frozen hills. But if a man has never played lacrosse, or been on horseback, or mastered a canoe, the lacrosse racquet or riding-whip or paddle mean little to him emotionally, except that they may stir his imaginative curiosity about a sport whose pleasures he has never experienced. His eye is likely to pass them over as indifferently as if he were glancing at the window of a druggist or a grocer. These varying responses of the individual to the visual stimulus of this or that physical object in a heterogeneous collection may serve to illustrate his capacity for feeling. Our chance group before the shop window thus becomes a symbol of all human minds as they confront the actual visible universe. They hunger and thirst for this or that particular thing, while another object leaves them cold.

Now suppose that our half-dozen young men are sitting in the dark, talking—evoking body-and-mind memories by means of words alone. No two can possibly have the same memories, the same series of mental pictures. Not even the most vivid and picturesque word chosen by the best talker of the company has the same meaning for them all. They all understand the word, approximately, but each feels it in a way unexperienced by his friend. The freightage of significance carried by each concrete, sensuous, picture-making word is bound to vary according to the entire physical and mental history of the man who hears it. Even the commonest and most universal words for things and sensations—such as “hand,” “foot,” “dark,” “fear,” “fire,” “warm,” “home”—are suffused with personal emotions, faintly or clearly felt; they have been or are my hand, foot, fear, darkness, warmth, happiness. Now the poet is like a man talking or singing in the dark to a circle of friends. He cannot say to them “See this” or “Feel that” in the literal sense of “see” and “feel”; he can only call up by means of words and tunes what his friends have seen and felt already, and then under the excitement of such memories suggest new combinations, new weavings of the infinitely varied web of human experience, new voyages with fresh sails upon seas untried.

It is true that we may picture the poet as singing or talking to himself in solitude and darkness, obeying primarily the impulse of expression rather than of communication. Hence John Stuart Mill’s distinction between the orator and the poet: “Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind.” [Footnote: J. S. Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry,” in Dissertations, vol. 1. See also F. N. Scott, “The Most Fundamental Differentia of Poetry and Prose.” Published by Modern Language Association, 19, 2.] But whether his primary aim be the relief of his own feelings (for a man swears even when he is alone!) or the communication of his feelings to other persons, it remains true that a poet’s language betrays his bodily and mental history. “The poet,” said Thoreau, “writes the history of his own body.”

For example, a study of Browning’s vocabulary made by Professor C. H. Herford [Footnote: Robert Browning, Modern English Writers, pp. 244-66. Blackwood & Sons. 1905.] emphasizes that poet’s acute tactual and muscular sensibilities, his quick and eager apprehension of space-relations:

“He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing color, of

dazzling light; in the more complex motory-stimulus of intricate,

abrupt and plastic form…. He delighted in the angular, indented,

intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call

for the most delicate, and at the same time most agile, adjustments

of the eye. He caught at the edges of things…. Spikes and

wedges and swords run riot in his work…. He loved the grinding,

clashing and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the

tender-hefted liquids…. He is the poet of sudden surprises,

unforseen transformations…. The simple joy in abrupt changes of

sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of nerve lent support

to his peremptory way of imagining all change and especially all

vital and significant becoming.”

The same truth is apparent as we pass from the individual poet to the poetic literature of his race. Here too is the stamp of bodily history. Hebrew poetry, as is well known, is always expressing emotion in terms of bodily sensation.

“Anger,” says Renan,

[Footnote: Quoted by J. H. Gardiner, The Bible as Literature, p.

114.]

“is expressed in Hebrew in a throng of ways, each picturesque, and

each borrowed from physiological facts. Now the metaphor is taken

from the rapid and animated breathing which accompanies the passion,

now from heat or from boiling, now from the act of a noisy breaking,

now from shivering. Discouragement and despair are expressed by

the melting of the heart, fear by the loosening of the reins.

Pride is portrayed by the holding high of the head, with the figure

straight and stiff. Patience is a long breathing, impatience

short breathing, desire is thirst or paleness. Pardon is expressed

by a throng of metaphors borrowed from the idea of covering, of

hiding, of coating over the fault. In Job God sews up sins in a

sack, seals it, then throws it behind him: all to signify that he

forgets them….

“My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; my

heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.

“Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.

“I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep

waters, where the floods overflow me.

“I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I

wait for my God.”

Greek poetry, likewise, is made out of “warm, swift, vibrating” words, thrilling with bodily sensation. Gilbert Murray [Footnote: “What English Poetry may Learn from Greek,” Atlantic Monthly, November,