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

“He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

“The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.” [Footnote: Tennyson, “The Eagle.” ]

Or suppose the poet is a woman, meditating upon the coming of old age, and reflecting that age brings riches of its own. Observe how this thought is “troped”; i.e. turned into figures which represent the fundamental idea:

“Come, Captain Age,

With your great sea-chest full of treasure!

Under the yellow and wrinkled tarpaulin

Disclose the carved ivory

And the sandalwood inlaid with pearl,

Riches of wisdom and years.

Unfold the India shawl,

With the border of emerald and orange and crimson and blue,

Weave of a lifetime.

I shall be warm and splendid

With the spoils of the Indies of age.” [Footnote: Sarah N. Cleghorn, “Come, Captain Age.”]

It is true, of course, that a poet may sometimes prefer to use unornamented language, “not elevated,” as Wordsworth said, “above the level of prose.” Such passages may nevertheless be marked by poetic beauty, due to the circumstances or atmosphere in which the plain words are spoken. The drama is full of such instances. “I loved you not,” says Hamlet; to which Ophelia replies only: “I was the more deceived.” No figure of speech could be more moving than that.

I once found in an old graveyard on Cape Cod, among the sunny, desolate sandhills, these lines graven on a headstone:

“She died, and left to me

This heath, this calm and quiet scene;

This memory of what hath been,

And nevermore will be.”

I had read the lines often enough in books, but here I realized for the first time the perfection of their beauty.

But though a poet, for special reasons, may now and then renounce the use of figurative language, it remains true that this is the characteristic and habitual mode of utterance, not only of poetry but of all emotional prose. Here are a few sentences from an English sailor’s account of the fight off Heligoland on August 28, 1915. He was on a destroyer:

“Scarcely had we started when from out the mist and across our front,

in furious pursuit, came the first cruiser squadron—the town class,

Birmingham, etc.—each unit a match for three Mainzes; and as we

looked and reduced speed they opened fire, _and the clear

‘bang-bang!’ of their guns was just a cooling drink_….

“The Mainz was immensely gallant. The last I saw of her, absolutely

wrecked alow and aloft, her whole midships a fuming inferno, she had

one gun forward and one aft still spitting forth fury and defiance

like a wildcat mad with wounds.

“Our own four-funnel friend recommenced at this juncture with a

couple of salvos, but rather half-heartedly, and we really did not

care a d–-, for there, straight ahead of us, in lordly procession,

like elephants walking through a pack of dogs, came the Lion, Queen

Mary, Invincible, and New Zealand, our battle cruisers, great and

grim and uncouth as some antediluvian monsters. How solid they

looked! How utterly earthquaking!”

The use and the effectiveness of figures depend primarily, then, upon the mood and intentions of the writer. Figures are figures, whether employed in prose or verse. Mr. Kipling does not lose his capacity for employing metaphors as he turns from writing verse to writing stories, and the rhetorician’s analysis of similes, personifications, allegories, and all the other devices of “tropical” language is precisely the same, whether he is studying poetry or prose. Any good textbook in rhetoric gives adequate examples of these various classes of figures, and they need not be repeated here.

8. Words as Permanent Embodiment of Poetic Feeling

We have seen that the characteristic vocabulary of poetry originates in emotion and that it is capable of transmitting emotion to the hearer or reader. But how far are words capable of embodying emotion in permanent form? Poets themselves, in proud consciousness of the enduring character of their creations, have often boasted that they were building monuments more enduring than bronze or marble. When Shakspere asserts this in his sonnets, he is following not only an Elizabethan convention, but a universal instinct of the men of his craft. Is it a delusion? Here are words—mere vibrating sounds, light and winged and evanescent things, assuming a meaning value only through the common consent of those who interchange them, altering that meaning more or less from year to year, often passing wholly from the living speech of men, decaying when races decay and civilizations change. What transiency, what waste and oblivion like that which waits upon millions on millions of autumn leaves!

Yet nothing in human history is more indisputable than the fact that certain passages of poetry do survive, age after age, while empires pass, and philosophies change and science alters the mental attitude of men as well as the outward circumstances of life upon this planet.

Some thoughts and feelings, then, eternalize themselves in human speech; most thoughts and feelings do not. Wherein lies the difference? If most words are perishable stuff, what is it that keeps other words from perishing? Is it superior organization and arrangement of this fragile material, “fame’s great antiseptic, style”? Or is it by virtue of some secret passionate quality imparted to words by the poet, so that the apparently familiar syllables take on a life and significance which is really not their own, but his? And is this intimate personalized quality of words “style,” also, as well as that more external “style” revealed in clear and orderly and idiomatic arrangement? Or does the mystery of permanence reside in the poet’s generalizing power, by which he is able to express universal, and hence permanently interesting human experience? And therefore, was not the late Professor Courthope right when he declared, “I take all great poetry to be not so much what Plato thought it, the utterance of individual genius, half inspired, half insane, as the enduring voice of the soul and conscience of man living in society”?

Answers to such questions as these depend somewhat upon the “romantic” or “classic” bias of the critics. Romantic criticism tends to stress the significance of the personality of the individual poet. The classic school of criticism tends to emphasize the more general and universal qualities revealed by the poet’s work. But while the schools and fashions of criticism shift their ground and alter their verdicts as succeeding generations change in taste, the great poets continue as before to particularize and also to generalize, to be “romantic” and “classic” by turns, or even in the same poem. They defy critical augury, in their unending quest of beauty and truth. That they succeed, now and then, in giving a permanently lovely embodiment to their vision is surely a more important fact than the rightness or wrongness of whatever artistic theory they may have invoked or followed.

For many a time, surely, their triumphs are a contradiction of their theories. To take a very familiar example, Wordsworth’s theory of poetic diction shifted like a weathercock. In the Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads (1798) he asserted: “The following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” In the Preface of the second edition (1800) he announced that his purpose had been “to ascertain how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally endeavour to impart.” But in the famous remarks on poetic diction which accompanied the third edition (1802) he inserted after the words “A selection of language really used by men” this additional statement of his intention: “And at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.” In place of the original statement about the conversation of the middle and lower classes of society, we are now assured that the language of poetry “if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated and alive with metaphors and figures…. This selection will form a distinction … and will entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life.”

What an amazing change in theory in four years! Yet it is no more remarkable than Wordsworth’s successive emendations in the text of his poems. In 1807 his blind Highland boy had gone voyaging in

“A Household Tub, like one of those

Which women use to wash their clothes;

This carried the blind Boy.”

In 1815 the wash-tub becomes

“The shell of a green turtle, thin

And hollow—you might sit therein,

It was so wide and deep.”

And in 1820 the worried and dissatisfied artist changes that unlucky vessel once more into the final banality of

“A shell of ample size, and light

As the pearly car of Amphitrite

That sportive dolphins drew.”

Sometimes, it is true, this adventurer in poetic diction had rather better fortune in his alterations. The much-ridiculed lines of 1798 about the child’s grave—

“I’ve measured it from side to side,

‘T is three feet long and two feet wide”—

became in 1820:

“Though but of compass small and bare

To thirsty suns and parching air.”

Like his friend Coleridge, Wordsworth forsook gradually his early experiments with matter-of-fact phrases, with quaintly grotesque figures. Revolt against conventional eighteenth-century diction had given him a blessed sense of freedom, but he found his real strength later in subduing that freedom to a sense of law. Archaisms, queernesses, flatly naturalistic turns of speech gave place to a vocabulary of simple dignity and austere beauty. Wordsworth attained his highest originality as an artist by disregarding singularity, by making familiar words reveal new potencies of expression.

For after all, we must come back to what William James called the long “loop-line,” to that reservoir of ideas and feelings which stores up the experience of individuals and of the race, and to the words which most effectively evoke that experience. Two classes at Columbia University, a few years ago, were asked to select fifty English words of basic importance in the expression of human life. In choosing these words, they were to aim at reality and strength rather than at beauty. When the two lists were combined, they presented these seventy-eight different words, which are here arranged alphabetically: age, ambition, beauty, bloom, country, courage, dawn, day, death, despair, destiny, devotion, dirge, disaster, divine, dream, earth, enchantment, eternity, fair, faith, fantasy, flower, fortune, freedom, friendship, glory, glow, god, grief, happiness, harmony, hate, heart, heaven, honor, hope, immortality, joy, justice, knell, life, longing, love, man, melancholy,