METRE-MAKING ARGUMENTSA Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry. By Robert Hass

Abstract

Near the end of Robert Hass’s not-so-little handbook on poetry is a chapter titled ‘Difficult Forms’. We might expect a discourse about the sestina, the canzone, or at least the Spenserian stanza, but Hass has an altogether more ambitious project in mind. Nodding to other poetry manuals (for praise he singles out An Exaltation of Forms by Annie Finch and The Making of a Poem by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland), Hass clarifies that his entry will not so much explain how to write in traditional and emergent verse patterns as it will interrogate ‘the essential expressive gestures inside those forms’ and ‘the persistence of those shapes of thought and feeling’. And yet the chapter in question finds Hass wary of pronouncing discrete categories of ‘formal imagination’ that may inhere in different verse structures. This reticence, or reluctance, betrays him into shrugging off the enormous challenge he had assigned himself in the book’s opening pages. Acknowledging that poetic form is often discussed ‘as if it meant the set of preconditions that made a kind of container for the writing’, he offers this corrective: ‘in the deeper meaning of the term [form], every sonnet has its own form. Every poem is its own form’. Well, thanks a lot. Happily, he doesn’t rest his argument here. It turns out that, for Hass, ‘the heart of the formal experience of the poem’ is occupied by ‘the sentences of the poem, their shape, their relation to line and stanza pattern’. (Elsewhere, in one of many gnomic statements that populate this guide, Hass declares: ‘The hidden paradigm of the single line is the completed sentence, without which idea there would be no enjambment’.)