The Poetics of the Physical World

Abstract

At the end of A Season in Hell, where Rimbaud reaches autumn, where his boat turns toward the port of misery, where he surrenders his supernatural claims and knows he has only rough reality to embrace, he says, is necessary to be abso lutely modern. This is a little different from Ezra Pound's phrase, Make it new, which suggests that a poem is a technical act, a thing controllable by the will. I have come to distrust discussions of poetry which are technical. Yet to approach what it might mean to be absolutely I need to touch on what appears to be a technical matter: the uses of form in English poetry?rhyme, meter, and stanza. In their earliest uses in English, rhyme and meter perhaps imitated a supernatural harmony: the regular beat, the foreknown ringing of the rhymes, perhaps echoed a celestial music. In the eighteenth century, when English poetry became more rational and worldly, the outward forms might have reproduced a natural order, so that form became an unconscious test of objective truth: for instance, if a statement couldn't be rhymed, it couldn't be true. For the Roman tics and the Victorians, for whom that supernatural harmony and that natural order had crumbled, rhyme and meter took on a far more energetic function, which was to call back, in poetry, the grace disappearing from everything else. The poem was erected against chaos. The more disorderly reality appeared, the smoother the iambs became, the more elegant the rhymes. It was thought a beautiful achievement, a kind of rescue, to reduce the rhythms of human speech to the iambic foot. In this way poetry, along with so many other human endea vors, undertook the conquest of nature. No nineteenth century poem written in fixed form, unless perhaps something by Clare or Hopkins or Melville, fails to give off the aroma of this essentially nostalgic act. For modern poets?for everyone after Yeats?rhyme and meter, having lost their sacred and natural basis, amount to little more than mechanical aids for writing. Contrary to common opinion, it is easier to write in rhyme and meter than to write without them. At the very least, the exigencies of these forms change the nature of the difficulty, making it more verbal than psychic. When using rhyme and meter one has to be concerned with how to say something, perhaps anything, which fulfills the formal requirements. It is hard to let the poem flow from oneself or move into the open that way. If you were walking through the snow, rhyming would be like following a set of footprints continually appearing ahead of you. Fixed form, in our time anyway, seems to bring you to a place where someone has been before. In a poem, you wish to reach a new place. And this requires pure wandering?that rare condition when you have no external guides at all, only your own, inner impulse to go, or to turn, or to stand still: