Hello to quite a large influx of new subscribers, since last week’s essay gained some unexpected purchase. It’s not all controversial reviews of hot recent poetry books I’m afraid . . . This week’s piece is somewhat connected to last week, though, as I was thinking about what it means to master a form as opposed to going through the motions, but also about one of the great mysteries of any real attempt at literary history: what is going on when a new form emerges and catches on? What makes some historical or cultural or political moments open to a greater degree of innovation than average?
We talk a lot about originality when we appraise literature, but of course any literary work has to be vastly more unoriginal than it is original, otherwise it’s not readable at all. A successful poem or story or essay or song has to be in a language its readers understand (or very largely understand), with diction and tone they are familiar with, and a form that is legible to them — that is, they have at least some sense of the generic expectations of what they are reading, and to have learnt how to appreciate its form. Everyone has to learn how to read free verse just as much as they do a sonnet, for instance; and though the gap has noticeably narrowed, I think, just in the last couple of decades, reading contemporary poetry from the US still requires different skills and experience than poetry from the UK. (This is even more true for Anglophone poetry from elsewhere in the world.)
The best way to get a real feel for how narrow the zone of ‘acceptable originality’ really is is to read literature from another time or place. Very quickly indeed, you are completely at sea. Try reading a literal translation of the Rig Veda, for instance, if you have no relevant cultural background or knowledge: it’s hard to make any sense of whatsoever, and most of it won’t seem to be recognisably poetry or liturgy at all. But this can be true much closer to home, as well, especially where a genre or form which was once standard fell at some point completely out of fashion.
So most innovations in literature are incremental at best. (And of course most literature isn’t trying to do anything new anyway.) But for all that, there are moments that are generally recognised as landmarks because something quite new did seem to erupt, or emerge, and find an audience. Scholars will often quibble with the dating and the origins of these watershed moments — I’ve written myself, for instance, about how the mid-late 17th and 18th century craze for ‘Pindaric odes’ in English, which is usually ascribed firmly to Abraham Cowley, actually has its roots in earlier authors, and was imported primarily from contemporary Latin verse, where it was already a fashionable form.1 This is a particularly interesting case, because Cowley probably had political reasons for exaggerating his degree of innovation. Cowley’s Pindarique Odes were first published in 1656, during England’s short-lived experiment with being a Republic. Cowley — who had been a loyal royalist — makes a big song and dance in his introduction and notes to the edition about how he is entirely reconciled to the new regime (honest!) and about how fantastically innovative his collection is: not because he was doing something unprecedented, but rather to distract attention from the existing — and broadly royalist — political connotations of the form he was importing. He expected certain readers to be well aware of the models he wasn’t citing. It’s obvious from contemporary manuscript collections that plenty of readers did so, and in fact the almost immediate popularity of Cowley’s “new” form, and its equally prompt imitation, is probably in itself an indication that it wasn’t actually all that unfamiliar.
But for all these nuances of attribution, there undoubtedly was a great deal of literary innovation in early modernity, which is why it remains such an important and engaging period of literature. For readers and writers of Anglophone poetry today, the closest real watershed is (still) modernism, that moment in the early 20th century which, similarly, saw the emergence and then the enormous influence of a series of genuinely new forms and styles (even if scholars here too can quibble over sources and precedents).2 The prose fiction of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence are genuinely different from what came before; and so is the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and others. Something about the particular cultural and political conditions in the first couple of decades of the century prompted these works to appear, and then — just as crucial — permitted their success: people were ready to read and admire writers of this type, for all the challenges of their work. (By contrast, literary history is littered with examples of innovations which didn’t catch on — a few decades before Cowley, Ben Jonson made a very similar attempt to “Anglicise” the fashionable Latin form of Pindaric odes, without much success; but when Cowley, well aware of Jonson’s model whatever he says, tried again a little later, it was hugely popular.)
Modernism demonstrably changed literature written in English to a very great degree, and this is especially obvious in poetry. Most of the free verse published today is very far removed both metrically and allusively from the sort of thing Eliot, Pound or Bunting were writing, but as a form free verse has achieved near-total dominance. Free verse is the ‘default’ form for contemporary poetry in English, just as iambic pentameters once were, or alexandrines in French.3
This isn’t true in the same way in fiction. There are plenty of experimental novels, but the great majority of novels that sell well are still pretty traditional in their structure and technique; a nineteenth-century reader might be surprised or even shocked by the inclusion of some topics and omission of others, but they wouldn’t have any difficulty accessing most popular contemporary fiction. Poetry in English, notoriously, doesn’t sell, so there is no real comparison to make here — and in fact it’s noticeable that the very small number of poetry books which do sell fairly well also, in fact, follow this rule. If you have read lots of Hardy and Housman you won’t, essentially, have any difficulty appreciating what Larkin or Heaney are doing, and why they are good at it.
Free verse, however, occupies an odd position. You have to have a fairly high degree of specifically literary reading experience to be able to access it at all: as anyone who has taught it knows, inexperienced readers generally find it either altogether baffling (what is it about?) or impossible to distinguish from prose (how is it a poem?); but it is also the dominant form of ‘poetry’ today. In that sense, contemporary English poetry as a whole is culturally more analogous to the Latin literature of the 16th or 17th century than it is to English poetry of the period: essentially a coterie culture, writing by and for the initiated.
But funnily enough, free verse wasn’t really invented by the modernists. Although it never made the move into English (or, as far as I know, any other European vernacular), there was a veritable craze for it in Latin in the mid-late seventeenth century — a period of political, religious and cultural upheaval not dissimilar to that of the early twentieth century. Indeed, many of the surviving examples express strong religious or political emotion (or indeed, most often, both). One of my favourites is by Christopher Wase (1627-90), who was a scholar of Latin metre as well as a poet, so certainly knew just what he was doing by abandoning any of the conventional Latin metres.4 In a particularly helpful notebook entry dated 1 October 1648 he explains his choice of form:
Varietas carminis et delectationem inducit et majestatem concinnat, et versum a pigrâ necessitate expletivarum exemptum dat.5
The [metrical] variety of the poem produces pleasure and contributes to a majestic effect, and also grants the verse an exemption from the tiresome necessity of filling out the lines.
The poem itself, entitled ‘Hypotyposis est Resurrectionis’ (‘A Description of the Resurrection’) is rather remarkable. This is how it begins:
Aura venit terram rimata
Et molli cinerem pretiosum subvehit alâQualis apis rores et mella reportat.Iam passim omnibus aruisHumanam videas flauescere messemSic latebris pecudes paullatim erepere
Which in a fairly literal translation goes something like:
A breeze has come and split the earthAnd lifts on its soft wing the precious ashAs a bee carries dew and honey home.Now all over the fieldsYou would see ripening a human cropLike beasts creeping little by little from their coverts.
This is a description of the resurrection shaped by the experience of civil war: all those so recently dead, cut down in ordinary English fields, standing back up from them, creeping out from behind the trees.
For a couple of decades English manuscript sources are full of Latin poems like this. Their popularity must be linked to the fashion for Cowleian style ‘Pindarics’, but this kind of free verse never fully made the jump into English: English Pindarics are metrically fairly ‘loose’, but to nowhere near the same extent as this sort of free verse in Latin. And while the vogue for English Pindaric verse ran on for the best part of a hundred years, becoming completely — even sometimes wearyingly — mainstream by the early 18th century, before being transformed again with Romanticism, Latin free verse seems to have started to fade almost as soon as the political landscape began to settle: most of these poems, and certainly most of the best ones, date from the 1640s-1660s. We don’t find anything that looks much like Wase’s poem in England again until the dawn of modernism.
Discussed at some length in Chapter 5 of my book, and also in this essay published in a recent book about Cowley. Cowley’s use of Pindarics is only one of several features of the 1656 Poems which seem to be working in this way. Pindaric odes are modelled, of course, on the Greek poet Pindar, but Latin Pindarics had been fashionable across Europe for several decades already, and Cowley draws as much, if not more, on that contemporary form: only two of Cowley’s ‘Pindarics’ are translations of Pindar; two are scriptural paraphrases; one combines scriptural paraphrase and paraphrase of the contemporary Latin poet Casimir Sarbiewski.
I say Anglophone with care: though there are parallel developments in French, the suddenness and coherence of “modernism” is much less marked in French literature. This is partly, of course, because Anglophone authors were in fact importing a lot of their “new” ideas from French.
Though my eldest son had to write a poem for school this week and he was told in no uncertain terms that each line had to have 12 syllables, with a caesura after 6; that the poem must be either 8 or 10 lines long; and that it must rhyme either AABB, ABBA or ABAB. Long live the alexandrine! The teacher is absolutely correct of course: this is by far the most useful measure to have in your head when it comes to reading French poetry as a whole, and a spot of obligatory verse composition is by far the best way to internalise it. In a totally unrelated development, I discovered this amazing tool for finding French rhymes. I’ve never seen anything half as good in English, which leads me to suspect that his teacher is not alone in her choice of homework assignments.
His treatise on the Latin senarius was published in 1687. He also published various classical translations. He studied at Cambridge, but was ejected for royalism in 1650.
Bodleian MS Add. B. 5, fols 63r-62v (reversed). A collection of Wase’s poems and letters, possibly in the hand of his friend, Henry Some.
Has a good history been written of changing metrical trends within the free verse line? From Pound to the present, let's say?
On your note 3, I find rhymezone very good in English, as it will allow you to do true rhyme, slant rhyme (as well as synonyms if a word needs changing) while also allowing syllabic and metrical restrictions on the search.