1.1. WHY WRITE VERSE?

Verse is a means to an end, a step towards what may, with the right gifts and effort, become poetry. It enables a piece of writing to be effective, moving and beautiful.

Verse writing comes in many forms. Much turned out in schools, creative writing courses, prisons and rehabilitation units aims at something other than art. It attempts to teach the rudiments of literary composition, to encourage self-expression, to explore the writer's psyche and to penetrate the sources of distress or antisocial behaviour. Art has grander aims, being the language closest to human experience. Poetry, said Aristotle, is superior to history because it uses words in their fuller potential, and creates representations more complete and more meaningful than nature can give us in the raw. Man needs coherence and consistency in his affairs, and the arts provide meaning, significance and purpose in a universe that seems increasingly strange and hostile. Words are not neutral entities, say the Postmodernists, but have intentions, associations and histories of usage. What we understand of the world is largely through language, and poetry may indeed clear the portals of vision.

Poetry may even achieve a special mode of knowledge — an essential, full and vital representation of the world where other representations are abstract and abbreviated. Facts are not rendered more exact by being expressed in a grey, abstract, bureaucratic language, and indeed philosophy's extended attempt this last hundred years to find a logically transparent language has been an heroic failure. Language is irremediably metaphoric, and speaks through analogies and parables. Poetry is aware of the past usages of words, their latent properties, their aspirations, deceits and corruptions, and it is therefore poetry that records the greater truth.

Or can do. We call serious the poetry that causes us to see ourselves and the world in greater depth and clarity. Its truth, its moral dimensions and its wider social significance are things that seize us immediately. The blood is chilled, and we see for the first time what should have been obvious. Life and poetry occupy very different spheres, but with poetry we travel with our eyes open through a world that is cruel, enticing and beautiful. We understand our place in the larger scheme of things, which was possibly our birthright before science and the minutia of everyday life locked us out.

Remember that:

1. Dedication to poetry is generally a vow of poverty. Scant reward comes in money or reputation. As in other arts, a more decent living is to be found on the periphery — in teaching, commentating on and/or performing poetry.

2. Poetry is a calling, not a career, and only adolescents strut around as wannabe poets.

3. Despite exhortation, hype and extensive funding, poetry is no longer the queen of the arts. It has minority status — worthy, but not courted by publishers or the media.

4. The rewards of poetry are those of a skilled craftsman in a difficult medium, one that gives great opportunities, and enormous pleasure when the work succeeds.

5. Poetry is still the workshop of language, and things can be explored in poetry that escape prose. Indeed, for all the current difficulties, poetry has the most innovative, exciting and significant of today's writing. To contribute here is to join a select community, and enter into a kinship with the serious writers of the past.

The sensible author will want to know what to aim for, which movement or group to join.

The broadest grouping is into professionals and amateurs, but even professional poets disagree as to what is or should be good poetry, and make strenuous efforts to belong to the right movement. You can only appreciate such coterie politics by jumping into the swim of events — writing, editing, reviewing — but you will need eventually to declare for one or other of the current types of poetry, and modify your output accordingly. Your pattern of acceptances will be a guide, but also helpful will be extensive reading, particularly the critical work of the 'enemy camp'.

Professionals

Many dream of the time when they can really get down to writing, without the need to put food on the table and create a name for themselves in their day-to-day jobs and local community. Why not become a professional, a career poet, turning out collections regularly from prestigious presses, and taking a recognized part in conferences, courses and workshops?

Some hundreds of poets do that, becoming writers in residence at universities, or accredited workshop conveners at writing colleges or community centres. Poetry was, is, and always will be an essential part of their lives, whatever the cost, however financially or socially unrewarding. They spend their last penny on poetry collections, and can remember precisely when they encountered an author later important to them.

Note the unquenchable interest, contacts and background. Professional poets make careers for themselves in one or more of the following ways:

1. Take a Master of Fine Arts degree, and become a writer in residence etc. at some recognized university or college of further education.

2. Follow a university English course by a Ph.D., but spend much of their time writing and associating with poets, promoting their work and being promoted in turn.

3. Become officers of poetry institutions, again hobnobbing with poets and becoming part of the publicity machine.

4. Teach in an English faculty, many of which run a magazine publishing certain types of poetry and their important names.

5. Work in a publishing house, particularly those few that bring out poetry collections or literary novels.

6. Join the poetry performing circuit, building up a loyal public and issuing collections of their popular numbers.

Of course there are dangers. One is the need to publish collections at regular intervals, regardless of quality, simply to prove credentials. Another is the ease with which literary activities can substitute for the real thing, which is writing. Everything is easier than writing poetry, or poetry that's any good, and perhaps only the most uncompromising (and sometimes difficult) characters survive the temptation.

Amateurs

But perhaps you're not a career poet at all, but an amateur in the best sense of the word, who has produced a substantial body of work. How do you get your precious lifeblood published?

1. You're earned the money to self publish at no cost spared. You find a reputable publisher, talk to local bookstores and place your work on Amazon Books.

2. You don't have the $1,000 + needed to 'publish and be damned'. Your options:

1. Join a local poetry group and publish in their occasional anthology.

2. Submit to the many ezines springing up on the Internet, and disappearing as fast again.

3. Submit to one of the long-established small poetry or literary magazines.

4. Self-publish an anthology of your work: traditional or print-on-demand.

5. Run your own magazine or literary website.

1.2. POETRY: A THEORETICAL DEFENCE

Any decent poetry book will make the points above. A more detailed and theoretical defence of poetry in an age of science and consumerism would proceed more as follows

1.2.1. A Superior Truth

Poetry is one way of telling the truth, a way often superior to others. How so?

One argument goes back to Aristotle, to his famous distinction between history and poetry. History reports what happened, and is therefore subject to all the constraints and imperfections of actual life. No general is a perfect embodiment of courage in battle, steadfastness in adversity, far-sightedness in decision-making, etc. But poetry uses words in their fuller potential, and creates representations that are more complete and meaningful than nature can give us in the raw.

A second argument borrows the approach of the Postmodernists, who claim that what we experience of the world is with and through language. The claim is greatly exaggerated, since we all have experiences not readily conveyed in words — riding a bike, listening to music, etc. — and meaning is not finally anchored in mere words but in bodily physiology and social usage. But language undoubtedly does colour our perceptions and modify responses, which politicians and the media understand very well. Words are not therefore neutral entities, but have intentions, associations, histories of usage, which in poetry are given their truer natures by employing the traditional resources of language. Rhythm, segregation into lines, metaphor etc. are not ornament, something added and inessential, but a means to a more exact commentary and expressive power. In this sense, the ordinary language of commerce and the professions, as that of everyday speech, is a stunted, stripped down and abbreviated shadow of what poetry should achieve.

Furthermore, there is no "standard language", but only a wide spectrum of usage from which we select for the purpose in hand. Even everyday speech is not a natural benchmark since each of us — as every playwright knows — uses speech slightly differently: according to our personality, the occasion, our social standing, whom we're addressing, what we want to express or get done. Our words may be apt or off the point, but they are not more natural for being used loosely or 'instinctively'. We admire the speaker who achieves exactly what is needed in a certain situation, and that exactness, but more honest, more personal, more considered, is what we look for in poetry. Poetry has more time at its disposal, and much greater resources of language, and its appropriateness is indeed governed by what the classical and renaissance worlds knew as rhetoric.

The point needs emphasizing. Unbeknown to most poets, British and American philosophy has attempted to find a language that should be logically transparent and free of ambiguity. That language should express the truth when all paraphrase is stripped away. It should state irreducible facts that are independent of their expression. The search has lasted the better part of a century, and has comprehensively failed. It cannot be done. What has emerged, with a greater understanding of such enterprises generally, is the extent to which philosophic enquiry itself is governed by rules, standard expressions and agreed procedures. In this regard, philosophy seems close to poetry, though its creations are very different. Both aim at truth, but a truth based on different perceptions.

So arise some important consequences for poetry writing. Poetry is not exempt from the requirements of the other literary arts. It is not mere fancy, but an attempt to tell the truth in a fuller and more authentic manner. We still want that truth to be new-fashioned and not simply imported from other experiences or situations — one argument against cliché — but we do not judge that truth by originality. We need the new-fashioning to be appropriate, illuminating, to sharpen rather than distort perception and understanding. We judge a particular phrase or line in the context of the poem as a whole, and the poem itself against the poet's larger work and outlook. To say of a novel "I didn't believe in the setting" is to make a damaging criticism, and poetry needs also to be underwritten by experience.

1.2.2. Poetry Reconciles Us to the World

However different we may be from other members of the animal kingdom in constructing our own world through thought, insight and artistic creation, human beings also need coherence and consistency in their surroundings. In this broader sense, the history of western art is a search for purpose in a increasingly strange and hostile universe. Since the demise of medieval theology, and the fragmentation of knowledge, the great intellectual traditions of the west have attempted to find some bedrock of belief, something that is fundamental and cannot be questioned further. The attempt seems to have failed. Whatever else the past century has learned, one thing has become clear: the world is stranger and more various than anything our intellectual equipment can encompass.

So has grown the great influence of the arts in western societies. The arts are not reductive, but seek pattern, order and consistency in the very midst of variety. Poetry may not change the world — much though Marxists insist that it should — but it can enable us to see life whole, with clarity and understanding. The great theatre of the world is written in verse, and its poetry reconciles us to the manifest absurdities, injustices and cruelties of our natures. In art we put aside the struggle for individual pre-eminence, said Schopenhauer, and learn to see life as it is directly given to us through timeless ideas.

1.2.3. Demanding and Satisfying

For much of its history, poetry has been the product of a highly educated, leisured class. Reams of competent but somewhat pedestrian verse were scribbled by eighteenth-century parsons, and the more popular poets were issued in reprint after reprint for the Victorian middle classes. But the widespread osmosis of poetry into English cultural life may start in mass education at the turn of the last century, and the subsequent need for standards and syllabuses. Today, poetry is again a minority interest, and one where craft is greatly subordinate to stylistic movements and political allegiances. Neither by the public at large, nor the practitioners themselves, can poetry still be called "the queen of the arts".

Many post-war developments have contributed to this fall from grace. Knowledge has become more specialized, and very abstruse theories have been devised to keep favoured styles of poetry within the ambit of academic study. Divergent styles have become anti-intellectual or even infantile. The sixties stress on personal expression is still working its way through society, and this iconoclasm naturally distrusts tradition and long-practised skills. Radical criticism has irrupted into literary criticism, and insists that literature be judged on the non-literary criteria of continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and ideology.

But poetry has always possessed the deeper roots and the larger promise. Prose is a comparatively late development in literature, and the masterworks of the past were predominantly in verse. Remove the poetry of the Greek playwrights, of Lucretius, Ovid and Virgil, the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Racine, Milton and Hugo, and the western literary heritage dwindles to a thin shadow of its former glory. Poets and poetry were prized in the Chinese world, fought over by the early Arabs, sought by lavish patronage in the hedonistic courts of the Timurid and Indian rulers. Poetry enters into the fabric of a people, and to be able to quote Ferdowsi or Hafez in Iran, even today, is the mark of an educated man.

As we grow older we read less, and that less tends to be poetry. With age comes knowledge of life, and a certain impatience with irrelevancies and self-importance. And writers too, though they may mellow into a larger humanity, tend also to be pithier and more to the point. Poetry is the most concentrated of all literary expression, and, if an obvious example were needed, we find the prosier plays of Shakespeare's middle period give way to the terse, eloquent poetry of Cymberline and The Tempest.

If writers and readers often return to poetry when they have a wider experience of life, there is also the deep and abiding joy that poetry, and often poetry alone, can bring. To a trained ear — and an extended training is needed — there is nothing to match verse that lifts so readily into saying what is exact, evocative and moving. Prose by comparison seems a muddled and lumpy medium, where there is little to separate the good from the merely competent. Poetry displays its bloodline immediately, and if it is more difficult to write, its successes are infinitely the more worth having.

1.2.4. Versatile and Wide-Ranging

Poetry is the most versatile and wide-ranging of literary forms: things can be said in poetry that cannot be said in prose.

Is this true? To many readers, poetry seems as out-of-date and constricting as an eighteenth-century stomacher, an artificial language that hardly exists outside school essays and unvisited library shelves. And if extraordinary things can be said in poetry, its most experienced practitioners will often despair of completing something of even modest competence.

Ease and prolixity have nothing to do with versatility. Poetry is a compact medium, needing great concentration to read, and even more to write. It is overwhelmingly a high art form, and so demands an excellent education, acute sensitivity, broad experience of life, and decided literary gifts. Facility only comes with practice, and the best way to appreciate poetry is to keep reading and rereading it, critiques and guides at the ready. Certainly it is hard work, but so are many things in life. Dancers must practice daily, and often start with the most demanding and unforgiving of training provided by ballet. Painters begin their apprenticeship with drawing, economy of statement, precise articulation of hand and eye, visual awareness all being developed in a medium where the essentials cannot be overlooked or fudged.

Granted that its conventions and devices may be necessary, what is the evidence that poetry can meet all demands? Would it be appropriate for a catalogue of horrors in a Nazi concentration camp? Would it serve for a difficult letter to our bank manager? Yes it would, provided by poetry is meant language at its most authentic, effective and resonant. All speech and writing is governed by conventions, so that a frank, courteous and well-thought-out letter in the usual form might well extend the overdraft. And even if we felt that a business letter could not be poetry of a sort, albeit of a very modest sort, and something a novelist would not spend time in getting right, we could at least accept that from poetry the descent can only be to prose. As for the concentration camp, its events are such that a plain rendering of the facts would suffice. Only in truth the facts would not be "speaking for themselves", but inevitably have been selected and ordered so as to serve the purpose of the report. Again a poetry of a sort, an astringent, sombre poetry requiring fine judgement and sensitivity not to turn horror into Grand Guignol.

Consider then what poets have achieved. Despite all the advantages enjoyed by contemporary plays and films — the technology, the "real-life" dramas, modern idiom in speech and attitudes — Shakespeare is still the most performed of dramatists, giving us a gallery of recognizable characters that no one has rivalled. Dante provides us with a sharp-etched picture of fifteenth-century Italian politics. Byron manages to work in slang and details of a water pump into Don Juan, and Ezra Pound incorporates views on capitalist economics in the Cantos. Philip Larkin paints the domestic nihilism of the contemporary welfare state, and Ted Hughes's animals are exactly observed. The list can be infinitely extended.

But what do we say on the Modernist and Postmodernist movements, that claim an abrupt break with the past? With the Modernist’s love of experimentation, anti-realism, individualism and intellectualism came a great narrowing of aims and accomplishments. Poetry was not writing at its highest pitch, but something fabricated altogether differently. Poems were free-standing creations of their authors, and they had no independent truths or emotions to impart. Their excellence lay in the subtlety, not to say complexity, with which meanings disclosed themselves to literary analysis. Modernist poetry was a highbrow art, drawing more on esoteric shadings and the inner lives of poets than the joys and sorrows of the workaday world. With Postmodernism these trends were accentuated. Writers became the self-appointed spiritual guardians of language, championing its creative and arbitrary nature over its more prosaic powers to represent, analyse and discover. Postmodernist poems do not represent anything but themselves. They are collages of words whose meaning lies only in their specific arrangement on the page.

They are certainly to be taken seriously. A good deal of current scholarship, funding and publishing centres on these creations, and no one wishes to overlook the best achievements of the last thirty years. Yet Postmodernist poems are often thin and unsatisfying. They require buttressing by abstruse theory, which is itself supported by a contemporary scholasticism, a turning away from science and a wilful misreading of linguistics, psychology and continental philosophy. It can still be argued that such poetry says things that prose cannot, but such things have no wider reference. They do not help us to see the world with greater vividness, clarity and understanding, and perhaps for this reason have not won the heart of the general reading public.

But there's poetry and poetry. Much of what's published today is probably best called journalism, a recycling of themes in an unexceptional style. Occasionally the writing lifts into the striking and memorable, and we praise as poetry what was once within the scope of the average novelist or essay writer. Poetry can say more than prose, and perhaps should say more, but may be lacking at present the necessary courage, independence of thought and informed reading.

1.2.5. A Special Mode of Knowledge

Poetry achieves a special mode of knowledge — an essential, full and vital representation of the world where other representations are somewhat abstract and abbreviated.

Here we enter very contentious territory. Past writers have occasionally claimed as much — Aristotle, Shakespeare and Shelley for example — but contemporary aesthetics is almost wholly opposed to such a view. The earlier arguments are numerous and compelling, however, and come from several disciplines.

1. Language is built of metaphors which, though largely dead, still guide our responses and understanding. This is easily demonstrated. In the first sentence all these started as metaphors: language, built, metaphors, largely, dead, still, guide, responses and understanding — as a glance at an etymological dictionary will show. Moreover, change "large" to "generally" and the meaning shifts. Large comes from largus, the Latin for copious, whereas generally derives from genus, the Latin for birth or stock. Not a great shift in meaning, but one a conscientious writer would be aware of. Rephrase the sentence altogether — "language is at base metaphorical, and that base unconsciously affects our behaviour" — and the rephrasing opens up new vistas of use and association. Metaphor is a mapping from source (familiar and everyday) to target domains (abstract, conceptual or internal), and this process cannot be evaded, however grey and bureaucratic the language employed.

For everyday purposes that metaphoric nature is of course minimized or overlooked. The law uses a circumlocutory Latinised language. The various sciences each have their preferred sets of imagery, but usually employ an mechanical language with commonplace verbs linking heavy noun clusters. Commerce prefers a commonplace style with quaint vestiges of social address — "I should be obliged if you would..." And so on. Whatever philosophy may wish, there seems no core meaning that is independent of its expression.

The ancient world never supposed there was. Close argumentation suited the philosopher in his private study, while a heightened, richer language was needed for public speaking. But the second was not inferior to the first, indeed the very contrary as the orator had to demonstrate the larger humanity which a classical education imparted. Poetry — and poetry in the Roman world was written for the speaking voice — was naturally allied to oratory, but it was not diminished by appealing to all sectors of the audience. In short, persuasion was the essence of speech and writing, not irrefutable evidence or truth.

Modern metaphor theories support this view, and link it to brain functioning. Metaphors reflect schemas, which are constructions of reality using the assimilation and sensorimotor processes to anticipate actions in the world. Schemas are plural, interconnecting in our minds to represent how we perceive, act, respond and consider. Far from being mere matters of style, metaphors organise our experience, creating realities which guide our futures and reinforce interpretations. Truth is therefore truth relative to some understanding, and that understanding is plural, involving categories which emerge from our interaction with experience. Poetry, which uses language with an acute awareness of its metaphoric content, is at once the most vital and authentic of utterances, conveying a knowledge that is not generalized.

2. Hermeneutics began as the interpretation of ancient documents — i.e. making a consistent picture when the words themselves drew their meaning from the document as a whole, which the words had yet to spell out — but has moved on to literature in general. Inevitably we live on our historical inheritance, a dialogue between the old traditions and our present needs. There is no way of assessing that inheritance except by trial and error, by living out its precepts and their possible reshapings. Literature not only bears the self-image and moral dimensions of the society that produced it, but the products of the resistance exerted by the individual circumstances of creation to wider social presuppositions. We cannot filter out these presuppositions without replacing them by own alternatives, which later readers will also come to see as prejudices, part of the sedimented ideology that makes up our utterances. All we can do is allow the two sets of presuppositions to confront each other, and grow into the larger opportunities of their fused horizons.

Poetry above all is sensitive to the past usage of words and their latent properties, and it is therefore poetry which speaks the fullest truth. The gaps, inconsistencies, corruptions and prejudices of language are not something we can ultimately escape from, and the smooth grey language of business or government is not so much a papering over as a repression of what is most vital and individual to us. Truthful language has to link both writer and reader, to be continually self-verifying if not self-evident, and to extend through the changing circumstances of a man's life, validating itself through being re-experienced.

3. Poetry is banned from many areas of public life. Its truths, its wider social reflections and moral dimensions are precisely what is not wanted for government, advertising and commercial use. Academia also prefers a thinner and more neutral language, where arguments can be closely reasoned and rest finally on "evidence that speaks for itself". But what is this neutral language? The heroic attempts to find a logically transparent language have failed, and a language reduced to "essentials" seems more an impoverished language than one of greater exactness. The discipline of extended and rigorous argument — i.e. philosophy — has recourse to symbolic logic, but that logic is not without its problems. Everyday statements have first to be converted to that symbolic expression, and that involves procedures that are reductive, open to question and ultimately sanctioned by the practices of the philosophic community. Once in symbolic form, logic is immeasurably more powerful, but there are many logics, and sometimes inconsistencies within each logic. And the great philosophical questions — the proof of existence, the nature of truth, the analyses of meaning — have not been solved or clarified: in most cases the questions remain more perplexing than ever.

1.2.6 Insight into All Forms of Writing

Poetry provides a deep insight into all forms of writing, which ripens eventually into an informed love of literature.

This rests not on argument but the experience of most readers. Certainly there are rare souls who find the coarse medium of prose unsatisfying or downright repellent, just as there are many prose readers who find poetry too demanding or insubstantial. But the great majority of seasoned readers relish both, and realize that prose at its best rises to the condition of poetry, and is enjoyable to the extent that poetry is enjoyed.

Must a love of poetry inevitably develop into a greater love of literature in all its forms? Not necessarily. Much of the literature winning rave reviews is ephemeral, and an apprenticeship in poetry may make it even less appealing. But experienced readers understand the commercial pressures behind publishing, read the reviews cautiously, and make their own selections. The argument remains. Life is short, and there is every reason to insist on the best in the hours stolen from other activities.

1.2.7. General Apprenticeship

Poetry is only one form of literature, and many good poets have handled the other forms indifferently. Indeed, the gift of poetry seems rather special, almost an illness. Nonetheless, poetry often forms part of introductory courses in creative writing, and for this reason: poetry displays its excellences deep in the grain of language. Prose is written in phrases, often somewhat ready-made phrases, but poetry is individual crafted in words or syllables. Everything counts — content, story, genre, diction, imagery, metaphor, syntax, rhythm — and nothing shows this interdependence so well to the beginner as writing poetry. Later courses develop a writer’s particular bent, and will specialize in the skills — journalism, short-story writing, articles — that the trainee will need to make a career in a competitive and not overly-rewarded profession. But poetry provides a concentrated introduction to the interrelated complexities of writing, and is recognized as such. There can be few journalists who haven't announced at dinner parties that they will someday give up their second-rate scribbling and concentrate on what they know they have inside. No one believes them, but the recognition is there.

1.2.8. Convenience

First there are the time scales. A poem or an article can be written in hours, a play in weeks and a novel in months. All generally take longer, often very much longer, but poetry seems easiest to the hobbyist or amateur writer.

Then the publishing side. Whatever the standard, the style or content of a poem, it is usually possible to find a publisher of sorts. But with this proviso. Most mainstream publishers will not handle poetry: they cater for the mass market and poetry cannot be sold in bulk. The dozen or so leading publishers who do have poetry lists are wary of publishing unknowns: contacts are needed and a good track record in the top literary journals. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get into the better literary journals, and practically impossible — editors' protestations to the contrary — to get into the top ones until well known.

For most poets, that leaves the less prestigious literary journals, the small presses, and the commercial publications which have the odd corner for a poem. Also self-publishing, by individuals or writing circles, which is much resorted to, increasingly on the Internet.

1.2.9. Sheer Pleasure

Most people write for pleasure. They have always enjoyed poetry, and now have the time — through retirement, unemployment or the children leaving home — to try their own hand at this absorbing genre. Poetry writing is indeed one of the fast-growing areas of the retirement industry. Practitioners number tens of thousands, and innumerable small presses scattered throughout the English-speaking world exist to publish their work.

Nonetheless, poetry is not easy. The medium is a compact one, needing great concentration to read, and even more to write. First attempts are not apt to be good. Nevertheless, even the most pedestrian effort occasionally lifts into the vivid and memorable, and kindles a response in its reader. And that is worth a great deal, in spite of all the recent developments.

Poets please themselves. There is nothing to stop good writers producing work that they like reading. Or what they consider worth reading. A beginner may ask: Do I have the talent to make it as a writer? Tutors handle the matter tactfully, saying that determination is essential to unlock the depths of a writer’s personality and potential. They point out that though there may be something perverse about the enforced seclusion necessary to perfect what will interest very few people, all good writers put themselves through such purgatory. And the reasons are not merely psychological, but the satisfaction that the writing supplies. Without talent, nothing of importance can be achieved. But without increasing absorption, fascination and sheer pleasure in literary craftsmanship, that talent will never see the light of day. Native ability and hard work are essential to poetry, and pleasure is the stimulus to both.

1.3. WHAT IS POETRY?

Poetry definitions are difficult, as is aesthetics generally. What is distinctive and important tends to evade the qualified language in which we attempt to cover all considerations. Perhaps we could say that poetry was a responsible attempt to understand the world in human terms through literary composition.

The terms beg many questions, of course, but poetry today is commonly an amalgam of three distinct viewpoints. Traditionalist argue that a poem is an expression of a vision that is rendered in a form intelligible and pleasurable to others and so likely to arouse kindred emotions. For Modernists, a poem is an autonomous object that may or may not represent the real world but is created in language made distinctive by its complex web of references. Postmodernists look on poems as collages of current idioms that are intriguing but self-contained — they employ, challenge and/or mock preconceptions, but refer to nothing beyond themselves.

Discussion

What distinguishes poetry from other literary compositions? Nothing, says a vociferous body of opinion: they are all texts, to be understood by the same techniques as a philosophic treatise or tabloid newspaper. But that makes sense only to readers of advanced magazines, for poetry does indeed seem different. Even if we accept that poetry can be verse or prose — verse simply having a strong metrical element — poetry is surely distinguished by moving us deeply. In fact, for all but Postmodernists, it is an art form, and must therefore do what all art does — represent something of the world, express or evoke emotion, please us by its form, and stand on its own as something autonomous and self-defining.

No doubt more could be said, but the starting poet may be feeling impatient. Theorists, like clever lawyers, can prove anything, and it is all too easy for an atrocious piece of writing to be defended by irrefutable standards. Are there not more practical ways of assessing poetry?

One point worth making is that aesthetics, together with theories of poetics and literary criticism, does not operate in a vacuum, but within a community of shared approaches and understandings. Typically, they are academia-based, and so written for fellow academics and their captive students. Their insights are important, indeed indispensable, for countering the half-truths that float around the poetry world, and for insisting that poetry maintain some depth and substance, but the young poet may wish initially to sidestep these abstruse matters and join another community, that of poetry itself. Poetry also has its beliefs and patterns of excellence. Its insights have to be acquired by participation: by writing and having that writing evaluated by fellow poets, by being able to appreciate a wide range of work, and by acquiring the crafts of literary composition.

None of that is easily accomplished, given the pressures of everyday life. Nor is there wide agreement on what sort of apprenticeship should be served. Schools of poetry are often hostile to, if not contemptuous of, other movements, and what is prized in one may be anathema to another. The beginning poet should read widely, join many groups, take any criticism seriously, but perhaps remember these points:

1. Poetry may well be the art of the unsayable. A good poem lies somewhere beyond mere words: it is the intangible, an exultation in things vaguely apprehended, something which emerges out of its own form, and which cannot exist without that form. Any poem that can be completely understood or paraphrased is not a poem, therefore, but simply versified or emotive prose (though not the worse for that).

2. Poems are an act of discovery, and require immense effort — to write and to be understood. The argument against popular amateur poetry is not that it uses out-of-date forms (there is no authority here, and art is always an mixture of elements coming in and going out of fashion) but that popular poetry finds its conceptions too readily. Contrary to contemporary dogma, poetry doesn't have to be challenging, but it does have to explore the nature and geography of the human condition.

3. A poem is something unique to its author, but is also created in the common currency of its period: style, preoccupations, shared beliefs. You may therefore grow out of the habit of writing Elizabethan sonnets, if indeed you ever write them, not by colleagues telling you that the style is passé but by understanding the limits of that Elizabethan world. You will probably write yourself through many enthusiasms and styles. And because your experience of the world will be shaped by your literary efforts, your conceptions of poetry will change as you develop a voice commensurate with your vision.

4. Poems are not created by recipe, or by pouring content into a currently acceptable mould. Shape and content interact, in the final product and throughout the creation process, so that the poems will be continually asking what you are writing and why. The answers you give yourself will be illustrating your conceptions of poetry. Once again, those conceptions will develop, eventually to include experiences more viscerally part of you, since poems are not a painless juggling with words.

5. Many poets have theorized on the nature of their craft. Their aphorisms are very quotable, and often provide entry into new realms of thought, but they should be used with caution. Artists are notoriously partisan, and rarely paint the whole picture. To understand their pronouncements, you need first to love their work, be steeped in its vision, and then to measure their pronouncements against the larger conception of art that other work provides.

1.4. WHAT IS VERSE?

Verse is a good deal more than writing lines that scan. First there is rhythm, an inescapable element of poetry. Cultural conventions and literary history select their varying requirements from the individual features of a language, but rhythm also arises naturally from the simple exercise of breathing and the desire for shape and regularity in human affairs.

Metre is a systematic regularity in rhythm. In western literature there are two great metrical systems the quantitative (introduced by the Greeks) and the accentual (which appears in Latin of the third century AD) but metre of some sort is found in all poetry, east and west. {2}

Metrical skill comes from practice rather than any slavish following of rules, and rules indeed vary with the literary tradition and what poets are attempting to achieve. The ear is not the only judge. Swinburne and Chesterton appeal to the auditory imagination, but look bombastic on the page. The late blank verse of Shakespeare needs a trained actor to bring out its rough-hewn splendour, and the rhythmic subtleties of Geoffrey Hill are apt to vanish on public performance.

New metres are rarely created, but much more common is the importation and adaptation of metre from a foreign language, which is a good reason for reading beyond translations. Conventional English verse is usually (and confusedly) described in a terminology deriving from classical prosody: as iambic, trochaic, dactylic and anapaestic. On an elementary level it may be better to consider metre under two headings: whether the syllables or the stresses are being counted, and whether these counts are fixed or variable. Accentual verse has fixed counts of stress but variable syllables. Syllabic verse has fixed counts of syllables regardless of stresses. Accentual-syllabic is conventional metre with both stress and syllables fixed. Free verse has no restrictions on either. How readers recognize and respond to metre is unclear, but any particular metre seems to be a norm, a pattern intuited behind permissible examples. The examples are often irregular, and indeed the common iambic pentameter seems only to be exact in some 25% of cases overall. {3}

Accentual verse is found in popular verse, ballads, nursery rhymes, songs and doggerel. Syllabic verse as exemplified by the French alexandrine is very different from English blank verse, and twentieth century attempts to write a pure syllabic verse in English have not caught on. Accentual-syllabic was developed by Chaucer from Italian models, and became the staple for English poetry from Elizabethan times till comparatively recently. Contemporary forms of verse originated in France around the middle of the nineteenth century, were championed (briefly) by the founders of Modernism, and have ramified into styles largely indistinguishable from prose.

Traditional verse is overshadowed by the achievements of the past. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Wordsworth set standards difficult to emulate, and poets are nowadays hardly encouraged to try. Many of the better magazines, where the fledgling poet must start his publishing career, will not take traditional poetry, and those with more generous requirements may still lack readers or editors capable of telling the good from the merely facile. Nonetheless, strict verse enjoys periodic revivals, and has been a feature of several twentieth century schools: the Georgians, Neo-Romantics, the Movement poets and the New Formalists.

Free verse is a very confused field, not properly understood or linguistically mapped. {4} Adoption may be more about pamphleteering and cultural aspects than poetic ends. Some of the speech rhythms claimed as "superior to metre" are not rhythms at all but an enviable dexterity in idiomatic expression. Some are loose assemblages of rhythmic expression to no constant base, and some an endearing tribute to their author's performance skills.

Why use the device? Because metre creates and organises content, giving emphasis to words or elements that would otherwise escape attention: the tighter the metre, the more expressive can be small departures from the norm. Metre gives dignity and memorability, conveying tempo, mood, the subtle shifts in evidence, passion and persuasion beyond what is possible in prose. In the hands of a great master like Shakespeare, metre provides grace, energy, elevation, expressiveness and a convincing approximation to everyday speech.

But metre is not diametrically opposed to free verse. Many contemporary poets write both, or served an apprenticeship in strict forms before creating something closer to their needs. Nonetheless, in the absence of this ability to highlight and compound meaning, free verse is often driven to expand in other directions. It prizes a convincing exactness of idiomatic expression, the line seeming exactly right in the circumstances: appropriate, authentic and sincere. It operates closely with syntax. It adopts a challenging layout on the page where line and syntax are rearranged to evade or exploit the usual expectations.

Metre in Practice

Poems need some supporting structure, and that in turn requires a decision: should you go for free verse or tackle the more demanding traditional forms?

Traditional metre and stanza shaping confer certain advantages, and certain disadvantages. They:

1. Please the reader by their display of skill, their variety within order, their continuity with the admired literature of the past.

2. Help the actual writing of the poem, either by invoking words from the unconscious, or by pushing the poem in new directions to escape the limitations of the form.

3. Provide a sense of completeness impossible in free verse. The author knows when the last word clicks into place.

4. Enforce dignity, emotional power and density of meaning.

5. Are more memorable.

The difficulties are equally apparent. Strict forms are:

1. Taxing to write, requiring inordinate amounts of time, plus literary skills not given to everyone.

2. Much more likely to go wrong and expose the blundering incompetence of their author.

3. Inappropriate to the throwaway nature of much of contemporary life.

4. More difficult to place in the small presses.

Theory: Introduction

Firstly, if, as we have said, poets write more by ear than rules, what's to be gained by formal study? Four answers:

1. Rules govern many art forms music, painting, choreography, etc. and are seen as aids to creation once they are so thoroughly ingested as to be second nature. Indeed, without some rules, art fails to be art and becomes instead a perplexity to everyone, not least its practitioners.

2. Poetry is now fragmented into diverse schools, each claiming indisputable truth. As rhythmic expressions are often made into shibboleths, the sensible writer will want an understanding of the issues, so as to choose between the rival claims.

3. Study sharpens the ear, and will locate examples useful to the practising poet.

4. An understanding of rhythm will create links to other art forms, and open the door to current studies in human physiology and behaviour.

Rhythm in poetry can be treated in many different ways. In fact, there exist no fewer than sixteen different theories. Most are in use by literary criticism, and each theory adds depth and significance to the others.

1.5. TYPES OF POETRY

What exactly is poetry? Dictionaries generally offer something like: the expression or embodiment of beautiful or elevated thought, imagination or feeling in language adapted to stir the imagination and the emotions.

But if this expresses the expectations of the man in the street, it doesn't describe the aims of most poets working today, nor take us far in appreciating the variety of past work.

1.5.1. Traditional Poetry

Traditionalists generally believe that poems give enduring and universal life to what was merely transitory and particular. Through them, the poet expresses his vision, real or imaginative, and he does so in forms that are intelligible and pleasurable to others, and likely to arouse emotions akin to his own. Poetry is language organised for aesthetic purposes. Whatever else it does, poetry must bear witness, must fulfil the cry: 'let not my heart forget what mine eyes have seen.' A poem is distinguished by the feeling that dictates it and that which it communicates, by the economy and resonance of its language, and by the imaginative power that integrates, intensifies and enhances experience. Poems bear some relationship to real life but are equally autonomous and independent entities that contain within themselves the reason why they are so and not otherwise. Unlike discourse, which proceeds by logical steps, poetry is intuited whole as a presentiment of thought and/or feeling. Workaday prose is an abbreviation of reality: poetry is its intensification. Poems have a transcendental quality: there is a sudden transformation through which words assume a particular importance. Like a bar of music, or a small element in a holographic image, a phrase in a poem has the power to immediately call up whole ranges of possibilities and expectations. Art is a way of knowing, and is valuable in proportion to the justice with which it evaluates that knowledge. Poetry is an embodiment of human values, not a kind of syntax. True symbolism in poetry allows the particular to represent the more general, not as a dream or shadow, but as the momentary, living revelation of the inscrutable.

The poet's task is to resurrect the outer, transient and perishable world within himself, to transform it into something much more real. He must recognize pattern wherever he sees it, and build his perceptions into poetic form that has the coherence and urgency to persuade us of its truth: the intellectual has to be fused with the sensuous meaning. All poets borrow, but where good poets improve on their borrowing, the bad debase. The greatness of the poet is measurable by the real significance of the resemblances on which he builds, the depth of the roots in the constitution, if not of the physical world, then of the moral and emotional nature of man.

Poetry can be verse or prose. Verse has a strong metrical element. An inner music is the soul of poetry. Poetry withers and dries out when it leaves music, or at least some imagined music, too far behind. The diction of poetry is a fiction, neither that of the speaker nor the audience. Without its contrivance poetry is still possible, but is immensely poorer. Subtly the vocabulary of poetry changes with the period, but words too familiar or too remote defeat the purpose of the poet. {1}

Traditional Aesthetics

Can these widely different views be bridged? Definitions are tricky matters, especially in art, but could we not analyse successful works of art and identify their common features? So attempts aesthetics, {2} which recognizes the following:

Representation

What is the first task of art? To represent. Words certainly do not stand in simple one to one relationships with objects, and there's no doubt that codes, complex social transactions, and understandings between speakers play a part in the process. But if literature of all types — written, spoken, colloquial, formal — reconstitutes the world according to its own rules, those rules are also constrained by our sense perceptions and social needs.

Emotional Expression

We also expect art to move us. Whether that emotion is what the artist originally felt, or what he subsequently induces in us through the artwork, is a debated point. But make us feel something a poem must, and we cannot begin an appraisal until we have that first response.

Autonomy

Beauty is a term unfashionable today, and troublesome to the contemporary philosopher, but there remains organisation — internal consistency, coherence, a selection and shaping of elements that seems to make art an autonomous and self-enclosing entity. Is that aesthetic separation required? Postmodernists say not, but most commentators have thought art was something different from life, and that a host of qualities — harmony in variety, detachment, balance, luminous wholeness, organic coherence, interacting inevitability, etc. — allowed art to provide something different from our everyday existences.

Social Purpose

But art is not entirely consolation or private pleasure. Artworks are social objects. We wouldn't fund the arts, or honour artists, unless they served some further end. Marxists believe that art should not only represent the economic facts of life, but improve them. And even conservatives would accept that poems give us some understanding of the world, can make us more tolerant and perceptive, shake us out of stock responses, perhaps even give our lives some overall purpose and significance. {4}

Traditional Poetry Today

Traditionalists see themselves in a difficult position. Criticism, which was useful to them in opening doors to new approaches and poets, has been taken over by literary theory, which espouses different objectives. Formalism, which shares their interest in craft, tends to march poems up and down in strict iambic beat, or to suppose that prosaic thought expressed as verse automatically becomes poetry. Many of the prestigious small presses will not take traditional work, or show by the pieces they do publish that they have no ear or soul for poetry. On the other side lie the vast plains of amateurism, well intentioned efforts on the whole, and with the odd success, but with talent spread so thin that poetry itself is given a bad name.

Writers may be competitive creatures, but the traditionalists do not generally have a quarrel with later schools, whose manifestoes they find interesting if not wholly convincing. They can see why Modernists believe that poems should not represent, but be. That they are structures of meaning with those meanings conveyed only through language. That once created, poems have an existence independent of the author's intentions, of the historical context or any social purpose. That poems are in some sense fictions and not representations of reality, though they may give significance, value and order to our perceptions. That they have the ability to hold something in the mind with uncommon sensitivity, with uncommon exactness, and to hold it there by attention to the language in which they're formulated. Yes, and that language catalyses, interpenetrates and modifies what is said. Perhaps even that a new reality is created, often by metaphors, which have an outward-ringing quality. Poetry does not simply illustrate a concept, but give it a new life and larger dimensions. A man is a poet if the difficulties of his craft provide him with inspiration, and not a poet if these difficulties deprive him of opportunities. {3} Yes, to all these they have no objection.

Of Postmodernism in its various manifestations — minimalism, conceptualism, performance art, improvised happenings — they are more wary. Perhaps Postmodernist poems do negate themselves by appearing to strive for autonomy but then dislocating that autonomy by shifting genre boundaries, fragmentation and montage. Perhaps language is ultimately ambiguous, when poetry is a special locus of unreality, poems accepting and exploiting that ambiguity, and to that extent becoming the most authentic of literary creations. Perhaps content is created by language, and meaning is simply the play of forms. Texts cannot know themselves, and it is the reader who has the final say on interpretation, no interpretation being final or better than another. More important than any outward organic unity is the dissonance, complexity, athwartness, estrangements and lacunae that specialized reading will discern in a poem. {4} All very interesting, traditionalists feel. But then they look at Postmodernist collections that receive rave reviews and see mere novelty, pieces that are clever but ultimately trivial and disheartening, what they might produce themselves if they forgot what poetry was or could be.

Looking Ahead

Though literature of the last century turned away from the findings of pure and social science — if not from life altogether — research in many areas of pure and applied science is beginning to place traditional poetry in context, to show the basic rightness of its intuitions. Study of complex systems suggests, for example, that art is important for the patterning it creates from chaos — i.e. it is not the order nor the chaos per se that are important, but the growth of one from the other. Poems therefore have to be fought for: they are continually asserting themselves against the obscure, the incoherent, the dark forces of our instinctive natures. The greatest poems do not necessarily derive from the most obviously felt emotions, but are made from deep strands of intellectual and emotional instability in society and individual character.

Then we have the expanding field of metaphor research, whose findings echo the sustained search for foundations in the other great areas of human endeavour: mathematics, linguistics, philosophy and science. Man is a complex creature, and his truest experiences are not to be wholly encompassed by rational systems. As the classical world accepted, man's nature is also instinctive and physiological. Traditional poetry operates through language used in its widest remit, and that language, having been fashioned by trial and error over millennia, must inevitably hold man's truest needs and longings.

References

1. Originals of many of these summarized aphorisms are to be found in Christopher Butler and Alastair Fowler's Topics in Criticism (1971), in Babette Deutsch's Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms (1957), and in David Daiches's Critical Approaches to Literature (1981). For more extended expositions, see Chapters 8 and 9 of Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992), contributions to the magazine The Formalist edited by William Baer, George Whalley's Poetic Process (1915, 1953), H.J.C. Grierson's The Background of English Literature (1925), Phyllis Jones and Derek Hudson's (Eds.) English Critical Essays: Twentieth Century (1933-58), Kenneth Hopkins's English Poetry: A Short History (1962), Winifred Nowottny's The Language Poets Use (1968), Christopher Rick's The Force of Poetry (1984), and Robert Wallace's Writing Poems (1987).
2. Oswald Hanfling's Philosophical Aesthetics: An Introduction (1992) and entries in David Cooper's A Companion to Aesthetics (1995).
3. Michael Podro's Fiction and Reality in Painting in Kermal and Gaskell's (Eds.) Explanation and Value in the Arts (1993), James Gribble's Literary Education: A Revaluation (1983) and Chapter 29 of William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brook's Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957). Also Julian Symons's Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature 1912-39. (1987)
4. Frank Kermode's History and Value (1988), Roger Cardinale's Figures of Reality: A Perspective on the Poetic Imagination (1981), Rainer Emig's Modernism in Poetry (1995), Richard Bradford's A Linguistic History of English Poetry (1993), John Hollander's Fictive Patterns in Poetic Language (1988) and Brandon Taylor's The Art of Today (1995).

1.5.2. Modernism: Overview

Modernism is where we are now, broadly speaking, if we include Postmodernism and experimental poetry. Modernist poetry is the poetry written in schools and poetry workshops, published by thousands of small presses, and reviewed by serious newspapers and literary journals — a highbrow, coterie poetry that isn't popular and doesn't profess to be. To its devotees, Modernist styles are the only way of dealing with contemporary matters, and they do not see them as a specialized development of traditional poetry, small elements being pushed in unusual directions, and sometimes extended beyond the limits of ready comprehension.

The key elements of Modernist poems are experimentation, anti-realism, individualism and a stress on the cerebral rather than emotive aspects. Previous writing was thought to be stereotyped, requiring ceaseless experimentation and rejection of old forms. Poetry should represent itself, or the writer's inner nature, rather than hold up a mirror to nature. Indeed the poet's vision was all-important, however much it cut him off from society or the scientific concerns of the day. Poets belonged to an aristocracy of the avant garde, and cool observation, detachment and avoidance of simple formulations were essential.

Poststructuralist theories come in many embodiments, but shared a preoccupation with language. Reality is not mediated by what we read or write, but is entirely constituted by those actions. We don't therefore look at the world through a poem, and ask whether the representation is true or adequate or appropriate, but focus on the devices and strategies within the text itself. Modernist theory urged us to overlook the irrelevancies of author's intention, historical conventions and social context to assess the aesthetic unity of the poem. Poststructuralist criticism discounts any such unity, and urges us to accept a looser view of art, one that accords more with everyday realities and shows how language suppresses alternative views, particularly those of the socially or politically disadvantaged.

Experimental poetry pushes the process further, taking its inspiration from advertising, and deploying words as graphic elements.

Modernism has no precise boundaries. At its strictest, in Anglo-American literature, the period runs from 1890 to 1920 and includes Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Wyndham Lewis among many others. {1} But few of its writers shared common aims, and the term was applied retrospectively. {2} Very largely, the themes of Modernism begin well back in the nineteenth century, and many do not reach full expression until the latter half of the twentieth century, so that Modernism is better regarded as part of a broad plexus of concerns which are variably represented in a hundred and twenty years of European writing. {3}

Modernism is a useful term because writing in the period, especially that venerated by academia and by literary critics, is intellectually challenging, which makes it suitable for undergraduate study. {4} Many serious writers come from university, moreover, and set sail by Modernism's charts, so that the assumptions need to be understood to appreciate contemporary work of any type. {5} And quite different from these is the growing suspicion that contemporary writing has lost its way, which suggests that we may see where alternatives lie if we understand Modernism better. {6}

Features of Modernism

To varying extents, writing of the Modernist period exhibits these features:

1. experimentation

· belief that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate

· ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake

· originality: deviation from the norm, or from usual reader expectations

· ruthless rejection of the past, even iconoclasm

2. anti-realism

· sacralisation of art, which must represent itself, not something beyond

· preference for allusion (often private) rather than description

· world seen through the artist's inner feelings and mental states

· themes and vantage points chosen to question the conventional view

· use of myth and unconscious forces rather than motivations of conventional plot

3. individualism

· promotion of the artist's viewpoint, at the expense of the communal

· cultivation of an individual consciousness, which alone is the final arbiter

· estrangement from religion, nature, science, economy or social mechanisms

· maintenance of a wary intellectual independence

· artists and not society should judge the arts: extreme self-consciousness

· search for the primary image, devoid of comment: stream of consciousness

· exclusiveness, an aristocracy of the avant-garde

4. intellectualism

· writing more cerebral than emotional

· work is tentative, analytical and fragmentary, more posing questions than answering them

· cool observation: viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalised

· open-ended work, not finished, nor aiming at formal perfection

· involuted: the subject is often the act of writing itself and not the ostensible referent

1.5.3. Postmodernist Poetry

Whereas Classicism, Realism and Romanticism all deal with the outside world, contemporary literature, by contrast, is commonly a retreat into the writer's consciousness — to make autonomous creations that incorporate diverse aspects of modern life (Modernism), or free-wheeling creations constructed of a language that largely points to itself (Postmodernism).

Postmodernism began in the sixties, when there developed on both sides of the Atlantic a feeling that poetry had become too ossified, backward-looking and restrained. {1} The old avant garde had become respectable, replacing one orthodoxy by another. The poetry commended by the New Criticism — and indeed written by its teachers — was self-contained, coherent and paradoxical. Certainly it was clever, with striking imagery, symbolism and structural economy, but it was also far too predictable. Where were the technical innovations of the early Modernists? Where were the alternatives to capitalism and the modern state that feature in Pound's or Lawrence's thought? And if contrary movements existed, they seemed disorganised. The UK might have its neo-Romantics, and a reaction to them, and in Europe were Milosz, Kundera, Ponge and Herbert, but there was no common purpose in these figures, and no common philosophy to give them intellectual standing. Into this vacuum came radical theory, and the generally Leftist theories of literature.

Features of Postmodernism

Most conspicuously in the visual arts, but shown to varying degrees in novels and poetry, Postmodernism has these four features: {2}

1. iconoclasm:

· decanonises cultural standards, previous artworks and authorities

· denies authority to the author, discounting his intentions and his claim to act as spokesman for a period

· contradicts the expected, often deliberately alienating the reader

· subverts its sources by parody, irony and pastiche

· denounces ethnic, gender and cultural repression

· strips context, reducing content to an austere minimum

· broods on the human condition disclosed by radical literary theory

2. groundless:

· employs flat, media-like images that have no reference beyond themselves

· champions the primary, unmediated but not sensuous

· regards both art and life as fictions, sometimes mixing the two in magic realism or multiple endings

· argues that meaning is indeterminate, denying a final or preferred interpretation

3. formlessness:

· repudiates modernism's preoccupation with harmony and organic form

· narrows the aesthetic distance, art being something to enter into or act out rather than simply admire

· fragments texts, turning them into collages or montages

· avoids the shaping power of metaphor and other literary tropes

· mixes genres with pastiche, travesty and cliché

· promotes the fluid and socially adaptable

4. populism:

· employs material from a wide social spectrum

· eschews elitist, literary language

· avoids the serious and responsible, promoting the arbitrary and playful

· accepts media images as the most accessible contemporary reality, making these the building blocks of art

1.6. AESTHETICS

Many artists feel uncomfortable with aesthetics, but since its terms feature so prominently in radical theory, and that theory often dresses up assessments of poems and movements, it may help to know the fundamentals.

Aesthetics is the philosophy of art. Though not amenable to definition, art can be analysed under various headings — representation, coherent form, emotive expression and social purpose.

Aesthetics analyses and attempts to answer such questions as: What is art? How do we recognize it? How do we judge it? What purposes do artworks serve? {1}

Why should we want to ask such questions at all? Well, firstly there is intellectual curiosity. Other professions are clear about their aims, so why not art? And if, as we shall see, there are no definitive answers, nothing that does not beg further questions, we may nonetheless gain insights into an activity that is human but very perplexing. Moreover, there are practical considerations. Daily in magazines, performances and exhibitions the frontiers of art are being extended, and about some of these efforts hangs the suspicion of a leg-pull, empty pretension, fraud on a long-suffering public. {2} If we ask: Is this really art, very often we are met with the retort: prove otherwise. Art is as it is, and you are just too dumb, bourgeois or ill-educated to understand that. If we could somehow draw a line, a cordon sanitaire, around true artistic expression, we could ensure that the lion's share of art-funding went to the better candidates — the sincere, the dedicated and the gifted who made a contribution to society. Surely real artists would not object, when the blind seem sometimes to be leading the blind?

Art is vastly oversupplied. Only the smallest percentage support themselves solely through their work, leaving the great majority to teach, review, or take menial part-time jobs. Such a situation would be monstrous in other professions. Lawyers, scientists, doctors, etc. have organised themselves into guilds with career structures, rates of pay, and a clear articulation of their public roles. Their communities share knowledge: the fruits of countless lifetimes of effort are tested, codified, and made ready for immediate application. Not for them to reinvent the wheel, or to venture forth without traditions, working practices and the helping hand of master to journeyman right to the base of the tree. Art may be marginalized in today's technological and consumerist society, but a clear notion of its objectives might help it back into the fold. {3}

Definitions of Art

So, what is art? What (to adopt the philosopher's approach) are its necessary and sufficient conditions? Many have been proposed — countless, stretching back to ancient Greece — but one of the most complete is that of Tatarkiewicz. His six conditions are: beauty, form, representation, reproduction of reality, artistic expression and innovation. Unfortunately, it is difficult to pin these terms down sufficiently, to incorporate them into necessary and sufficient conditions — do they all have to be present? — and what about quality? Even in the most hackneyed piece of commercial art we shall find these conditions satisfied to some extent. How do we specify the sufficient extent? {4} By common agreement, a consensus of public taste?

Take a less time-bound view and consider art down the ages? Then we have problems of shifting boundaries and expectations. The Greeks did not distinguish between art and craft, but used the one word, techné, and judged achievement on goodness of use. In fact not until 1746 did Charles Batteux separate the fine arts from the mechanical arts, and only in the last hundred years has such stress been laid on originality and personal expression. Must we then abandon the search for definitions, and look closer at social agreements and expectations? That would be a defeat for rationality, philosophers might feel — it being their role to arrive at clear, abstract statements that are true regardless of place or speaker. But perhaps (as Strawson and others have remarked) art may be one of those fundamental categories which cannot be analysed further, cannot be broken into more basic terms. And there is always Wittgenstein's scepticism about definitions — that terms commonly have a plexus of overlapping applications, meaning lying in the ways words are used, and not in any fiat of God or philosophers.

Aesthetic Qualities

Suppose, to take Wittgenstein's scepticism further, we dropped the search for definitions but looked to the characteristics of art, the effects and properties that were needed in large measure for something to establish itself as "art". What would they be? One would be beauty, surely — i.e. proportion, symmetry, order in variety that pleases. Beauty therefore comes down to feelings — not individual and transient feelings necessarily, but matters that ultimately cannot be rationalized? Yes, said David Hume and George Santayana. But then, said Wittgenstein, we should have to deny that aesthetic descriptions had any objectivity at all, which is surely untrue. We may not know whether to call some writing "plodding" or simply "slow-moving", but we don't call it energetic.

Very well, do we need to enquire further into beauty? Probably, since it is a term useful and universal. {5} But contemporary philosophers have great difficulties in analysing the term properly — i.e. into abstract, freestanding propositions that are eternally true. Art certainly speaks to us down the ages, and we should like to think it was through a common notion of beauty. But look at examples. We revere the sculpture of fourth century Athens, but the Middle ages did not. We prefer those marbles in their current white purity whereas in fact the Greeks painted them as garishly as fairground models. We cannot, it appears, ignore the context of art, and indeed have to show how the context contributes. Clearly, beauty is not made to a recipe, and if individual artworks have beauty, they do not exemplify some abstract notion of it.

Dangers of Aesthetics

Artists have therefore been chary of aesthetics, feeling that art is too various and protean to conform to rules. Theory should not lead practice, they feel, but follow at a respectful distance. Put the cart before the horse and theory will more restrict than inform or inspire. Moreover professionals — those who live by words, and correspondingly have to make words live for them — are unimpressed by the cumbersome and opaque style of academia. Any directive couched in such language seems very dubious. For surely literature is not made according to rules, but the rules are deduced from literature — rationalized from good works of art to understand better what they have in common. And if theorists (philosophers, sociologists, linguists, etc.) do not have a strongly-developed aesthetic sense — which, alas, they often demonstrate — then their theories are simply beside the point.

But theory need not be that way. Rather than prescribe it may clarify. No doubt, as Russell once wryly observed, philosophy starts by questioning what no one would seriously doubt, and ends in asserting what no one can believe, but creative literature is not without its own shortcomings. Much could be learnt by informed debate between the disciplines, and a willingness of parties to look through each other's spectacles. Obtuse and abstract as it may be, philosophy does push doggedly on, arriving at viewpoints which illuminate some aspects of art.

Art as Representation

What is the first task of art? To represent. {6} Yes, there is abstract painting, and music represents nothing unless it be feelings in symbolic form, but literature has always possessed an element of mimesis, copying, representation. Attempts are periodically made to purge literature of this matter-of-fact, utilitarian end — Persian mysticism, haiku evocation, poesie pure, etc. — but representation always returns.

How is the representation achieved? No one supposes it is a simple matter, or that codes, complex social transactions, understandings between speakers, genre requirements etc. do not play a large if somewhat unfathomed part. Our understanding is always shaping our experiences, and there is no direct apperception of chair, table, apple in the simple-minded way that the Logical Positivists sometimes asserted. Words likewise do not stand in one-to-one relationships to objects, but belong to a community of relationships — are part, very often, of a dialogue that writing carries on with other writings. Even when we point and say "that is a chair", a wealth of understandings underlies this simple action — most obviously in the grammar and behavioural expectations. The analytical schools have investigated truth and meaning to an extent unimaginable to the philosophically untutored. They have tried to remove the figurative, and to represent matters in propositional language that verges on logic. Very technical procedures have been adopted to sidestep paradoxes, and a universal grammar has been proposed to explain and to some extent replace the ad hoc manner in which language is made and used. Thousands of man-lives have gone into these attempts, which aim essentially to fashion an ordered, logically transparent language that will clarify and possibly resolve the questions philosophers feel impelled to ask.

Much has been learnt, and it would be uncharitable to call the enterprise a failure. Yet language has largely evaded capture in this way, and few philosophers now think the objectives are attainable. Even had the goals been gained, there would still have remained the task of mapping our figurative, everyday use of language onto this logically pure language. And of justifying the logic of that language, which is not the self- evident matter sometimes supposed. There are many forms of logic, each with its strengths and limitations, and even mathematics, that most intellectually secure of human creations, suffers from lacunae, areas of overlap and uncertainties. But that is not a cause for despair. Or for embracing the irrationalism of the Poststructuralists who assert that language is a closed system — an endless web of word — associations, each interpretation no more justified than the next. But it does remind us that language becomes available to us through the medium in which it is formulated. And that literature of all types — written, spoken, colloquial, formal — incorporates reality, but reconstitutes it according to its own rules.

Art as Emotional Expression

Suppose we return to simpler matters. Art is emotionally alive. We are delighted, elated, filled with a bitter sweetness of sorrow, etc., rejecting as sterile anything which fails to move us. But are these the actual emotions which the artist has felt and sought to convey? It is difficult to know. Clearly we can't see into the minds of artists — not in the case of dead artists who have left no explanatory notes, and not generally in contemporary cases where artists find their feelings emerge in the making of the artwork. Then, secondly, we wouldn't measure the greatness of art by the intensity of emotion — unless we accept that a football match is a greater work of art than a Shakespeare play. And thirdly there is the inconvenient but well-known fact that artists work on "happy" and "sad" episodes simultaneously. They feel and shape the emotion generated by their work, but are not faithfully expressing some pre-existing emotion. {7}

Some theorists have in fact seen art more as an escape from feeling. Neurotic artists find their work therapeutic, and hope the disturbance and healing will also work its power on the audience. And if Aristotle famously spoke of the catharsis of tragedy, did he mean arousing emotions or releasing them — i.e. do artists express their own emotions or evoke something appropriate from the audience? Most would say the latter since raw, truthful, sincere emotion is often very uncomfortable, as in the brute sex act or the TV appeal by distraught parents. Whatever the case, art is clearly a good deal more than emotional expression, and at least requires other features: full and sensitive representation, pleasing and appropriate form, significance and depth of content.

Form and Beauty: The Autonomy of Art

And so we come to form. Beauty we have glanced at, but if we drop that term, so troublesome and unfashionable today, there remains organisation: internal consistency, coherence, a selection and shaping of elements to please us. And please us the art object must — genuinely, immediately, irrationally — by the very way it presents itself. How exactly? Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Croce, and dozens of contemporary philosophers have all made important contributions, but the variety of art makes generalization difficult, and explanations are naturally couched in the philosophic concerns of the time.

But something can be said. Art presents itself as an autonomous, self-enclosing entity. The stage, picture frame, etc. give an aesthetic distance, tell us that what is shown or enacted serves no practical end, and is not to be judged so. We are drawn in — engrossed, enraptured — but we are also free to step back and admire the crafting, to exercise our imagination, and to enjoy disinterestedly what can be more complete and vivid than real life. {8} Is this autonomy necessary? Until the present century most artists and commentators said yes. They believed that harmony in variety, detachment, balance, luminous wholeness, organic coherence, interacting inevitability and a host of other aspects were important, perhaps essential. Many contemporary artists do not. They seek to confront, engage in non-aesthetic ways with their public, to bring art out into the streets. Successfully, or so the trendier critics would persuade us, though the public remains sceptical. Modernism is taught in state schools, but Postmodernism has yet to win acceptance. {9}

Art as a Purposive Activity

Art, says the tax-paying citizen, is surely not entertainment, or not wholly so. Artists aim at some altruistic and larger purpose, or we should not fete them in the media and in academic publications. We don't want to be preached at, but artists reflect their times, which means that their productions give us the opportunity to see our surroundings more clearly, comprehensively and affectionately. And not only to see, say Marxist and politically-orientated commentators, but to change. Art has very real responsibilities, perhaps even to fight male chauvinism, ethnic prejudice, third-world exploitation, believe the politically correct. {10}

Artist-Centred Philosophies

With the advent of psychology, and the means of examining the physiological processes of the human animal, one focus of attention has become the artist himself. Indeed, Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood felt that the work of art was created in the artist's mind, the transposing of it to paper or music or canvas being subsidiary and unimportant. But the transposing is for most artists the very nature of their art, and few conceive work completely and exactly beforehand. John Dewey stressed that knowledge was acquired through doing, and that the artist's intentions were both modified and inspired by the medium concerned. For Suzanne Langer the artist's feelings emerged with the forms of expression — which were not feelings expressed but ideas of feeling: part of a vast stock which the artist draws on, combines and modifies. Of course there is always something inexplicable, even magical, about good writing. It just came to me, says the writer: the words wrote themselves. That and the intertextuality of writing — that writing calls on and borrows from other pieces of writing, establishing itself within a community of understandings and conventions — led Roland Barthes to assert that the writer does not exist, that writing writes itself. Certainly writing is inextricably part of thinking, and we do not have something in our minds which we later clothe in words. But most writing needs shaping, reconsidering, rewriting, so that the author is not some passive, spiritualist medium. Moreover, though we judge the finished work, and not the writer's intentions (supposing we could ever know them exactly) it is common knowledge that writers often have a small stock of themes which they constantly extract and rework: themes which are present in their earliest efforts and which do indeed reflect or draw substance from their experiences. Biography, social history and psychology do tell us something about artistic creations. {11}

Viewer-Centred Philosophies

Given that artists find themselves through their work, and do not know until afterwards what they had in mind, it may be wiser to look a art from the outside, from the viewer's perspective. We expect literature, for example, to hold something in the mind with particular sensitivity and exactness, and to hold it there by attention to the language in which it is formulated. Special criteria can apply. We feel terror and pity in the theatre, but are distanced, understanding that they call for no action on our part. We obey the requirements of genre and social expectations, making a speech on a public platform being very different from what we say casually to friends. We look for certain formal qualities in art — exactness, balance, vivid evocation, etc. — and expect these qualities to grow naturally from inside rather than be imposed from without. We realize that art produces a pleasure different from intellectual or sensuous one — unreflective enjoyment, but one also pregnant with important matters. Change one feature and we know instinctively that something is wrong. How? Perhaps as we instinctively detect a lapse in grammar, by referring to tacit rules or codes. Nelson Goodman argued that art was essentially a system of denotation, a set of symbols, even a code that we unravel, the code arbitrary but made powerful by repeated practice. {12} Edwin Panofsky suggested that symbols could be studied on three levels — iconic (the dog resembles a dog), iconographic (the dog stands for loyalty) or iconological (the dog represents some metaphysical claim about the reality of the physical world). {13} Hence the importance of a wide understanding of the artist and his times. And why no appeals to good intentions, or to morally uplifting content, will reason us into liking something that does not really appeal.

Art as Social Objects

But can we suppose that content doesn't matter? Not in the end. Art of the Third Reich and of communist Russia is often technically good, but we don't take it to our hearts. Marxist philosophers argue that art is the product of social conditions, and John Berger, for example, regarded oil paintings as commodities enshrining values a consumerist society. {14} Hermeneutists argue that the art produced by societies allows them to understand themselves — so that we have devastating judgements skulking in the wartime portraits of Hitler, and in scenes of a toiling but grateful Russian proletariat. They are untrue in a way obvious to everyone.

But if society ultimately makes the judgements, who in society decides which artistic expressions it will commission and support? Not everyone. Appreciation requires experience and training — in making quality judgements, and in deciding the criteria. Some criteria can be variable (subject matter), some are standard (music is not painting) and some are decided by the history of the art or genre in question (paintings are static and two-dimensional). But additionally there are questions of authority and status. Institutionalists like George Dickie say simply that an object becomes art when approved sections of society confer that status on it. {15} But that only shifts the question: how can we be sure such sections are not furthering their careers in the cosy world of money, media and hype? Ted Cohen could not really find such rituals of conferral, {16} and Richard Wollheim wanted the reasons for such conferral: what were they exactly? {17} Arthur Danto introduced the term " artworld" , but emphasize that successful candidates had to conform to current theories of art. Individual or arbitrary fiats were not persuasive. {18}

But are there not more important considerations? However portrayed in the popular press, artists lead hard lives, for the most part solitary, unrecognised and unrewarded. What drives them on? Vanity in part, and deep personal problems — plus, it may be, a wish to overcome feelings of inadequacy deriving from youth or the home background. But artists are not always more febrile or bohemian than others, or at least the evidence of them being so is open to question. {19} When asked, artists usually speak of some desire to make sense of themselves and their surroundings. They feel a little apart from life, and do not understand why the public can skim over the surface, never troubling itself with the deep questions that cause elation, anguish and wonder. Literature, say writers, brings them experiences saturated with meaning, in which they perceive the fittingness of the world and their own place within it. The concepts of their own vision are inescapably theirs, and they can only hope these concepts are also important to the society from which they draw their support and inspiration.

NeuroAesthetics

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist, proposed universal laws of art, selecting features that in life would have helped the evolving homo sapiens to survive. {20} These included:

1. The ‘peak shift principle’ makes exaggerated elements attractive. Rats rewarded when they select a rectangle over a square soon find exaggerated rectangles even more attractive. These and other documented examples suggest that art selects certain elements and emphasizes them.

2. Isolating a single cue helps to focus attention. Just as learning to put together glimpses of a predator through the undergrowth into a single danger would have helped early man, so artists ‘tie’ their work together by repeating an aspect, colour or feature in their work.

3. Contrast: Perceptual grouping makes objects stand out from the background. A black and white photograph may be more attractive than colour for this reason: we are not distracted by superficial aspects but can concentrate on balance, tone contrasts, shape repetition, etc.

4. Perceptual ‘problem solving’ is also reinforcing. We find a nude behind a diaphanous veil more alluring than a Playboy pin-up because the very act of identifying what we are looking for is pleasurable. Art is an activity for the viewer as well.

5. Symmetry: unique vantage points are suspect. A multiple viewpoint is safer.

6. Visual ‘puns’ or metaphors enhance art.

Ramachandran’s list is not exhaustive, and many of the laws can be subsumed under a more general need for human beings to make sense of impressions. In theory, such laws could be tested in the laboratory, though with difficulty as how do we 1. isolate each element properly in anything purporting to be a work of art, and 2. objectively measure degrees in some element, without using the attractiveness the test was supposed to assess, and 3. take account of the interaction between elements that art commonly employs?

Conclusions

We have come a long way, but only scratched the surface of aesthetics. Large sections (the non-representational arts, the ontology of art objects, the history of aesthetics) have not received even a mention. But here are the starting points at least for further reading in the difficult but very rewarding original sources. Also the beginnings of answers to questions that surface continually in the writing and appraisal of poetry: What do poems attempt? Why don't the strongest feelings produce the best writing? Why is originality important, but not all-important? Why is poetry so marginalized in contemporary society, and what can be done to correct matters?

The answers will not be definitive. Philosophy does not finally settle anything, but can untangle the issues involved, suggest what has to be argued or given away if a certain position is held. Philosophical questions pass ultimately beyond rational argument (the finding of bad reasons for what we instinctively believe, one philosopher called his subject) into preferences, outlooks, experiences. It would be surprising if they didn't. And more surprising if we could use one small part of our faculties to explain the rest, though that is very much what mathematics, science, logic and linguistic philosophy have attempted. But if reason has its dangers, the sleep of reason may be worse.

References

1. Oswald Hanfling's Philosophical Aesthetics: An Introduction (1992). A readable summary. Also entries in David Cooper's A Companion to Aesthetics (1995).
2. Roger Scruton's The Politics of Culture and Other Essays. (1981), Chapter 1 of John Passmore's Serious Art (1991) and Chapter 4 of B.R. Tilghman's But is it Art? (1987).
3. Brian Appleyard's The Culture Club: Crisis in the Arts. (1984) and Ian Gregson's Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrangement (1996).
4. W. Tatarkiewicz's A History of Six Ideas (1980) and Chapter 1 of Hanfling 1992.
5. Mary Mothersill's Beauty entry in Cooper 1995.
6. Crispin Sartwell's Representation entry in Cooper 1995, Chapter 6 of Hanfling 1992, and Chapters 6 and 7 of Passmore 1991.
7. Chapter 5 of Hanfling 1992, and Malcolm Budd's Emotion entry in Cooper 1995.
8. Crispin Sartwell's Realism entry in Cooper 1995.
9. Ihab Hassan's The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. (1987).
10. Chapter 11 of Hanfling 1992.
11. Chapter 10 of George Watson's The Literary Critics (1986).
12. Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art (1968).
13. Edwin Panofsky's Iconology and Iconography: An introduction to the study of Renaissance art in Meaning in the Visual Arts (1970). Also John Hyman's Language and Pictorial Art entry in Cooper 1995.
14. pp. 24-25 in Passmore 1991.
15. George Dickie's Art and the Aesthetic (1974)
16. Ted Cohen's Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic (1973).
17. Richard Wollheim's Art and its Objects (1980).
18. A.C. Danto's The Artworld (1973). Also Chapter 1 of Hanfling 1992 for references 15-18.
19. Albert Rothenburg's Creativity and Madness: New Findings and Old Stereotypes (1990).
20. V.S. Ramachandran’s The Artful Brain, from A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness ( 2006). http://www.nyas.org/ebriefreps/ebrief/000500/pdfs/ramachandran.pdf

Verse Writing: a Practical Guide

PREFACE

1.1. WHY WRITE VERSE?

Professionals

Amateurs

1.2. POETRY: A THEORETICAL DEFENCE

1.2.1. A Superior Truth

1.2.2. Poetry Reconciles Us to the World

1.2.3. Demanding and Satisfying

1.2.4. Versatile and Wide-Ranging

1.2.5. A Special Mode of Knowledge

1.2.6 Insight into All Forms of Writing

1.2.7. General Apprenticeship

1.2.8. Convenience

1.2.9. Sheer Pleasure

1.3. WHAT IS POETRY?

Discussion

1.4. WHAT IS VERSE?

1.5. TYPES OF POETRY

1.5.1. Traditional Poetry

Traditional Aesthetics

Representation

Emotional Expression

Autonomy

Social Purpose

Traditional Poetry Today

Looking Ahead

References

1.5.2. Modernism: Overview

1.5.3. Postmodernist Poetry

Features of Postmodernism

1.6. AESTHETICS

Definitions of Art

Aesthetic Qualities

Dangers of Aesthetics

Art as Representation

Art as Emotional Expression

Form and Beauty: The Autonomy of Art

Art as a Purposive Activity

Artist-Centred Philosophies

Viewer-Centred Philosophies

Art as Social Objects

NeuroAesthetics

Conclusions