Of late there has been so much energy expended on the subject of meter that facets of equal or greater importance to writing verse or prose have been ignored. As one way of turning to another subject, let me opine that most writing for or against meter for the last twenty years has seemed off the mark. Meter is not quantum physics; meter and variations from it are heard (or not). As such, learning how to use it is done by listening to metrical poetry. Nothing can substitute for that. Further, meter, much as the measure in music, is not how we define poetry and its sound, but how we control expression in a way that's impossible (and even undesirable) in writing intended for the eye instead of the ear. As an aside, in music, the measure allows a composer to balance durations (phrasing, single tones, the lengths of a theme or variation, of a section at a particular tempo, etc.), whether for equalities or inequalities. Yet this doesn't force a composer to write themes or variations of a measure's length. Duration is about time in a sequence which may extend measure to measure; and, while the perception of time is subjective, notation of where its seconds fall allows us to create a sense of time's velocity (or lack of it) in a way that artless improvising never can.

On improvisation, dear to free verse's advocates, there is no similarity between this as expressed by poets and as understood by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughn, Charlie Parker or their descendants in jazz. Improvisation in jazz, true as well in other music (notably in opera and in baroque), is tightly bound to structures including time, key, progression and often, though not always, to originally stated themes. Parker's use of formulae, several hundred figures of his own making (often quotes from other music) which he would attach to a melodic line as it progressed through the changes in a song, is worth an essay in and of itself. Jazz improvisation is a high art, not a casual enterprise of sincere but otherwise ignorant "creativity." Free verse, as it's now practiced, is mostly artless sincerity; some may find poetry in that as some may find music in 3-chord rock (a far more structured art). I have in the past, but, after about age 25, I wanted something more complicated, more like my life and those of colleagues, friends and family. That's when I started, as most of my advanced age started looking, for practitioners of whole arts, not just masters of one note. The intricate variations in sound and rhythm in Bishop, Feirstein, Kelly or Wilbur provide not only counterpoint to their subject matter but indicate a willingness to push the art past the pedestrian and often juvenile limits of prose poetry. But enough on meter -- there's much more to the whole art of poetry.

What follows is a compressed version of a book, still in the works, called The Art of the Figure. Built from a variety of sources, but greatly dependent on a brilliant study from 1947 entitled Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language by Sister Miriam Joseph, the first objective in writing it was to open eyes to the complexities of Elizabethan composition (and by extension that going back to Classical times).  Research revealed that complex use of figures of speech, from the trivial to the profound, were learned to Elizabethan grammar school students before the age of 16.  Further, there is something compelling about Elizabethan prose and verse that vanishes from English writing by the time of Dryden and is only seen in the law and in some science writing today. A sense of logical development, of coherent systems of metaphors, and of orderly argument (even in theatrical debate) underpins even the most passionate passages of a range of Elizabethan authors. Was it just the peculiar time and place? Or were there other instruments that raised both discourse and literary entertainment to a level not seen before and rarely after in English?

Given that grammar school students in 1550 were likely no more dazzling a crop of children than those in 1998, does it say anything about teaching methods or materials that such a raw crop produced the bulk of English dramatic poetry and a collection of lyrics as good or better than anything written since? One doubts that teachers were better than those today. There is no zoological evidence that the human brain has shrunk in the interim. Indeed, because we've become better able through science to look after ourselves, life is vastly more comfortable. For instance, in a sonnet, Shakespeare complains of himself as being an old man at 35; indeed he was, probably with open sores on his skin, boils on his crotch and under his arms, rotten teeth (and breath to match), circulatory problems to match his bad diet, eyesight unrepaired by prescription lenses or partly blinded by undiagnosed glaucoma, and back and joint injuries that hobbled his walk and made bending over to pick up a dropped manuscript at the Globe a Herculean task. Perhaps, though lacking in health, they had a superior cosmology?

That's not likely. Elizabethan perceptions of physical reality were bizarre, even by standards of the time in Europe. (What are perceived by some contemporary critics as figures in Metaphysical poets regarding eyesight are often statements of how Elizabethans saw the workings of vision and light.  And even in England these were, in decades, exposed in Newton's work as leftovers from Medeaval mysticism or as new impositions from Puritan dogma. Indeed, a little more than a century and a half after Shakespeare's death in 1616, Elizabethan cosmology had been so far surpassed that the resulting physical law, and the mathematics underpinning it, dominated science until the early 20th century. (Partisans of Leibniz are welcome to their own opinions.) Perhaps they had a superior society?

Elizabethan poets, and dramatic poets in particular, were plagued by religious hysteria, political disputes, and bouts of censorship that today would likely only be found at an American university humanities department. The advent of the Puritans and their odd practices and beliefs, as well as the Church of England and its patron's violent suppression of former Catholic institutions such as the workhouses (which became poorhouses, much as union hiring halls have become in our time), led to the arrest and imprisonment of virtually every major poet except Shakespeare, and to the periodic closing of every theater in London. By the time of Milton and Cromwell, theaters were closed altogether as being affronts to moral rectitude. Further, despite the most prepossessing, talented and aggressive monarch in Europe, Elizabeth I, women were barred not only from ministerial posts but from appearing onstage; and, though many women participated in literary culture, such as the legendary Marie Lanier (see Archives for a piece of her work), the official view of women was not very different from that expressed in Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost half a century later. (Interestingly, though not surprisingly, one of the leading factors in the social reform movements in 19th century England were actress/managers who found in the theater an area beyond prose fiction where women could not only succeed but lead.)  Perhaps then, some quality of personal or town life advanced the cause of otherwise stunted English development?

The case would be hard to make. This was a society dominated by hoodlums on the streets and roads, where a major poet, Ben Jonson, murdered an actor, and was released on suspended sentence because a lawyer successfully argued that Jonson was too important a scholar to be imprisoned. The Queen was as deadly to her ministers as her father had been to his wives. The plague still haunted Elizabethan towns and cities, where plumbing as crude as that of the Romans 15 centuries earlier had yet to be developed. The English garden, however, was one great cultural artifact (what Shakespeare called "nature" was such a garden, the largest of which were enormous parks built by English royalty). Were there other areas of English cultural life that conformed to the brilliance of the lyric and dramatic poetry?

There's scarcely an English painter worthy of the name from that time; music was a late invention there and many would say they've never caught up with any contemporaries but those in American rock 'n roll and musical comedy. If you're fond of thatched roofs and theaters with a habit of burning down, their architecture might move you (I can't wait to see a play in the new Globe, however). Where public consummation of royal marriages was only lately practiced, palaces tended to be enormous, drafty spaces choked with smoke in the winter and sewage year round. There were a number of bright, inquiring minds, such as the School of Night with Hariot, Bacon and an assortment of alchemists, but their work had to proceed under cover of either private rooms or of a royal patron. With so much antipathy in culture, politics and religion, what did Elizabethan writers have going for them?

It didn't hurt that English was in the process of being "discovered," both as a process of nationalist pride sponsored by Elizabeth I and as an outcome of the integration of the old court language of French with the language of Chaucer. The nationalist side is not to be discounted (as one wouldn't in considering Ibsen and his preference for bukman over "Norse"). Dozens of major writers, both dramatic and lyric poets, wanted to integrate classical prosody with English to prove that the language was one with Europe in its potential for poetic expression (a multicultural prosody the French and Italians had grabbed from Arabic, Greek and Latin sources). As is true in any artistic movement, they stole everything they could find that fit their credos, most notably from translations of prosodists and critics of Classical times, and from their Renaissance disciples among the Italian critics and the Pleïade of France.

The richness of expression in English, arising from its integration of northern and southern European lexicons (and haphazard blends of grammars from the same sources), surely played a powerful role in what has marked the English of Britons ever since, a witty sense of play. That in and of itself is an indication that a language's inexactness permits not only a wide range of meanings from synonyms, homonyms, and similar combinations of words, but an even wider range of opinions. A writer in a language so rich can scarcely avoid puns and other forms of wit, nor can debate be very far from conversation. The very looseness of the language (then and now) opens it to fresh approaches to figures of comparison that might not be available to languages with more solidified vocabularies. And this is no less true today than it was then, with a heavy infusion to English not only from the sciences but from Spanish and a variety of Asian languages. These factors might have contributed, as did the erratic and ambiguous encouragement of free expression by the Court itself.  There were obvious restrictions on expression, particularly those regarding religion; they were motivations for some uses of figurative language, but it is fair to describe such phrases as "s'blood" and other ways of avoiding the censor as being the least interesting use of figurative speech by Elizabethan writers. Where was it used best?

From the work itself, it seems clear that the most evocative use of the figures lay in expressing the otherwise ineffable: the nature of love or death; the peculiar ambiguities of sexuality; the strange but unprovable similarities of things, actions, and events; the ineradicable space between desire and its expression; the odd but unprovable links between the individual and the universal; and the inevitable space between expression and the senses -- words are not the thing itself, though skillful use of comparative figures may bring them closer.

In an earlier effort to restore this part of the art of poetry, it strikes me Pound and Eliot committed a major error, particularly with figures of comparison, in describing them as routes to discovering the irrational. But the ineffable, though lacking empirical proof, need not be irrational. It may instead be how we feel about the rightness or wrongness of a combination of colors or tones; the ineffable may be experience that cannot be interpreted in simple declarative sentences, as the intricate weave of complex systems can only be interpreted by nonlinear equations. Look at this not-so-famous essay-within-a-play, and note how an old master explores its subject while still keeping it a believable dramatic scene.
 

Hamlet:  Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man
as e'er my conversation coped withal.
Horatio: O, my dear lord.
Hamlet: Nay, do not think I flatter,
for what advancement may I hope from thee
that hath no revenue but thy good spirits
to feed and clothe thee. Why should the poor be flattered?
No, let the sugared tongue lick absurd pomp
and crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
where thrift may follow feigning.  Dost thou hear?
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
and could of men distinguish, her election
hath sealed thee for herself. Thou hast been
as one in suffering all that suffers nothing,
a man that Fortune's buffets and rewards
have ta'en with equal thanks.  Blest are those
whose blood and judgment are so well commingled
that they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger
to sound what stop she please.  Give me that man
that is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
in my heart's core, ay, in my heart of hearts,
as I do thee...Something too much of this...

        (from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)

Indeed, the notion of orderly composition lay at the heart of the system of figurative speech. And the system was broken out into a number of categories, including the simplest (schemes), comparisons, argumentation, testimony, pathos, and ethos. Followed with pedantic vigor, such could be as stultifying as the absence of order can be today. Followed with a sense of play like that of a Baroque composer with the rules of the fugue, figurative speech can be more astonishing, vivid and coherent than the plainest language W.C. Williams and his disciples, including many among New Formalists, can buy or rent.

Next time, we'll look at the most important class of figures for poets, those of comparison.

                                Arthur Mortensen