Comments on: The Poetry in the Prose: Part Two

By: Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:47:41 +0000

Thomas, thanks for clarifying!
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:17:06 +0000

Poe’s poem was called ‘The Haunted Palace,’ not ‘The Haunted House,’ and it was published 5 months previously on its own, before it appeared in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and the poem may have suggested the tale.
Another Poe poem, ‘The Conqueror Worm’ also appeared as a poem before it was included in Poe’s tale ‘Ligeia.’
Poe consciously mixed prose and poetry together perhaps better than anyone save Shakespeare.
Poetry has much to gain by insinuating itself into the more popular novel form. I’m surprised more poets don’t do it. Poems in a novel can advance character development, as well as plot, and can also set mood, scene, etc. I would think it would be easier for a poet to turn novelist than for a novelist to become a poet. But that’s open to question. I’ve written a character-driven novel which uses some poems.
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By: Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:21:26 +0000

And yes, Mairead, lucky characters indeed!
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By: Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:56:54 +0000

Kent, thanks for that. Good to know. It would be a perverse thrill to one day find an entry in a ‘real world’ anthology, for one ‘John Shade’, but now I’m being silly…
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By: Mairead

Mairead — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:35:48 +0000

Just a side note, to add onto the list of works-within… Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty attributes a poem of the same title by her husband, Nick Laird, to one of the characters, and it acts as an essential analysis of the book’s greater theme. I’m sure lots of novelists quote published poetry, but I wonder how many appropriate poems for their writer-characters. (Lucky characters…)
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:38:04 +0000

Jason,
Not anthologized, exactly, but an excerpt from Shade’s poem in Pale Fire appears in Also with My Throat I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada’s Letters in English (Combo Books, 2006).
Kent
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By: Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 13:10:42 +0000

Thanks, Brian. Okay, that’s two votes for Possession. I really need to hunker down w/ this novel. I’m not surprised Don Coles admired the poetry in Pale Fire. I suspect a lot of people admire the work of ‘John Shade.’ (A silly question, perhaps, but has anyone ever anthologized the poetry from Pale Fire? And under whose name? An anthology of works-within-works would be fascinating, though it would be nice to see these works infiltrate the ‘real’ anthologies, too…)
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By: Brian Bartlett

Brian Bartlett — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:42:17 +0000

One novel this discussion makes me think of is A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which includes great gobs of poetry written by her fictional poet. When I read the novel well over a decade ago, I gave Byatt’s poetry (maybe unfairly) the most superficial of skims, thinking that if I was going to give it close attention I should do so only after getting much more familiar with Tennyson, Arnold, and the Rossettis. I suspect other readers not well-versed in Victorian poetry might’ve felt and done the same. A fascinating study could be made (if it hasn’t already been) of poets who lend or give poems previously published under their own names to fictional creations of theirs. For one, Poe did this sometimes, publishing, in one case, “The Haunted House” as his own, then as Roderick Usher’s (I think that was the order, though maybe it worked both ways in dffierent cases, the fictional accreditation sometimes occuring after, and sometimes before, the work was published under the author’s name). What was the case with the poems Pasternak gave Zhivago? Where they published first as Pasternak’s, without the novel’s framework? As for Nabokov, one of Canada’s very best living poets, Don Coles, once told me how much he admired the poetry in Pale Fire.
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By: Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:42:34 +0000

Iolanthe, thanks for the excellent suggestion. And I agree: I think it takes great skill to write in another style. So many of these works-within-works are wonderful in-and-of-themselves. Even the more lurid matter, like Pynchon’s British Invasion knockoff, demonstrates a certain insight.
Martin, thanks for your great comments. Nabokov does seem to be of a different order, doesn’t he? I can’t comment on Updike – I haven’t read enough – but the New Yorker‘s recent retrospective featured some lovely poems. There may not be many more as good as these, but I wish I could write one poem as perfect as “Telephone Poles.”
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By: mearl

mearl — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:23:20 +0000

Jason,
Excellent post. There’s and interesting idea that shadows your arguments, and that is: are poetry and fiction separate skills and does mastery at one form preclude mastery of the other. One can think of very few writers who were able to pull of both forms at levels that have insured their survival as poets we still read, and novelists we still read. Shakespeare of course mixes prose and poetry throughout his plays, depending on character status, setting and dramatic needs. But I am thinking more of writers who do both, separately, and at a high level. There are many formidable poet critics, many poets who write prose (poet’s prose, poetic prose, call it what you will). But this was not the case with Thomas Hardy, nor was it with D.H. Lawrence. Pasternak seems the preeminent example. His early prose could still be situated within the context of poet’s prose. But Dr. Zhivago presents quite a different order of accomplishment. Updike’s poetry, while not necessarily terrible, never reached anything near the level of his fiction. Peter Handke is the only other case that I can think of off the top of my head. More noted for his Novels and plays, some of his poetry is formidable indeed.
Crucial in your presentation is the case of Nabokov and his novel Pale Fire. You say that he “plays poet and critic”. But I wander if “play” is an adequate term (although certainly a high level of play and irony run through his oeuvre). But since he was a serious poet and a serious critic, as well as one of the 20th century’s greatest novelists, this separates him fundamentally from the rest of your examples. After all he wrote poetry assiduously and with great dedication until he was in his late twenties, and his first novel, Mashenka only appeared in 1926, when he was a twenty-seven year old poet, and well-established as such in his émigré setting.
As late as 1959 he would bring out Poems and Problems with Doubleday. This book contained thirty-nine Russian poems, with translations and fourteen original English poems. And yet he had a much higher opinion of his Russian poetry. This is what he had to say: “Somehow, [the English poems] are of a lighter texture than the Russian stuff, owing, no doubt, to their lacking that inner verbal association with old perplexities and constant worry of thought which marks poems written in one’s mother tongue, with exile keeping up its parallel murmur and a never-resolved childhood plucking at one’s rustiest chords.” (http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/epo/nabokov/poems.htm).
Martin
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By: Iolanthe

Iolanthe — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:32:09 +0000

There are many such “faux” poems to be found in A. S. Byatt’s novel, Possession. I think it must take real skill to write in the style of someone else, especially if you are primarily a novelist and not a poet.
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