(I might take this opportunity to strike out the word “bar” in that passage and replace it with “club.” Football fans go to bars, rugby supporters to clubs, and rarely to this day in the U.K. or its dominions do the twain ever meet.

The difference is that today there’s far more poetry in the bars than the clubs.)
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“What we often forget is how steeped in the Classics all education was until very recently, and that nobody STUDIED poetry as such, what is more Modern Poetry. If you were from the tiny elite that got to study at all, you studied the Classics, Latin and Greek, and scanning as much as grammar was the discipline through which you became that educated man who could rule Estate and Empire without blinking. Everybody in that class had Horace in their pockets, even as they went into battle, the bar or the boardroom. But they were officers, not toughs in the ranks, and it would have to wait until the toughs in the ranks got to school to give anyone the chance to start majoring in English!”

Well said, Mr. Woodman.

“Well, Mr. Woodman, had I known beforehand I was entering into an exchange with a peer of John Milton’s I would have demured.”

Lighten up, Tere.

.
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Terreson, you’re insight is correct; I’m a mere hack, imitating Poe. Truly! I’ll fully admit that’s all I am.

The Modernists tried to bury Poe, but, as I’ve shown, Eliot read Poe (and stole Poe’s critical ideas) and Ezra Pound’s whole ‘pedantic yet rude’ schtick comes right from Poe, even while Pound and his prissy pals, Yeats, Eliot, Winters, both the Euro-trash Modernists and their American, ‘tough guy,’ Fugitive, New Critical, Creative Writing establishment soldiers were bashing Poe–and that other great Amercian, Millay.

(The ‘practical’ bridge between European & America Modernism may be glimpsed in Ford Madox Ford–who was an Ezra Pound in interconnection and energy between these two wings, facilitating London’s Little Magazine Modernism while also working for Britain’s propaganda War Machine and then coming to the U.S. and working with Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Lowell)
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“Football’ (soccer) was played by the lads in Manchester and Liverpool, Rugby, or versions thereof, by the boys at the great ‘Public Schools” (oh, the ironies!), Winchester, Harrow and, yes, Rugby.

I’m no peer of John Milton, Tere, partly because I’m a football fanatic. Indeed, I was heartbroken by the recent results in Rome.
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Famous for rugby, when you went up for your interview the Master of Christs threw a rugby ball to you as you entered his rooms. If you came from the right school that gave you an advantage–if you caught the ball instead of dribbling it you were in.

‘Football’ was for louts.
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Terreson
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“Poe’s essential idea was right,” you concede at the end. From your tone it’s obvious you yourself didn’t need Poe’s help to arrive at that conclusion, the position being so obvious. So perhaps it’s “the slash and burn tactic in his forensics” you find so derivative in Thomas Brady, almost as if you weren’t using the tactic yourself in the post.

I myself am not too concerned about this problem of scansion, mainly because I don’t know too much about it. I use the established terminology I grew up with and simply apply it to what I hear in the verse I want to understand better, or discuss with a friend. For me, it’s just terminology that I can do what I want with, and most often, antique and rigid as it is, it still helps me more or less to muddle out what I hear in the verse.

It wasn’t always like that, because I grew up in the last throes of a classical education, and would have failed my Vergil if I’d done what I do now with the lines. In fact, I did fail my Vergil, but mainly because at that time I was bored and delinquent.

What we often forget is how steeped in the Classics all education was until very recently, and that nobody STUDIED poetry as such, what is more Modern Poetry. If you were from the tiny elite that got to study at all, you studied the Classics, Latin and Greek, and scanning as much as grammar was the discipline through which you became that educated man who could rule Estate and Empire without blinking. Everybody in that class had Horace in their pockets, even as they went into battle, the bar or the boardroom. But they were officers, not toughs in the ranks, and it would have to wait until the toughs in the ranks got to school to give anyone the chance to start majoring in English!

And that’s why we are where we’re at—products of an educational system that was never designed for us democrats. And we still play the games by the rules that were formed, like those for tennis and rugby, in the courtyards of Harrow—or Christs, my and John Milton’s college.

Christopher

Christopher
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Since the derailment is established I just made a discovery I wish to share. I’ve for long wondered why Thomas Brady, in argument, tends to the slash and burn tactic in his forensics. Upthread he quotes from Poe’s essay, “The Rationale of Verse.” So I pulled down my Everyman’s Library copy of Poe’s poems and essays. And I scanned the Verse essay in order to refresh my memory of his thesis. To some surprise I’ve discovered the source of Master Brady’s forensics.:

” ‘But if this is the case, how,’ it will be asked, ‘can so much misunderstanding have arisen? Is it conceivable that a thousand profound scholars, investigating so very simple a matter for centuries, have not been able to place it in the fullest light, at least, of which it is susceptible?’ ”

“A leading defect in each of our treatises, (if treatises they can be called,)…”

“A grammarian is never excusable on the ground of good intentions.”

“So general and so total a failure can be referred only to radical misconception. In fact the English Prosodists have blindly followed the pedants.”

“On account of the stupidity of some people, or, (if talent be a more respectable word,) on account of their talent for misconception…”

“Were anyone weak enough to refer to the Prosodies for the solutions of the difficulties here…”

“Now, had this court of inquiry been in possession of even the shadow of the philosophy of Verse…”

“All the Prosodies on English verse would insist upon making an elision in ‘flowers,’ thus (flow’rs), but this is nonsense.”

So there it is. Speaking as a student of human behavior I am fascinated by the extent to which Master Brady has adopted, or absorbed, the forensics of EA Poe. Mind you, I don’t disagree with the essay quoted from. Poe’s essential idea was right and he might have been the first to realize as much: that the system of scansion still followed, and based on Classical, syllabic quantitative, prosodics, has never, can never, will never, snugly fit the syllabic accentuated English language poetry. It ain’t going to happen and never has happened. I am just fascinated by the extent to which Poe’s pugilistic style of rhetoric is on display again.

Terreson
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I’d rather read the phone book. A random list of names would be more interesting to me than ‘Spring and All.’

lines ending with ‘the?’ Grab my coat, the revolution’s startin’!

Tell me the secret
handshake so I, too, can
appreciate
‘Spring and All.’
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I don’t think Williams was “better” than Frost, Stevens, Berryman, Crane (& why are Eliot & Pound left out of that list?). But only because at that level, such distinctions are parlor games. Can’t imagine American poetry without a single one of them, & neither can you, because it would be unrecognizably different.
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You betcha!

Dépend tellement du rouge
brouette de roue
vitré avec de l’eau pluie à coté
les poulets blancs

You see, Gary? It doesn’t get any more American than that.

The AMERICAN…OBJECTS…(swoon)

Do you want to be extra-modern, Gary? Extra-American? Do you want to write superb, flawless FREE verse?

Here’s the secret…

shhhh….

(whisper) all you have to do is learn French!

Thomas
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(please please please don’t quote that plum poem!)
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Greatest American poet of the 20th C.

Daisy
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I don’t believe you.

Give me just one, concrete example of his “American voice,” his “influence.”

I’ve read ‘In the American Grain.’ Williams blathers; he has nothing to say. I’m sorry, but I just find him stupid, and I think that’s the point. You had these super-intellectals making Modernism work on either side of the Atlantic–Eliot and Ransom–and the work Modernism did was ‘against the odds’ and a coup that needed real brains, and Eliot had them, and Ransom had them, but you needed the token inarticulate American to round out Modernism’s triumph and it fell to Williams by default just because he was there–he knew Pound.

Sorry, I just get very irritated even talking about William Carlos Williams. To quote Gerturde Stein, there’s no there there.

Thomas
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The Padel/Walcott “spat” was brought to my attention just yesterday by a friend from that “other” place, Oxford, and it was only after I had posted my reference on this thread to the May 27th Guardian article that I realized you’d already had a go at it here—and what a go too (“Derek Walcott Drops Out”).

What a wonderful site is this Harriet!

In reading the thread over I spotted Thomas Brady’s May 15th quip, “I think we should let Alan Cordle get to the bottom of this.”

And I suspect that’s just what John Sutherland of The Guardian wants the British to think about too in his article —because although we Americans always leave it late, and always do it the hard way, we do do it!

Like the appointment of Sonia Maria Sotomayor to the Supreme Court!

So is that an appropriate analogy? Am I allowed to be so political? Because I don’t mean that in a partisan way at all, and of course I’m speaking as a poet.

Just as Thomas Brady is surely speaking as a poet when he insists that nobody reads William Carlos Williams.

We’ll let Tom say that, and not just because we know he means well, but because we know he means true–even when he’s wrong!

Christopher
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Although Auden cared more for German critics than French, not even Auden could ignore the importance of French verse to the free verse revolution in English speaking poetry.

Poe was treated rather roughly by the Moderns, but they read Poe secretly (especially Eliot) and knew that their free verse experiment could not successfully pass Poe’s critical ghost, for Poe had seen free verse in numerous poets he reviewed in the 1830s and 1840s and called it “trash.” Poe’s rigor would not allow for even Eliot’s defense of free verse–that it was not really “free” etc. The Modernist revolutionaries were anxious for their free verse revolution to succeed, and were afraid the historical scholars would call them out as frauds, raining examples such as Poe on their heads.

I’m guessing that one of the Moderns, desperate for a winning strategy read with unbridled joy the following:

“I began the “processes” by a suggestion of the spondee as the first step towards verse. But the innate monotony of the spondee has caused its disappearance, as the basis of rhythm, from all modern poetry. We may say, indeed, that the French heroic — the most wretchedly monotonous verse in existence — is, to all intents and purposes, spondaic. But it is not designedly spondaic — and if the French were ever to examine it at all, they would no doubt pronounce it iambic. It must be observed that the French language is strangely peculiar in this point — that it is without accentuation and, consequently without verse. The genius of the people, rather than the structure of the tongue, declares that their words are, for the most part, enunciated with a uniform dwelling on each syllable. For example — we say “syllabifiCAtion.” A Frenchman would say, syl-la-bi-fi-ca-ti-on; dwelling on no one of the syllables with any noticeable particularity. Here again I put an extreme case, in order to be well understood; but the general fact is as I give it — that, comparatively, the French have no accentuation. And there can be nothing worth the name of verse, without. Therefore, the French have no verse worth the name — which is the fact, put in sufficiently plain terms. Their iambic rhythm so superabounds in absolute spondees, as to warrant me in calling its basis spondaic; but French is the only modern tongue which has any rhythm with such basis; and even in the French, it is, as I have said, unintentional.” “The Rationale of Verse” E. Poe

Ah, the French! They had just the right combination of learning and decadence to lend authority to an English speaking free verse revolution, but even better, as Poe said, THE FRENCH HAVE NO VERSE, so all we have to do is be influenced by French poetry (the kind that is splendidly decadent) and voila! we have English speaking free verse! And rather than looking inept and silly, we will appear learned and dangerous and decadent and…French. Pound led the charge with his French cheerleading, Eliot supplied the cautionary, classical tone, lending an air of respectability to the Modern madness, and the revolution was won. Verse was dead, thanks to a couple of American rogues, three or four English dons, an English lord or two, and a few French poet maudits to de-versify us and disarrange our senses.

Thomas
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You write:

“This is, again, just untrue. Go to any poetry course on any university campus anywhere in the country – but particularly check out ones at Harvard, Yale, the U. of C., Penn, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford – & you’ll find you’re quite wrong about how widely Williams is read.”

In my post on Williams above I did say that he “only interests academics.” I won’t deny Williams has a certain following in the ivory tower.

“As for influence – well, it’s almost too easy. Besides Ginsberg, how about Ronald Johnson, Oppen, Creeley, O’Hara, Fanny Howe. I could go on & on.”

I think there’s a great tendency nowadays to throw around the word “influence” without really thinking about what we mean.

First, if Williams did not exist, no poet would have lacked models. I cannot picture Ginsberg (!) or Oppen (!) or Creeley (!) or O’Hara (!) pacing the floor in a world without William Carlos Williams and fretting, “How shall I write? What shall I write?”

Second, was Williams an ‘American voice?’ Obviously not. Who elected him to that role? This is nothing but empty talk.

Let us take “influence” seriously, for once, shall we? I could, right now, write a haiku and it would be obvious to everyone what I was being influenced by the haiku form. Now someone could say, ‘OK, Thomas, that was a good haiku, write a sonnet,’ and once again it would be impossible for me to indulge in this exercise without being ‘influenced’ by the sonnet form. But how would Williams be imitated? Beyond a certain flippancy and metrical looseness–which did not originate with him, and which thousands of poets had been doing for decades before Williams was even on the scene?

I have no vision of anyone caring about Williams, except for maybe a young person of little talent saying, “Oh, is that considered poetry? I can do that.” Which, when you think about it, is enough to make a poet beloved forever.

In the 40s Williams thought the two best poets living were Pound and Cummings. These were two poets who received the annual Dial Magazine awards in the 1920s along with Williams himself. On the other hand, he couldn’t stand Eliot (another Dial Prize winner from the 1920s) because Williams felt Eliot lacked some notion of ‘purity’ that Williams held–but what right had Williams to hold such a notion? Who the hell was Williams, anyway?

Thomas
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Just look at Padel v. Walcott—that prize fight makes it all the way to The Guardian!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/27/poetry-padel-walcott-oxford
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“I can’t argue with my own taste. I get no pleasure from Williams. I can’t read him.”

Then forget Williams, but I think we should always argue with our own taste.

“Yea, I’m sure Ashbery’s a wide reader. So are most poets. But real influence is something different. Ashbery has a recognizable style and I think he copped it from early Auden, who probably got it from LeForgue.”

You’re right about the connection between early Auden and Ashbery, but Auden was never really interested in French poetry (Baudelaire in passing). Nor did he speak or read French with any fluency. Of course he read Julian Symons’ book on the French symbolists, like everyone else, but Symons was later utterly dismissive of Auden in the London journals of the day. In the Prologue to The Dyer’s Hand Auden says the following: “If I were to attempt to write down the names of all the poets and novelists for whose work I am really grateful because I know if I had not read them my life would be poorer, the list would take up pages. But if I try to think of all the critics for whom I am really grateful, I find myself with a list of thirty-four names. Of these twelve are German, and only two French. Does this indicate a conscious bias? It does.” In Edward Mendelson’s definitive study of Auden, LaFourge is not once mentioned. It would be a mistake to reduce Ashbery’s sphere of influence to early Auden, just as Bloom makes the mistake of reducing it to Wallace Stevens.

At any rate, Thomas, you’ve piled so much intellectual energy and really topnotch commentary into the various threads on Harriet that you are to be complimented. We all owe you a great deal, and I, for one, feel your eccentricity of taste and the way you stand by it is one of your best qualities. For me, it’s extremely refreshing. I mean it!

Martin
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“I think we have to give Williams more credit than that. I, for one, read him all the time. (My wonderful two volume New Directions collected, edited by Christopher MacGowan (1988, is one of my treasures). Also, there are some unlikely cases of indebtedness.”

I can’t argue with my own taste. I get no pleasure from Williams. I can’t read him.

“John Ashbery was always telling me how important and liberating Williams was for him.”

I don’t believe Ashbery. That sounds like blurb talk. There’s some early Auden (during his highly obscure phase) which sounds exactly like Ashbery.

“Of course W. doesn’t fit the Bloomian version of Ashbery’s influence-kit, but neither do Robert Graves, Laura Riding or Delmore Schwartz, all of whom J.A. thrived on.”

Yea, I’m sure Ashbery’s a wide reader. So are most poets. But real influence is something different. Ashbery has a recognizable style and I think he copped it from early Auden, who probably got it from LeForgue.

“Likewise, Robert Lowell’s mid-career shift to a freer and less constrained approach to poetry with Life Studies, owes a substantial dept to Williams, whom he praises repeatedly in his letters. This, not to mention W’s influence on the Objectivists, Black Mountain and Charles Olsen. And, as Daisy says, his politics were uncompromising, though he was not a “political poet”.

I can’t read Lowell, either. That’s another poet who is wildly overrated, in my opinion. And don’t get me started on Black Mountain and Olsen. I have no patience for most of that stuff. I just can’t read it with pleasure. And I suppose I should blame Williams.

Thomas
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I’m glad that you “bit,” so to speak.

When I asked Martin — whose position here I think comes with a bit of responsibility — about the history, it’s because I thought he might know (have done that research). If I’d asked at “The Valve,” I’d have expected some reader (or the blogger at hand) to know as well. A comment thread can be ruled by citations and proof instead of ad hominem assertions; we may just have to raise the level of debate. If I have the time, I’ll have to read into it myself (with that in mind: does anyone have a grant; or suggestions of where to begin?).

I agree about there being an actual even split, on the more and less difficult sides of poetry, at least in my experience. I wanted to know who, besides the marquee names, I might be missing, and that is exactly why I asked Martin to know of whom he was thinking. I read journals pretty regularly, online and in print, and was surprised by his assertion.

I’m not intentionally being condescending, at all, either in my questions or in using the terms I have to analyze this idea; “feminized” being the way a “pursuit” is conceptualized and gendered in / by the culture at large. (I didn’t call it anything but poetry, but I do notice the ways different activities and identities are engaged.) In turn, it might be more constructive not to assume that commenters here are so ignorant of “the history of literature,” if only for the sake of mutual respect and some slight benefit of the doubt.

D.
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Zhachary comments:

No Peacemakers here, Thomas. I’m a pacifist at heart if not always in act: as a youth, rash and young, such inconsistencies are my inheritance.
As for my shoddy metaphor, Martin: does not incongruity obtain comic effect these days?
My main response to the original post was to call out its philosophical confusedness, and I still think that’s where the conversation stops. Earl makes claims we don’t have the means to analyze, as when he writes: “This comes from ease with self-effacement, which in artistic endeavors results in a more thoroughgoing capacity for immersion in the project at hand. … Because women are generally more sensitive to others, they are more sensitive to the needs of the poem.”
Opinions such as these — ungrounded as they are in data of any kind — serve to end conversations, not to start them. The attitudes from which are the precursors to such propositions as “They are more apt to experiment in ways that produce organic forms for expressive purposes rather than try, as men so often do, to trick language into duplicating the will”, are too often incommensurate. I don’t enjoy talking past others, and so try to steer clear of conversations in which the launch is from the get-go fuzzy.
The topic is fascinating nonetheless. I don’t agree with the suggestion that Daniel Pritchard write male poets about his maleness, since we are in such desperate need of self-aware masculinity. Better that he write about parturition, especially since it has been practically forbidden him.
POSTED BY: ZACHARY BOS ON MAY 27, 2009 AT 2:05 PM (EDIT)

What can I say? Both “opinions” and “claims” are, by definition, not grounded in “data”. The title of the post should have certainly clued you in to the fact that what you were about to read was and opinion piece. You admit to youth and so a certain entitlement to “inconsistency”. However, I don’t think that entitles you (especially if you are the pacifist you claim yourself to be) to have made such a hostile and unsupported comment (I’m referring to your first comment.) The aggression was just not appreciated. As for your statement in this comment: “opinions like these…serve to end conversations, not start them” – you might reflect on the fact that this post has generated 82 comments to date. Likewise, I have no idea what you mean by “does not incongruity obtain comic effect these days?” Zachary, you were decidedly not going for “comic effect”, you were going for my throat. Finally, about my “shoddy thinking” (first comment) and that I know nothing of Heidegger or ontology, etc., I would only reply that I have been reading philosophy since the age of fifteen and my credentials on that account are in order. Why not cast your eyes over the following (http://books.google.com/books?id=YsHYVzgO-DwC&dq=earl+nabais&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=xoYorhsa5X&sig=vrMR
ToeTTqH5rdTOaPzRj_UDOX0&hl=en&ei=QZgdStrlMYnN-Aacq83PBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#PPR7,M1) This is a peer-reviewed study of Nietzsche, a book that I recently translated for Continuum Press, Britain’s most prestigious publishers of philosophy.

Of course I have tracked your own interests and what I have discovered looks very worthwhile indeed. So, I hope that you will keep commenting on my threads, but that if you do so, it is with a little less aggression.
Martin
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If you’ll forgive the personal reminiscence, an at-the-time friend directed “Sweeney” onstage in Chicago in 1991 and asked me to set the two songs, “Under the Bamboo Tree” and “My Little Island Girl.” (Eliot — that popster!) I didn’t know, or even know about, the original Johnson song, nor did I know anything about the minstrel/blackface tradition (which continued onscreen into the 1950s — indeed, Judy Garland “blacked up” in other movies, though not to sing “Under the Bamboo Tree”; this stuff gets a *lot* less attention than Pound’s fascism, comparatively). But I did vibe on Eliot’s primitivism/exoticism, and for pre-show music I made a collage (they’d call it a mashup now) of Fred Astaire singing “like the beat beat of the tom-tom when the jungle shadows fall” (Porter’s “Night and Day”) accompanied by Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” It was a fun show to work on. Wish I would have recorded my settings of the Eliot lyrics; I should track the director down, because they revived the production at least twice after I moved away from Chicago, and maybe she recorded the songs at some point.
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As for my shoddy metaphor, Martin: does not incongruity obtain comic effect these days?

My main response to the original post was to call out its philosophical confusedness, and I still think that’s where the conversation stops. Earl makes claims we don’t have the means to analyze, as when he writes: “This comes from ease with self-effacement, which in artistic endeavors results in a more thoroughgoing capacity for immersion in the project at hand. … Because women are generally more sensitive to others, they are more sensitive to the needs of the poem.”

Opinions such as these — ungrounded as they are in data of any kind — serve to end conversations, not to start them. The attitudes from which are the precursors to such propositions as “They are more apt to experiment in ways that produce organic forms for expressive purposes rather than try, as men so often do, to trick language into duplicating the will”, are too often incommensurate. I don’t enjoy talking past others, and so try to steer clear of conversations in which the launch is from the get-go fuzzy.

The topic is fascinating nonetheless. I don’t agree with the suggestion that Daniel Pritchard write male poets about his maleness, since we are in such desperate need of self-aware masculinity. Better that he write about parturition, especially since it has been practically forbidden him.
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