It’s literary Saturday here at the stately Mead manor in gracious Queens; as one of my new year’s resolutions I’m going to try to blog less about politics and events on the weekends and more about literature and life. Sundays I’ll try to continue that pattern, blogging more on matters of values and faith. Politics will be sure to creep in; politics is about how people live together and while church and state can and should be kept separate, politics and religion (and politics and culture) will always mix. Even so, I’ll try to keep the weekend focus noticeably different from the weekdays.
On literary Saturday I’ll be writing mostly about old books, dead writers and old ideas; that’s not because I don’t like — and read — new ones. (Try Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall for some great contemporary fiction; two excellent new books on Chinese history that I’ve recently enjoyed are The Generalissimo: Chaing Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China by Jay Taylor and John Keay’s gripping and readable A History of China.) But it’s the old books that I really love; those are the ones that have shaped me and the ones that I’ve lived with a long time.
Many of the old books I love are in verse. I’ve always had a weakness for heroic couplets: iambic pentameter lines that rhyme. Iambic pentameter (duh DAH, duh DAH, duh DAH, duh DAH, duh DAH) seems to be the easiest, most natural rhythm for English verse. Long stretches of Shakespeare’s plays are written in blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter. When I was a hopeful young lad of thirteen, I had to memorize the speech that Duke Orsino makes at the start of Twelfth Night. It begins like this:
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more…
I must have looked pretty ridiculous as I spouted this when our eighth grade class performed it, though not half as bad as my poor classmates at the all-boy prep school who had to play the female roles in this gender-bending story of star-crossed lovers and lost twins. It is, in any case, very good iambic pentameter.
John Milton was another writer who used blank verse to great effect. Here’s how he starts Paradise Lost:
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse,that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow’d
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
I feel uncomfortable putting my own miserable doggerel anywhere near Milton’s poetry, but while only a genius can write great blank verse, pretty much anybody can churn out the lesser stuff. To wit:
Blank verse falls lightly on the English ear
And takes no special training to compose;
With little practice even kids can spout
Unblemished lines of reasonable blank verse.
A friend of mine, Mark Childress, once produced
A novel loosely written more or less
In verse like Shakespeare’s plays, but on the page
He laid it out like ordinary prose.
Though critics raved about his gorgeous style,
Nobody saw how well the novel scanned.
Back in my twenties I already knew
That writing was the way for me to go;
I set myself to learn to write blank verse
To polish up my style and get a sense
Of how the rhythms of our language work.
It’s not a bad thing to do; getting some facility with this basic poetic form will make you a better writer and reader both. The next stage up in complexity and difficulty is the heroic couplet. It’s the English equivalent of Alexandrian verse in French, the rhymed twelve syllable lines that give classic French literature its elegance and fire. Take this couplet taken at random from the opening of Racine’s great tragedy Phaedra:
J’ai visité l’Élide, et, laissant le Ténare,
Passé jusqu’à la mer qui vit tomber Icare.
If your French isn’t up to it, trust me: these quite ordinary lines of no special emphasis are lapidary, elegant and flowing all at once. Many of the English poets of the seventeenth century envied that French flair, and to come as close to it as possible, they adapted the old English rhymed iambic couplet. The form has a long English history; Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in heroic couplets. This is another piece I had to memorize back in the days when students were still being educated at both ends; I understand that English majors are still sometimes expected to know it by heart.
Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Writers like John Dryden made brilliant use of this form in the seventeenth century, but the great English master of the heroic couplet was Alexander Pope. Poets today generally have a pretty narrow view of what poetry should be and do. Pope like many poets in former times thought that poetry should be about anything and everything from love poems to story telling to epitaphs to essays on literature and history. This is what he wrote about Sir Isaac Newton:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.
Very unlike today’s literature professors and critics, Pope believed that literary criticism should itself be literate, and that critics who could not write well were not qualified. His Essay on Criticism still makes a lot of sense today and is well worth reading:
‘Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
In Poets as true Genius is but rare,
True Taste as seldom is the Critick‘s Share;
Both must alike from Heav’n derive their Light,
These born to Judge, as well as those to Write.
Let such teach others who themselves excell,
And censure freely who have written well.
Authors are partial to their Wit, ’tis true,
But are not Criticks to their Judgment too?
I don’t agree with all of Pope’s literary judgments, and criticism has come a long way since 1711. But I strongly believe that Pope was right about two things that most of the modern world gets wrong.
First, he was right that poetry is more than lyrics and sentiment. Most though not all poetry today is too small: too short, too restricted in subject, too fragile, in-groupy and evanescent. My good friend Michael Lind has written an epic poem about the Alamo; I wish more contemporary essayists and writers took poetry seriously and worked in it from time to time.
Second, Pope was right to denounce bad writers and to say that even critics need to write well. Bad writing isn’t just a sign of laziness and poor training; it’s an enemy of freedom and democracy and it deserves to be ruthlessly mocked and scorned. People who call themselves scholars and intellectuals but write ugly, dull or crabbed prose should be ashamed of themselves; you can’t turn yourself into a genius but anybody who takes the time and trouble can learn to write prose that doesn’t hurt the eyes and that makes sense to the ordinary lay reader. This isn’t a mysterious gift that some are born with but that others lack; writing clearly and well is a skill that can be taught.
It’s the duty of a serious intellectual in a democratic society to express herself or himself in ways that make important ideas and information available to a broader public. It’s the duty of a university to ensure that its graduates have the skills to communicate with the general lay public.
The great Greek orator Demosthenes, we are told, overcame a speech impediment and learned to speak with exceptional clarity by learning to speak with pebbles in his mouth. Writing effective expository verse is a surefire way to improve your expository writing overall: if you can write an effective op-ed on world trade in heroic couplets you can certainly write one in prose.
Students, take note: Professor Mead gives extra credit for term papers in blank verse — if the blank verse is good.
Today we seem to make a virtue of horrible prose. Graduate students are forced to write incomprehensibly to win credibility in their profession. Our great universities with their enormous budgets and endowments generally spend very little time or money teaching their students to write well.