Sherry Chandler

sort of.

Consider this passage from Seamus Heaney’s essay “Extending the Alphabet: On Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander,” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995):

…we have been rightly instructed about the ways native populations and indigenous cultures disappear in the course of these civilizing enterprises, and we have learnt how the values and language of the conqueror demolish and marginalize native values and institutions, rendering them barbarous, subhuman, and altogether beyond the pale of cultivated sympathy or regard. But even so, it still seems an abdication of literary responsibility to be swayed by these desperately overdue correctives to a point where imaginative literature is read simply and solely as a function of an oppressive discourse, or as a reprehensible masking. When it comes to poetic composition, one has to allow for the presence, even for the pre-eminence, of what Wordsworth called ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure,” and that pleasure comes from the doing-in-language of certain things. …Which is to say that the creative spirit remains positively recalcitrant in face of the negative evidence, reminding the indicative mood of history that it has been written in by force and written in over the good optative mood of human potential.

…for it is obvious that poetry’s answer to the world is not given only in terms of the content of its statements. It is given perhaps even more emphatically in terms of metre and syntax, of tone and musical trueness; and it is given also by its need to go emotionally and artistically “above the brim,” beyond the established norms. These things are the artistic manifestation of that affirming spiritual flame which W. H. Auden wanted the good person and the good poet to show, a manifestation which has less to do with argument or edification than with the fact of articulation itself. (pp. 24-25)

A clarification about grammar: the indicative mood says “she did,” optative mood says something like “if she had done” or perhaps “she might have done.”

As an Irish poet, Heaney is saying that it is good to know that works in the canon of English literature are based on certain empirical assumptions, and that their actions don’t always look all that noble from the point of view of the conquered “barbarians.” Same with Latin literature or Greek.

Even so, says Heaney, there is something about the literature that rises above the politics of the time and that something is found in its music, its form, its art, in the joy it brings us from its playfulness and audacity.

Some snippets from a classic on the subject of meter, Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965):

“Rhythm must have meaning,” Ezra Pound insisted in 1915. And he is right. The empirical study of poetry will convince us that meter is a prime physical and emotional constituent of poetic meaning.

…

Which is to say that regardless of the amount and quality of intellectual and emotional analysis that precedes poetic composition, in the moment of composition itself the poet is most conspicuously performing as a metrist. And the same principle holds for the reader: at the moment of his first apprehension of the poem he functions less as semanticist than as a more or less unwitting prosodist.

…

When Boswell asked Johnson, “What is poetry?” Johnson answered: “Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.” In the same way, everyone knows what meter is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.

…

Civilization is an impulse toward order; but high civilizations are those which operate from a base of order without at the same time denying the claims of the unpredictable and even the irrational. The impulse toward the metrical organization of assertions seems to partake of the more inclusive human impulse toward order. Meter is what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that pattern—which means repetition—emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance. Because it inhabits the physical form of the words themselves, meter is the most fundamental technique of order available to the poet. The other poetic techniques of order—rhyme, line division, stanzaic form, and over-all structure—are all projections and magnifications of the kind of formalizing repetition which meter embodies. They are meter writ large. (pp. 3-5)

The mark of a great poem is not just how it establishes its rules of order but in how it breaks those established rules. Too much order, an order too strongly imposed, is the mark of doggerel. Great poems, like great civilizations, strike a balance between order and the chaos from which creativity springs.

And just as an aside, because all roads lead to politics, democracy is like poetry in that it requires order — people must be safe to go about their daily lives — and also a certain amount of chaos. A people overprotected are not free. So Congress may think in passing this latest totally unnecessary FISA bill, they are protecting us from the dangers of external attack. That is I suppose the most generous interpretation. More cynical is the thought that it’s the telecoms they’re protecting. Be that as it may, what they actually seem to be doing is creating a daddy state and imposing order, thus destroying the essence of our democracy from within.