The complexities of the line

From Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965):

In matters of emphasis, then, we find it all too true that poetry should be at least as well written as prose. [Ed. note: This quotes a famous line from Ezra Pound.] But the poet’s formal problem, although in one way resembling the prose writer’s, is infinitely more complex: while the prose writeris adjusting his matter to only one “stanza form”—the sentence—the poet must be a master not only of this form but, simultaneously, of another as well, his chosen stanzaic or stichic form, which constantly cuts across sentence structure and which unremittingly invites him to attain a triumph . . . or to risk a disaster. When we realize that a lifetime is quite insufficient for the achievement of even a prose style that is fully emphatic and always weighted just right, we can appreciate the almost insuperable obstacles that the poet has elected to encounter. We can then value correctly his very occasional hard-won masterpiece. [p. 167]

A few years ago, Andrew Hudgins convinced me that writing accentual poetry relieves the poet of responsibility for the line break. He said the problem of the line break in free verse is purely intellectual and therefore a puzzle to him but using meter makes the choices automatic.

Fussell has now convinced me that it ain’t so. Even when writing (or trying to write) metered-verse, the question of how that line is going to end, what word it’s going to come down on, is a great responsibility. Hubby reminded me this morning that the end of the line used to be where the swords would clash together in the bard hall. How can you ask a preposition or a conjunction to stand up to the clashing of swords?

This writing of poetry becomes harder the better one becomes at it.

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