The Imagist

[miyako73]

I do not ask what brush or stroke painters use
Or what kind of paint or colors their palettes have,
Nor do I ask the length of their canvases;
... Formalists are dead.

[MorpheusSandman]

The key word in that poem is the "I" that begins it, because the last line is a falsity (either that, or poets like AE Stallings and critics like Helen Vendler are figments of my imagination... which wouldn't be so bad, come to think of it!). Speaking a bit philosophically, all art is formal expression. To kill form is to kill art. Being ignorant of form isn't the same as form not existing or being dead.

[miyako73]

Have you read any book by Helen Vendler? Was it peppered with classical poetic terms from page to page? Do you know some critics and writers consider Vendler more of a Moralist (as opposed to amoral aesthete or ideologue) than a Formalist? Do you also know that close reading or new criticism that looks at texts as artifacts or aesthetic objects is not the formalism of the ancient? Vendler is not as gung-ho as you two when it comes to anapestic or iambic meter. Read some of her books. You will actually learn terms like "key word" and "couplet ties" and "algebraic".

Of course any kind of art is a formal expression. A violinist has to have a violin to play a Mozart. A poet has to jot down his thoughts on a paper. A ballet dancer has to wear a tutu. That's my idea of formalism- materialist. If your kind of formalism is based on conventional rules being the foundation of an art form, I don't think you are correct. Tribal arts based on meanings and narrative contents have existed among cultural groups since the time of their ancestors. Graffiti is an art; Basquiat proved that. Did he follow any formal rules?

[MorpheusSandman]

Have you read any book by Helen Vendler? -- Yes. To date I've read Poets, Poets, Poetry, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, The Odes of John Keats, Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentary, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, and Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire

Was it peppered with classical poetic terms from page to page? -- It somewhat depends on what you're defining as "classical poetic terms" but, some of them, yes. Her Shakespeare book certainly was.

Do you know some critics and writers consider Vendler more of a Moralist than a Formalist? -- Who?

Do you also know that close reading or new criticism that looks at texts as artifacts or aesthetic objects is not the formalism of the ancient? -- So? New Criticism still focused on form. Why do you think Brooks titled his book "The Well-Wrought Urn" where he vigorously argued against paraphrasing content in favor of understanding how form manipulates our understanding of content? Granted, he focused on things beside meter as well, such as the development of motifs and symbols, but that's still form.

Vendler is not as gung-ho as you two when it comes to anapestic or iambic meter. You will actually learn terms like "key word" and "couplet ties" and "algebraic". -- I admit she doesn't discuss meter much, but not because she's not "gung-ho" on it. She says explicitly in her book on Shakespeare that she doesn't discuss meter because she feels there is no complete system of rhythm that takes syntax into account as well. She actually recommends Shakespeare's Metrical Art by George T. Wright as being an excellent book on the subject, but her focus is simply different. "Key words" and "couplet ties" are formal terms, related to how Shakespeare developed a word over the course of a sonnet. Again, it's a formal feature of his sonnets. And Vendler uses terms like quatrain, couplet, octet, sestet, structure, chiasmus, etc. repeatedly, which are all formal terms as well.

If your kind of formalism is based on conventional rules being the foundation of an art form, I don't think you are correct.

It depends on what you mean by "conventional rules". So far, all I've seen you label as "conventional rules" are meter and closed-forms, and if you had actually read my critique of your last poem you may notice I didn't mention either. What I did mention was the somewhat illogical usage of one image and the opening which seemed merely to give necessary background information without connecting meaningfully with what came after it. That's rooted in the nature of motifs, which is something all artists in every culture I'm aware of utilizes. Repetition and variations is one of those universal aspects of art.

Even if we're just discussing meter and closed forms, you can pretend these things are conventional, classical, dead, archaic, passe, etc. all you want, but there are still a great many modern poets that write metrical poetry and utilize forms, and if you strike up a list of the best poets of the 20th century (meaning, poetry after the modernist/free-verse revolution), most of them wrote in meter and closed forms much of the time too. You can barely read through an entire issue of Poetry Magazine or American Poetry Review without at least ONE formal poem; here's one from Stallings, who's won both the Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowship. I guess someone out there must appreciate such "archaic" and "passe" writing.

[miyako73]

Here's one by Perloff.

"Indeed, most assistant professors hired at even the top institutions like my own no longer have the slightest idea what literary analysis might entail. They've heard of an old-hat technique called "close-reading" -- a technique they know they don't want to use even though they have no idea what it might accomplish. The dirty word "formalism" is associated in their minds with the New Criticism even though the New Critics were not formalists at all but, by and large, moralists. I am always startled, for example, to see journal articles that refer critically to Helen Vendler's "formalism," evidently because Vendler actually looks at the poems she talks about. But Roman Jakobson and Juri Tynyanov, whose emphasis was always on the linguistic base of texts (literary and otherwise) -- their syntax, sound structure, their generic markers and rhetorical forms - would have been amazed to see Vendler's discussions, say, of Seamus Heaney's representations of the Irish Troubles labeled as "formalist." Conversely -- although one would never know it in the contemporary English department - the study of rhetoric -- a central study from Longinus and Horace to the present -- is hardly exclusive to the bad old Englit classrooms of the now despised era of New Criticism. Indeed, in the age of Socrates, as later of Augustus, rhetoric and political study went hand in hand."

Amato/Fleisher Too Pessimistic
Marjorie Perloff
2002-08-17

[PrinceMyshkin]

Honestly, you two: why do you go on about poetry as if it were a branch of entomology instead of focussing on what is original or idiosyncratic or surprising, sad or joyful about this or that poem?

[miyako73]

Thanks, Prince, for the enlightenment.

I'm still waiting for young critics to share their voices. I would rather see what others think about the qualities of a poem than how some dissect a poem and reduce it to archaic poetic quantities in the form of beats, rhyme, syllabic placement, metering, formal length, etc. What makes literature and art relevant is not because of the form but of the content composed by images, meanings, narratives.

[MorpheusSandman]

Here's one by Perloff.

The dirty word "formalism" is associated in their minds with the New Criticism even though the New Critics were not formalists at all but, by and large, moralists... But Roman Jakobson and Juri Tynyanov, whose emphasis was always on the linguistic base of texts... would have been amazed to see Vendler's discussions, say, of Seamus Heaney's representations of the Irish Troubles labeled as "formalist."

Two things strike me about this entire quote:

1. All Perloff has demonstrated by mentioning Vendler focused on how Heaney represented Irish troubles (I haven’t read her book on Heaney, btw) is that she isn’t JUST a formalist.

2. Some new critics did seem to have political and moral motivations for their emphasis on close-reading outside of the biographical and historical, but they nonetheless focused on form regardless of their motivations. Brooks even has a section in Urn where he discusses the philosophical implications of his formal readings.

All that quote says to me is that formalism and other forms of criticism (moral, political, philosophical, biographical) aren't mutually exclusive, and that's a point I would've agreed with even before you posted it. I haven't read Vendler's book on Heaney, but one would have to be blind to say she doesn't focus primarily on formal analysis of poems in her Shakespeare, Yeats, Dickinson, Keats, or Stevens books. I assume when Perloff runs down the list of “their syntax, sound structure, their generic markers and rhetorical forms” he’s referring to those things as falling under the label of form, and I have to ponder what it is he’s inhaling if he thinks Vendler DOESN’T analyze these things…

I'm still waiting for young critics to share their voices.

I'm 26! I hope that's not considered old!

reduce it to archaic poetic quantities in the form of beats, rhyme, syllabic placement, metering, formal length, etc.

I didn’t do this in my last criticism of one of your poems. But keep beating on this strawman if it makes you feel good, I guess.

What makes literature and art relevant is not because of the form but of the content composed by images, meanings, narratives.

When you talk about images and narrative in the abstract you’re talking about form. It’s only when you say a specific image that you’re talking content. But notice how you can never get to content without form itself. And I wonder at how you toss out “meaning” out there as if it’s extricable from form as well, as if HOW you say something doesn’t influence WHAT you mean. You do realize that postmodernism put the emphasis on the signifier (signs) rather than signified (meaning/semantics), right? What’s the meaning of: “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table”?

If you could really explicate what kind of criticism you're looking for--meaning, not something as vague as "content composed by images, meanings" etc.--then you may realize that it's impossible to get there without formal considerations. And, again, by form, I don't just mean meter, rhyme, and syllables.

[MorpheusSandman]

why do you go on about poetry as if it were a branch of entomology instead of focussing on what is original or idiosyncratic or surprising, sad or joyful about this or that poem?

Perhaps because I feel to really understand why a poem is original or idiosyncratic or surprising, sad or joyful requires studying it as if it were a branch of entomology! Let me put it another way: Anyone can experience a work of art and just react, and maybe they can express that reaction in a fairly simple way. But some do enjoy understanding why they reacted that way, and what it is about art and themselves that causes that reaction. Understanding that dynamic is kinda what criticism is about and, personally, I'll take thoughtful criticism over mere expressions of reactions any day. But, as I often say, I was a critic before I was a poet (if I have the right to really call myself either).

[miyako73]

Being a fan of (New) Formalism, you have close-reading as one of your tools. You missed Perloff's "Formalism". Quotation marks can say a lot, you know.

[MorpheusSandman]

I would like to think close-reading IS my "tool". But there's too many poems posted around here to close-read every one to the extent that Vendler or Ricks or Brooks does, especially when they live with the poems they write about for years (Vendler even stated she had memorized every Shakespeare sonnet!). It's why they write books and I'm writing on a forum. Not every poem merits in-depth close-reading to begin with. Call me when someone has taken to close-reading McGonagall.

I don't know what you think the quote-marks around "Formalism" is supposed to imply. New Critics were formalists, Vendler is a formalist, even if they are other things. What's the point?

[miyako73]

Check who Roman Jakobson and Juri Tynyanov were and find out who the literary or language formalists, among them (Vendler included), were, but you have to read first Vendler's book on Heany to find out if indeed it is a work of a formalist.

[miyako73]

Let's stop this, Morpheus. It's ruining my sex drive. Let's just write poetry. Any comments you have, make it poetic like my last two, which are both parodies.

[MorpheusSandman]

I don't get it... you keep bringing this subject up and then you want to drop it... I don't mind, but what gives?

[miyako73]

I might overstay my welcome. I don't want to become an outcast here. If Formalism dominates in this forum, so be it.