Use of form and archaisms in poetry

[chevalierdelame]

Please vote and share your ideas.
By the use of archaic words/ phrases I mean 'thee', 'thou' for 'you' and 'Would that I had known' for 'I wish I had known' etc.

[YesNo]

I suppose it's OK to use thee and thou, but archaic language and formal techniques are two different things. The formal techniques are mainly sound patterns that one imitates.

[chevalierdelame]

I agree. That is why I put four options. I just didn't want to start two threads for something that was more or less related.:)
I hope I've got the questions right. If not, please post how I can correct them. Thanks.

[cacian]

I think whenever there is a word it is to be used unless the lettering of the word is offensive in which case I refrain from using it.

[YesNo]

I agree. The main reason one might choose not to use a word is whether it is offensive. It doesn't matter if it is archaic in some way.

[Poetaster]

It depends entirely on the poet's purpose.

[MorpheusSandman]

It depends entirely on the poet's purpose.Yes.

I will say, though, it's probably best if young(er) poets avoided archaisms until they gain some experience, especially when writing in form. Form naturally lends itself to unnatural syntax and words because of the demands of rhyme and rhythm, and if the only reason someone chooses a word or word-order is to make it work with the form, then that's a classic sign of bad poetry. So, learn to write naturally in form and THEN learn to recognize when archaisms could enhance whatever you're saying.

[Poetaster]

Yes.

I will say, though, it's probably best if young(er) poets avoided archaisms until they gain some experience, especially when writing in form. Form naturally lends itself to unnatural syntax and words because of the demands of rhyme and rhythm, and if the only reason someone chooses a word or word-order is to make it work with the form, then that's a classic sign of bad poetry. So, learn to write naturally in form and THEN learn to recognize when archaisms could enhance whatever you're saying.

I agree completely.

[Pierre Menard]

^^^

What Poetaster and Morpheus said.

[desiresjab]

Form naturally lends itself to unnatural syntax and words because of the demands of rhyme and rhythm, and if the only reason someone chooses a word or word-order is to make it work with the form, then that's a classic sign of bad poetry.

Before the comma your sentence is perfect, after the comma you were careful to say, and if the
only reason for choosing it...

Of course if that is the only reason. Because then he is not doing it because it sounds good to him or because it is exactly the meaning he intends to convey, but only because it fits with his form. Didn't he try anything else first or afterwards? That would be an unusual poet. Did none of his other attempts fit at all? He must have liked something about the version he settled on, because he chose it over other alternatives.

There must have been an awful lot of bad poets in the past. Some of them had to be settling for less than their ideal, unless tens of thousands of anachronistic speech patterns were exactly right in each case.

I think this and some other ideas you brought up earlier are worth further exploration. First, just what was considered archaic in Pope's time, and what was considered stepping over the line, going too far? Maybe Johnson or another spoke on this somewhere. To me it is not a big deal, because I think I have the ear to know when and how to use them. I just find it a very interesting topic to pursue.

I think all poets make compromises for the sake of the form sometiimes. To think not seems rather superficial, what an inexperienced poet or observer might say. Poet's say things a certain way sometimes not because they believe themselves in every case to have written perfectly, but because they knew, given the exegincies of the form, they had little to no chance of ever doing better. This was after a great deal of experimentation, if I know poets. Don't get into the habit of compromising every time you run into a problem.

I think it is okay. It is alright to make compromises sometimes. We are kidding ourselves if we think the greats did not compromise once in a while. They still had to be more fond of what they settled on, compared to all the alternatives they tried and rejected.

I am not sure where to look for a particular instance of this, but am sure anyway that it has to happen. Probably not as rarely as we might think. There are times, of course, when an archaicism is perfect and one realizes he could not do better and does not want try. When they sound good or bad, hopefully one can tell the difference. For most people, including myself, it takes years of reading and writing poetry, observing the masters with your ears. Some critical studies do not hurt either.I think there is a great deal of education to being a good poet, the same way there is with a machinist or a nurse. You get better. You learn more. Small eiphanies add up, until one day you reach that critical mass.

[MorpheusSandman]

Your first questions aren't really answerable in any general way as it would really depend on the poet. There are many poets that can work for hours tweaking a few lines, trying out several alternatives, etc., and then there are those that "write it, forget it" or get their mind locked on one particular rhyme (or meaning accompanied by rhyme) for which they have to unnaturally twist something to make it work and don't worry to much about making it sound natural. Take this bit from Bob Dylan's Sara: "They run to the water their buckets to fill." It's a classic verb/object inversion, and it's archaic and creaky as hell. As far as I can tell, it adds absolutely nothing to the work. Dylan knew he needed "fill" to rhyme with "hill" in the last line, and apparently didn't think long enough to come up with "with" to replace "their" ("with buckets to fill"). Of course, I may be wrong and maybe Dylan had some profound aesthetic reason for this inversion, but I don't see it, and I'm fairly sure this is a clear example of inversion used solely to hit that last rhyme word.

Compare that, however, with two famous inversions from Stevens and Frost: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" and "I placed a jar in Tennessee, / And round it was, upon a hill." Here are two inversions that I think are as clearly done for aesthetic reasons as Dylan's Sara was done for formal reasons. It would've been just as easy for Frost to write "There is something" or Stevens to write "it was round," but in both cases I think the inversion adds a sense of strangeness to the piece, Frost's right from the opening line. What is Stevens's poem about? It's about a jar that's out of place, something man-made juxtaposed with the natural world. What's Frost's poem about? It's about a wall that's out of place, that's lost its purpose, but that people go on mending out of unconscious tradition. In both, the archaisms hint towards the theme, and in both they don't seem a product of formal demands.

It's difficult to say what was "archaic" in Pope's time since we don't have direct access to natural speech from that time, but it's quite clear (as you suggest) that inversions probably weren't common in natural speech. They were "allowed" in poetry because, back then, there was a sense that poetry was a nobler form of language than common speech, and things like inversions served to alienate and "heighten" language above common speech. Today, however, and really starting with Thomas Hardy, the dominant aesthetic has become poetry that tends towards natural speech, with "heightening" done with imagery, metaphor, surrealism, allegory, etc. I think in Pope's time they would've been more likely to condemn poetry that sounded too close to ordinary speech than unnatural speech; the reverse is true now. That's what I meant in the other thread about it merely being a part of aesthetic trends.

I do agree that all poets occasionally have to compromise for the sake of form sometimes, but I think the key is working to compromise as little as possible, mastering form and not being mastered by it. A good test for formal poets, IMO, is whenever they get stuck to write out what they WANT to say in prose, and then see how closely they can get to that using the form they've chosen. It can also be a good idea to "sketch" the form before you start writing. IE, don't just start writing from beginning to end in that form. This was a mistake I made a lot early on; I would think "I'm going to take this idea and make a sonnet," and I would just start with the first word and end with the last. The problem with this is that you find yourself making choices along the way to make the rhythm and the rhyme work. On the other hand, it can be easier and more natural to first pick out the rhyme words you want to use, and then think about what lines would fit them. It can take a little more time, but I think you tend to run into less unsolvable problems along the way. Nothing worse than having several good lines written with a certain form only to realize none of them will work because you just can't make the last one fit: I learned this the hard way writing that long poem in ottava rima where you have two sets of rhymed tercets in each stanza (ABABAB) and it's all too easy to get to that last "AB" and just find you can't make it work adequately.

It's worth it to note that even a poet like Keats, who wasn't afraid of archaisms, gave up on Hyperion because it had "too many Miltonic inversions." He knew he was being archaic and wasn't doing it as well as Milton. I think a lot of avoidance of archaisms is due as much to Bloom's "anxiety of influence" as anything else, since such things were more common back then. A lot of the current aesthetic is probably no more than a reaction to avoid past aesthetic paradigms, to avoid unfavorable comparisons (this was, IMO, one of the dominant reasons for the rise of free-verse; poets were tired of not being able to live up to Pope, Milton, Shakespeare, et al.). I, of course, take Keats' position that it's better to fail (even miserably) than not be amongst the best, and I think most of the best have early works whose ambition out-strips their talent.

[tonywalt]

"Form and archaisms," he then repeated the words slowly with a quizzical look, as if he were in thrust into another century by time machine, "F o r m and A r c h a i s m s," suddenly he remembered he was on Litnet where the past is revered and the present discounted with a smelly fish face. Then it all made sense.

[Sir Guyon]

I recently wrote a neo-classical tragedy, I used both blank verse and archaisms. I am pleased with the result.

[MorpheusSandman]

suddenly he remembered he was on Litnet where the past is revered and the present discounted with a smelly fish face. Then it all made sense.Except, you know, all those recent threads about contemporary poetry and the best poets of the 20th century that had a lot of responses. I don't know anyone here that "discounts the present," but the problem is getting at least two people here that have read the same "present" poets to really discuss it. Nonetheless, acting like either are only things of the past would require ignorance of the present as well; there are plenty of contemporary poets writing in form, though fewer make regular use of archaisms (not since Auden in the early 70s before his death; but he got quite liberal with the thees, thous, and abstract personifications later on).

[desiresjab]

I like the examples you chose (Frost & Stevens & Dylan).

Dipping into the stream of grammatical inversions allowed for immediate indentification with poetic tradition. I am sure they were unnatural (out of step with common speech) to both Pope and Keats. Keats may have minded more than Pope. I would guess they considered them old fashioned. There must have been a sense in which they were fashionable. Milton was probably standing on the shoulders of others when he used them. I don't know Milton, but it sounds like he made them his own. Did he become a prime developer of that particular poetic real estate? The way the classicists desried to purify the language and set it back down unchanging in a steady state, I can easily imagine Pope having every intention that these "devices" would remain a stable part of poetic tradition ever after. The revolution of Keats and his peers (and before them Wordsworth) was much more a revolt of the philosophy of poetry itself than of language, though there were localized attempts to naturalize the language, and one does not mistake Wordsworth for a classicist. Revolutions in poetry are always revolutions in language in the end, poetry can never escape that.

[MorpheusSandman]

Milton's two primary influences were Virgil and Spenser. Spenser wasn't rife with inversions, but he was writing in a kind of faux-Middle English even at the dawn of Early Modern English. Virgil was writing in a different language altogether, but his Latin is as heightened, twisted, and unnatural as it gets. Milton's originality lies in him combining Spenser's sensuality and love of archaic words with Virgil's tortured, unnatural syntax and transporting them to blank verse, which, up until then, had mostly been used to more closely imitate common speech in verse in English drama (it's more of a middle ground between "heightened" poetry and common speech; Shakespeare could use it at both extremes). Milton's challenge was how to achieve the loftiness of the past epic masters (Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Spenser) in a form that, at that time, most everyone associated with a much "lower" form of poetry, and he achieved that through his archaisms. In fact, he achieved it to such a degree that it was nearly impossible for any imitators to come off as anything BUT imitators, and all of the romantics imitated him at one point or another. Keats merely recognized it was a dead-end; he couldn't out-Milton Milton. I think Shelley may have gotten to closest, but he wasn't nearly as consistently archaic in his approach; Byron's Cain is a great imitation as well. In a way, one can think of Milton as THE crux at which English poetry turns, as pretty much everyone after him had to react to him somehow.

I think you're partly right about the "revolution" of the romantics. That really kick-started the desire to bring "the common" back to poetry. Yet with Wordsworth and Coleridge, at least, I think it started more with their subject matter; the Lyrical Ballads being so focused on the common people, the downtrodden, the outsiders, the overlooked (and it's worth noting that this really started with Burns, a major influence on the early romantics); but their language was still a ways from being truly demotic, for the most part. In that sense, their "Conversation Poems" (Frost at Midnight, Tintern Abbey, etc.) were far more influential in bringing "common language" back to poetry, but they represent a minority of the output of both. In fact, the difference between Coleridge's "Conversation Poems" and his "High Imagination Poems" (Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan) in a way represent the division between poetry of the future and the past. Ironically, perhaps the romantic that had the most "common" language consistently was Byron, and he was the romantic most critical of Wordsworth and Coleridge and most wanting to maintain the tradition of Pope and Dryden. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Byron is how hard it is to tell where the division between his romanticism and anti-romanticism/classicism is.

[chevalierdelame]

Thanks for voting and all the posts too.



On the other hand, it can be easier and more natural to first pick out the rhyme words you want to use, and then think about what lines would fit them. It can take a little more time, but I think you tend to run into less unsolvable problems along the way. Nothing worse than having several good lines written with a certain form only to realize none of them will work because you just can't make the last one fit:


I have also found that this method really helps.


I like the Frost & Stevens & Dylan example too.

[sandy14]

Form can always used effectively. Poems usually find their own form. A poem starts as a bunch of notes, sentiments or ideas and the theme may work as a sonnet, it may work as a haiku or it may be better suited as a free verse or prose poem.

There is a difference between studying poetry and writing it. When studying poetry identifying the form is the most crucial aspects, but in most cases you are presented with one final version. When writing several forms and techniques may have been attempted until finding one that suits. Some ideas work very well as sonnets, others don't. I tend to regard the concept of form/no form as one of artistic choice. Knowledge of form broadens the choices a poet has, but that doesn't mean they always make the right one.

Form also has its fashions and may vary according to continent/nation/local region. The concept of poetry being something to be performed has had a good run in the UK recently, but it hasn't always been so. The visual arrangement of the lines on the page was the previous fashion and the sound was not the priority. I'm not saying either is wrong - just that there are trends and fashions out there and something published ten years ago, let alone 100 years ago may not resonate quite as well in the present.

Archaisms are best avoided or used with good reason (maybe you are writing a new Arthurian legend or something). There's no point in trying to write like Wordsworth or Keats - it's already been done by Keats & Wordsworth. Yes, you can learn a lot by copying their stuff, but you run the risk of having to unlearn it later on.

[Pierre Menard]

suddenly he remembered he was on Litnet where the past is revered and the present discounted with a smelly fish face. Then it all made sense.



You've said this same thing a number of times on the forum. It's a literary forum with a lot of people who are passionate about literature. They're naturally going to be drawn to the classics and the great works of art through the ages. Get over it.

[desiresjab]

For a long poem, especially one requiring scholarly attention, I would research details the same as I have done for novels. Since I love the mystery, I usually go into a poem without notes, and research anything that is needed along the way.

Poems are different. I wrote some semi-biographical poems on mathematicians that definitely required research and notes beforehand. I have done quite a bit of historical stuff.

But few begin a love poem from notes or research, right? There is still that spontaneous prompt emerging from somewhere for us to make, right; that overwhelming emotion of Wordsworth, the one that caused him to faint upon seeing the Alps for the first time?

You do it all, whatever it takes to successfully complete your work. Complete is such a key word. You have to be a completion addict, even if you are a revision addict with it.

Writer's block I have experienced, but not for a long while. Sometimes I just let it begin out of nowhere, not even knowing if it will be a poem whose line lengths are a consideration.

[YesNo]

I agree. That is why I put four options. I just didn't want to start two threads for something that was more or less related.:)


How are they related?

[chevalierdelame]

Well, what I meant was they are both techniques of poetry.

[MorpheusSandman]

Knowledge of form broadens the choices a poet has, but that doesn't mean they always make the right one.To provide a simile; a poet learning about form is like a painter adding colors to their palette; it gives them more to work with, but doesn't mean they'll work with it well.

[RobbyA]

Interesting question and difficult to answer because I don't think you can be absolute about it. I think there is a risk of young budding poets falling back on archaic words and phrases because they've been taught at school that that's what poetry sounds like, which of course is false. However, it can work well if used appropriately and sparingly, and there's nothing wrong with experimenting with traditional tropes and devices.

[desiresjab]

Reading through a 19th century American army officer's account of an Indian massacre, I came upon this passage: "We came upon a great deal of massacred Indians."

What a curious expression for the occasion. It had to be archaic. To us it comes off as rather calloused and seems to depersonify the Indians, though I am sure the army officer did not have this intention.

[YesNo]

I don't think I use any archaism although I enjoy writing formal poetry. It's sounds better. However, one could also ask about special dialects, foreign phrases or jargon. All of these would likely be unfamiliar to the reader. When are they appropriate?

[chevalierdelame]

Special dialects reminds me of Joseph in 'Wuthering Heights'. I had a hard time making out what he was saying, at first, but then it started getting very interesting. So I think special dialects can be used in instances, such as to develop a character.
Sometimes foreign phrases can better express the writer's meaning, but if the reader is unfamiliar with it, then the effect is lost.

[YesNo]

One of the problems I have with special dialects is that they don't seem authentic unless that is the dialect the author regularly uses.

[RobbyA]

One of the problems I have with special dialects is that they don't seem authentic unless that is the dialect the author regularly uses.

But you could apply that logic to anything - can a male author write with any authenticity in the first person voice of a female character, can a white author write from the perspective of a black person, can a straight author write in the voice of a gay person? etc.

[YesNo]

Right. There is no reason not to use a dialect just because some might not be able to use is correctly. The same would go for archaisms or use of form.

[desiresjab]

Even we injuns were indulging in archaic trophes tonight, I swear. I watched a couple of long epic movies about us because I was too lazy to do anything else. Upon the white man's arrival, the injuns referred to guns as "smokey firesticks," and the white men were the "white hairy faces." Before long they were just guns and white men, though. Near the end of the movie when the tribe was debating a spilt, one of the middle aged warriors used the "white hairy faces," appellation again. The archaism actually played a crucial part, allowing him to convey both digust and solidarity without a tonal cue from his voice.