To me, punctuation are rules as to how words should be organized in print. It's only a matter of application, not creation nor art. Anyone can be taught to punctuate to the highest standard. No one can be taught to create art.
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To me, punctuation are rules as to how words should be organized in print. It's only a matter of application, not creation nor art. Anyone can be taught to punctuate to the highest standard. No one can be taught to create art.
Oh, well then we're talking about different things. When I was talking about the visual aspect of poetry I was talking about all of the poetic devices that can only be detected on a page, like line-breaks, as opposed to those, like rhythm and rhyme, that can be heard aurally whether it's read on a page or not. But I do think a poet's preference for caps at the beginnings of lines should be respected by a publisher.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Well, I think you are very wrong about this. Read Cleanth Brooks' The Well Wrought-Urn where he discusses this issue while also offering some very good readings of many great poems. I would also recommend Reading Poetry: An Introduction by Furniss and Bath as it stresses the importance of form in poetry.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
If I had to sum up my opinion on the matter in short, I would say that if all that matters is relating a message then poetry is a terrible medium to do that. The back-and-forth communication we're doing here or the precise language of science and math are far, far, far better in terms of being able to relate messages. Poetry isn't about relating messages at all, IMO, it's about rendering experiences, thoughts, feelings, and emotions through language and using form to enhance and manipulate how we react to what's being expressed. Poetry without form isn't poetry, IMO.
Well, it's not a LITERAL image you get from reading the poem, ie, it's not one you see with your eyes, but it's an imagined image based on one's experience with having seen other wheelbarrows. It's no different than when you read any literature and images form in your mind as if you were watching a movie.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I think I agree with My2cents on the role of punctuation.
As I think about it, MorpheusSandman, I don't really understand the "visual aspect" of poetry or of language in general, including prose. This is not to say that adding an illustration to a poem or story does not make the poem or story more enjoyable.
I don't know much about the Imagist poetic theory and don't have access to the books you reference. If you quote something from these texts maybe we can discuss it.
Regarding images, you write:
Well, it's not a LITERAL image you get from reading the poem, ie, it's not one you see with your eyes, but it's an imagined image based on one's experience with having seen other wheelbarrows. It's no different than when you read any literature and images form in your mind as if you were watching a movie.When I read, I don't think I see images as if I were in a movie. Perhaps, I'm just not a visually-oriented person.
For example, when I read the word "wheelbarrow", I know what this is, but I don't see it laying down on its side or standing up. I don't see it with or without rust or if it is painted in a certain color. I don't see it as either a tool for cement mixing or one for gardening. I don't see anything specific about it. I'm waiting for the author to tell me more what it is I should be "imagining". Even then it is an "idea" that I am imagining and I am looking for some interesting relationship in the text about this thing that justifies reading it.
If there isn't any relationship that is interesting, why was the wheelbarrow brought to my attention by the author? And if there is such a relationship, how would I imagine that relationship as a specific visual image?
I think the subject of a poem can best be seen as a set of ideas, parts of which might be about things for which an image could more or less be constructed were I an illustrator, but the most interesting parts would likely have little to do with any specific object but be about relationships that mattered to me.
YesNo, I think you misunderstand me when I say "visual aspect" of poetry. I'm not talking about illustrations. Let me try to make this clearer; imagine someone is reading a poem to you. If you're only hearing the poem read, then you can pick up on the rhythms and sounds of the language, but you will not pick up on line-breaks. However, if you're reading a poem on a page, you can pause at the line-breaks and consider how this line-break impacts your understanding of a poem.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Well, I can't quote entire chapters of these books. I did find an online PDF of Brooks' The Heresy of Paraphrase, but the problem with reading that out of context is that Brooks references the poems that he's analyzed throughout the book. Anyway, the Imagist theory of poetry basically states that images in poetry are more important than anything else. Images are defined as anything in poetry that makes references to things accessible through the senses, so if a poet describes a sound, a smell, a sight, a taste, or the feel of something then that's an image. Keats' poetry is largely famous for his sensuous imagery, especially in poems like To Autumn. The Red Wheelbarrow and Pound's Station at the Metro are good examples of imagism because it strips away everything except for an image (although Pound's could be said to be an image wrapped in a metaphor).Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Oh, well, that's a shame. I thought most people pictured the things they were reading about in their head....Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
You should be imagining a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water with white chickens surrounding it... it's really that simple.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I'm not sure what kind of relationship you're referring to here... The point of imagism is to make us see things we would typically just overlook without having them connected to any other ideas. It's a purity of experience, seeing things like a child might without having it wrapped up in a variety of assumptions and judgments and connotations that we end up polluting our experiences of life with.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Well, you have a preference for poetry of ideas. That's fine to have as a preference, but it's not everyone's ideal of poetry. I like ideas in poetry just fine, but I also appreciate the new way of seeing that the imagists brought to poetry, and I think something like Red Wheelbarrow is a perfect example of that.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
They aren't rules, they're more like guidelines (eg, there is no set-in-stone rule about whether one should use a period or semi-colon, and with a few exceptions, commas are frequently completely optional). The art lies in which punctuations you choose to utilize (If any) at various points and how that punctuations affects the reading and/or meaning of the poem.Quote:
Originally Posted by My2cents
I think I understand. You are mainly interested in line breaks and initial caps or other punctuation that one might be able to do on an old manual typewriter in which a sheet of paper was inserted. You are not interested in the visual display that one might get with different fonts for example.Quote:
Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman
When I bring in illustrations in general, I'm trying to emphasize that all of those punctuation marks are "illustrations". I agree with you that there are better ways to punctuate a poem on a page than others, however, I disagree in thinking that a poem punctuated in one way is a different poem from one punctuated in another way. Maybe you don't think so either?
Thanks for the reference. I'll try to go over it today and give you some reactions. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman
Imagism isn't really new anymore. I think it is about 100 years old now. I wonder if poets are still thinking in terms of it whether they write free verse or metrical poetry. Most of the poetry I read on this site seem to me to contain ideas more than images.Quote:
Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman
I think you're in for a shock. There are books dedicated entirely to the specific rules that apply to punctuations, including three dotted and four dotted ellipses--if you care to look.Quote:
Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman
My point is once you know them, you know them...just like a multiplication table.
Punctuation is a tool that aids both writer and reader in establishing meaning.
One can do a lot with a colon or a semi-colon. I've found that contemporary
writers use the exclamation point far too often. Too much emphasis defeats
the purpose!!!! (See what I mean? One ! is sufficient, and even there rarely.)
A comma is a pause, not quite a full-stop. It shows the reader, especially one who's reading aloud, to take a breath.
Isn't most of poetry the marriage of the two in metaphor? I've never heard of someone writing dry and literal philosophy, for example, or the discussion of a scientific finding in verse...and even if it's been done I would submit it's not really poetry.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I think a further and important distinction can be drawn. Concrete nouns can convey "hard" and "soft" images, corresponding to the degree of abstractness the meaning of the word has. For example, saying apple generically is softer than saying granny smith apple, which contains a conception with further sensuous details. I suppose Imagism would rather you use granny smith apple than just apple, since it's more direct than just "apple," which can suggest other varieties of apples. But, to qualify, this is somewhat debatable. Imagism deals first with directness and directing the audience towards something, not necessarily Maximalism.Quote:
Anyway, the Imagist theory of poetry basically states that images in poetry are more important than anything else. Images are defined as anything in poetry that makes references to things accessible through the senses, so if a poet describes a sound, a smell, a sight, a taste, or the feel of something then that's an image.
I suppose some punctuation is necessary to make sure the meaning is unambiguous. One wouldn't want to skip all periods or commas. Spaces between words are also useful. I agree with AuntShecky that only one exclamation point is necessary or even desirable in most cases.
I was trying to read the chapter in Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn that MorpheusSandman referenced. It seems that Brooks is trying to find some objective way to tell whether something he is reading is poetic or not. He asks, "For what is it to be poetic?" He also doesn't like "paraphrases" of the content of a poem and notes "the resistance which any good poem sets up against all attempts to paraphrase it". I suspect I would agree with that: The content of a poem is not enough to determine that something is a poem.
In the back of my mind, I don't know why anyone would want to paraphrase a poem in the first place.
I suspect Brooks is looking for some objective way to place strings of words into something like the following four containers:
(1) Poetry but not Prose
(2) Prose but not Poetry
(3) Both Poetry and Prose
(4) Neither Poetry nor Prose
Any string of words, punctuated or not, should be able to fit into one and only one of these containers. The problem is that each of us would fill the containers differently since we would not likely agree on a definition of what makes a string of words poetic.
I also think I agree with Cunninglinguist when he writes: "Isn't most of poetry the marriage of the two [ideas and images] in metaphor?" My interest in content is that any string of words wanting to be called a "poem" should have some meaning so it could be called a communication. It should make sense no matter how coated it is with irony, lies, truths, images or whatever.
Calling punctuation "illustrations" seems positively bizarre to me. Punctuation is an integral part of language, and as an integral part of the language itself, I'm not sure why you would call them "illustrations." At least, they're no more illustrative than any letter or word is.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Punctuation CAN radically change the meaning of a poem. Let me give you a good example from a vilanelle I recently wrote. The refrain is:
History tells us that we’re not there yet,
...
We have to learn before we can forget.
The final couplet is:
Maybe we’ll learn we never get there, yet
It’s still worth learning things you don’t forget.
Now, if you notice, the major difference between the first example and the second is the comma before "yet," and it completely changes how one reads both line. If you remove that comma, you have a completely different meaning.
No, you're right, imagism isn't new any more, but if you read poetry in context it seems like every revolution is a breath of fresh air from what had become stale before it. Reading Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads after being immersed in Augustan couplets is a breath of fresh air, reading Pound and Eliot after being immersed in romanticism is a breath of fresh air. To me, each revolution gives us a new way of thinking about poetry.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Personally, I still do consider whether or not to write in meter or free verse. To me, every poetic device (meter, images, metaphor, free verse, etc.) are all just tools for expression, and the goal of any artist is to always choose the best tool for the job. Some spend their lives mastering one tool, like Shakespeare did with the sonnet, or Dickinson did with the ballad meter, and some spend their lives trying to become proficient in a wide-range of forms, like Auden or Yeats.
For those who grew up studying poetry in school (something unheard of these days), the common thing teachers would always ask was "what does the poet mean by X?" Well, this is nothing but an invite to state what they're saying in other words, a paraphrase. What Brooks is objecting to is the idea that by paraphrasing the basic meaning of a poem you've really even begun to understand what the poem is about, and he proceeds to argue throughout that book that all of the poetic devices poets use (form, metaphor, images, irony, etc.) all modify and manipulate the meaning of the poem to the point that you can't paraphrase it because paraphrasing it would mean removing all of the meanings and connotations that those poetic devices create.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I'm hardly in for a shock because I know of those books, but language is much too mutable to be fixed with absolute unbreakable rules. Some things become more ambiguous over times, other becomes more definite. Something like the semi-colon has really fallen out of use; few people seem to know how to use it "correctly" and most seem to prefer periods or commas. Personally, I think it's a good middle-ground between a mere pause and a complete stop. But I doubt you'll find any book that says when you have to use a semi-colon over a period or comma.Quote:
Originally Posted by My2cents
I don't know about "most poetry," but I think we consider most great poetry to find interesting ways of melding ideas into metaphoric images. But they're by no means mutually inclusive. You can certainly express ideas in poetry without metaphor and images (much of Pope's Essay on Criticism and Essay on Man fall under that category; I humorously remember one critic referring to Pope as the "best prose writer in English" because he didn't consider his verse essays real poetry), and you can have images without explicit metaphor (like Red Wheelbarrow, or Keats' To Autumn; though it's debatable about whether such things can be symbols and therefor metaphoric to an extent).Quote:
Originally Posted by Cunninglinguist
Very true. I've often thought that there is a spectrum between abstraction and image. Do you know of any books that make this distinction and try to work it into some kind of theory? Because it's something I almost never see addressed in intro books.Quote:
Originally Posted by Cunninglinguist
I completely agree with you about the need for punctuation in the case you mentioned above. Here's a question to see whether we agree or not about what I think is the question of this thread. Consider the following two strings of words.Quote:
Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman
Here is the first string of words:
mary had a little lamb. its fleece was white as snow and everywhere that mary went the lamb was sure to go.
Here is the second string of words:
MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB. ITS FLEECE WAS WHITE AS SNOW AND EVERYWHERE THAT MARY WENT THE LAMB WAS SURE TO GO.
Would you consider these to be different poems because of the difference in punctuation?
I use the word "illustration" to include more marks on a page than what one of those old manual typewriters could make which could add value to a published poem for the readers.
My understanding of New Criticism (which isn't really all that new now, over a half-century old) is that the so-called "marriage" in the poem isn't so much between idea and image but form and content. If a poem is good, you can't separate (or divorce or set asunder ) the meaning of the poem (what's being said) from its expression -- the "what" and the "how" are inextricably linked. Hence, the statement from Archibald MacLeish (I think) --"A poem must not mean but be;" the question from John Ciardi--"How does a Poem Mean?" and the injunction from Cleanth Brooks against paraphrasing.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
It's a little like what comics say about jokes -- if you try to break one down to find out why it makes you laugh, it isn't funny any more. (But we still can try to analyze poems in order to see what they're saying and how they're saying it-- at the same time. If we couldn't do that, English departments wouldn't exist --or would that be such a bad thing?)
I'm not sure if capitalization is related to punctuation rules besides a sentence must begin with a capital letter. The two sentence you illustrated could differ only in terms of emotion employed by a reader. If read meekly, the message of the sentence soothes. If read loud, it will convey obnoxious confidence that is almost boasting.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Punctuation marks, at least in my understanding and non-technical usage, are abbreviated emotions. I use "...." when I'm speechless maybe from shame or sadness, "?" when I'm doubtful and unsure, "!" when I'm happy, ":" when I have the urge to voice out my reasons, ";" when my thoughts are uncontrollable and abundant, and "." when I'm confident and sure with finality.
Take care.
I'm not sure if capitalization is related to punctuation rules. The two sentence you illustrated could differ only in terms of emotions employed by a reader. If read meekly, the message of the sentence soothes. If read loud, it will convey obnoxious confidence that is almost boasting.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Punctuation marks, at least in my understanding and non-technical usage, are abbreviated emotions. I use "...." when I'm speechless maybe from shame or sadness, "?" when I'm doubtful and unsure, "!" when I'm happy, ":" when I have the urge to voice out my reasons, ";" when my thoughts are uncontrollable and abundant, and "." when I'm confident and sure with finality.
Take care.
It did seem like Brooks was talking about "form" and "content" rather than "image" and "idea".
Just want to share this. The Filipino poet, Jose Garcia Villa, a contemporary and friend of E.E. Cummings, wrote this poem that is considered as one of the early modernist and avant-garde works of poetry in my country.
The Bashful One
,
Villa's poem reminds me of a painting I saw in the Art Institute in Chicago some years ago called "White on White on White". It was all white. I can't remember the artist or if that was the real name of it, but I do remember that it looked white.
I'm with miyako whom stated that these two sentences don't illustrate a difference in punctuation. Capitalization and the rules that govern it are completely different than punctuation (! , : ; ...) and the rules that govern them.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Exactly. New Criticism is quite old now, but still influential. Probably the two finest critics of modern poetry, Helen Vendler and Christopher Ricks, are both closest to the New Criticism school than any other, though perhaps they're not quite as stringent as Brooks, Empson, Richards, Wimsatt, et al. who tried to eliminate all biographical and historical considerations completely.Quote:
Originally Posted by AuntShecky
I guess the answer to that question would entirely depend what one thinks of academia and criticism when it comes to poetry. Personally, I was a critic before I was a poet, so I've always been very interested in the theoretical aspects of what makes a poem (or a film, or a piece of music, etc.) work, and I love picking stuff apart and incorporating the interesting aspects into my own work. I certainly tremendously value the writings and work of the best critics out there, and I credit the aforementioned Vendler with teaching me the majority of what I know about the art-form.Quote:
Originally Posted by AuntShecky
Of course, there is an eternal chasm between theory and practice. It's extraordinarily rare to find someone who is both a great critic and a great practitioner of the art they criticize; TS Eliot was a phenom in that regard.
If capitalization doesn't count, do line breaks?Quote:
Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman
Consider this string of words:
Mary had a little lamb.
Its fleece was white as snow
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to do.
And then this string of words:
Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow
and everywhere that Mary when the lamb was sure to go.
Are they different poems?
Line breaks certainly count as a type of punctuation, but they count differently in different poems. In some poems, the line breaks are crucial in terms of reading into the meaning, while in others it may be more about rhythm or something else entirely. In Mary Had a Little Lamb, the rhythm is classic ballad meter, a 4-beat/3-beat pattern. 4-beat patterns dominate English lyric and song, and the earliest English verse grew out of 4-beat traditions (Beowulf's alliterative prosody). 4-beat creates a distinct sing-song rhythm that is inescapable. The interesting thing about ballad meter is that it plays off this expectation by leaving the last beat of the sequence silent, making us pause on it before we move on to the next line.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
So, getting back to Mary's Lamb, your first iteration is the classic ballad meter form. The first 4-beat line pairs with the second 3-beat line and we pause at the end of the 3-beat line for the silent, unexpressed 4th beat. When you instead stretch this 7-beat pattern out to a single line, you do de-emphasize this pattern, although readers may slip into it intuitively anyway. What I think the second version does is not allow as much for that invisible last beat. If you read the second line, eg, as one line, you don't hear the 4/3 pattern as much.
So I wouldn't say they're different poems in terms of meaning, but I do think they're slightly different rhythmically. A better example of someone who exploited line-breaks and the expectations created by the ballad rhythm to its utmost would be Emily Dickinson. One could cite countless examples, but one of her more playful excursions was in "I like to see it lap the Miles:"There are numerous examples in this one poem, but I'll point out two: the first comes at the end of S1 and the beginning of S2:Quote:
I like to see it lap the Miles -
And lick the Valleys up -
And stop to feed itself at Tanks -
And then - prodigious step
Around a Pile of Mountains -
And supercilious peer
In Shanties - by the sides of Roads -
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its sides
Complaining all the while
In horrid - hooting stanza -
Then chase itself down Hill -
And neigh like Boanerges -
Then - punctual as a Star
Stop - docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door -
And then - prodigious step
Around a Pile of Mountains -
Instead of ending the sense at L4, as is typical with this meter, Dickinson "steps" the sense all the way over the first stanza and into the second stanza, which mirrors what she's describing about the train "stepping around a pile of mountains". If you change this to:
And then - prodigious step Around a Pile of Mountains
then it loses a lot of its affect. You can see a similar device here:
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its sides
Just like she's describing the train paring a quarry, the first line of S3 is "pared" to only 2 beats ("To fit its sides"). One last example would be:
punctual as a Star
Stop
where it's almost as if "Star" becomes an adjective ("Star stop") to the noun "Stop", rather than being a noun followed by the verb "Stop". It's these kind of playful ambiguities that line-breaks can create that, if you wrote it down as prose, you'd lose. I think writing the above as "punctual as a star, stop" is much less effective than the way Dickinson wrote it.
What I'm trying to say comes down to this: If you had left the comma out altogether, an astute reader would be able to infer where the comma should be placed depending on context (from the lines previous and/or following). But that's a lot of needless work, which is what punctuation does well to eliminate.Quote:
History tells us that we’re not there yet,
...
We have to learn before we can forget.
The final couplet is:
Maybe we’ll learn we never get there, yet
It’s still worth learning things you don’t forget.
Actually, in that context the reader would never be able to infer that the comma should go before "yet" since it's the only line in the poem that puts a comma before "yet" and has the "yet" meaning attached to the following line rather than the line it's on. Saying "not there yet" and "yet it's still worth knowing" are two different things.Quote:
Originally Posted by My2cents
Anyway, punctuation does eliminate such ambiguities, but they can also perpetuate them like in Dickinson's work.
The line break makes it tricky, and if as you say the preceding 'yets' all have commas before them, conditioning the reader to the pattern, it's conceivable no one would get it right. Conceivable. (Some one may catch the dissonance however miniscule and be crazy enough to pursue it's resolution to the ends of the earth--and there such people, I have no doubts.)
A punctuation question:
What would you say one would put after an exclamation or question mark?
a capital letter or just a small capital?
example
What is one supposed to do? ring a bell or dance around?
Ring or ring?
I would put "Ring" since it would make the grammar checker refrain from marking the area in red and that is what I think someone else, whether reader, publisher or editor, would want to see.
As a poem, I don't think it matters whether "Ring" is used or "ring", however, it does matter for the presentation which is where the editor or publisher make the decisions. Most of the time the author is also the one who publishes the poem by posting it on a forum and so the same person is doing two tasks.
In that example it's "Ring," but if you wrote it: "What is one supposed to do: ring a bell or dance around" then it would be "ring." You can put a colon before an either/or choice and follow that with a lower-case and question mark at the end. You may want to ask AuntShecky, but I'm pretty sure the latter version would actually be, technically, grammatically correct (I could be wrong as it's been a while since I've studied grammar) because in your example you're making two separate questions: "What is one supposed to do?" and "Ring a bell or dance around?" when, given the context, the two options "Ring a bell or dance around" is connected to the question "What is one supposed to do?".Quote:
Originally Posted by cacian
Thank you YesNo.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I had always questioned the capital usage srtaight after a qestion mark because it did not look right to me.
About the marking in red is a very recent thing I started to notice.
I never considered a ! or a? as a full stop before.
Thank you Morpheus in other word if it was a stream of questions then they would look like separate entities and not together as a stream of thoughts which I wanted to convey.Quote:
Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman