the importance of punctuation or not

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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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.

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?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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).

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Thanks for the reference. I'll try to go over it today and give you some reactions. :)

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

Most of the poetry I read on this site seem to me to contain ideas more than images.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

When I bring in illustrations in general, I'm trying to emphasize that all of those punctuation marks are "illustrations"... I disagree in thinking that a poem punctuated in one way is a different poem from one punctuated in another way.

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

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.

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

In the back of my mind, I don't know why anyone would want to paraphrase a poem in the first place.

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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.

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Originally Posted by My2cents

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Cunninglinguist

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...

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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).

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Originally Posted by Cunninglinguist

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

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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 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.

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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.

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?)

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Originally Posted by YesNo

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

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.

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.

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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.

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




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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.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

mary had a little lamb. its fleece was white as snow and everywhere that mary went the lamb was sure to go.

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?

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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.

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Originally Posted by AuntShecky

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by AuntShecky

(But we still can try to analyze poems... If we couldn't do that, English departments wouldn't exist --or would that be such a bad thing?)

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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If capitalization doesn't count, do line breaks?

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?