Prosody

Or, "How to Actually Do Anything, Part Two."
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So in our last post we saw how "mid-way upon my life's journey" -- or quarter-way, I suppose -- I found myself completely lacking in anything remotely resembling a technical skill, or any useful art. Until, that is, I realized that I was capable of acquiring some elementary Spanish through evening study. This, as I said earlier, seemed to open up boundless new fields of possibility, but it also filled me with a secret guilt. If it was, after all, so easy, why had I not done this before with countless other fields of human endeavor? What excuse did I have for having spent so much time in perfecting the art of the useless -- that thing I earlier defined: expert generalism, or literary knowledge -- the medium of the "public intellectual" -- which seems always to take over wherever other arts and sciences -- even philosophy -- abandon their last and most remote claims to practicality?

Truly the last straw for me came earlier this year, when I was thinking back to those learned references to prosodic theory that appear in Nabokov's Strong Opinions, and which at the time I had not particularly bothered to understand. This suddenly seemed to me an embarrassing dereliction. How could I have allowed it to be the case that even literary people evidently had more technical knowledge than I did? Even English majors -- they who are most universally teased in our society for their supposedly information-free eductions -- must have acquired some of this expert jargon too, if they took any courses remotely infringing on the technical arts of poetry or rhetoric. Even this eventuality I had carefully sidestepped by my choice of the history major. And I had done so in full awareness of my crime. But look where it had left me -- a superfluous liberal arts major even among the liberal arts majors!

It was partly this reason as well why -- as a child -- I gravitated always toward writing and acting as my chosen crafts. They seemed safely unlike more conventional "skills." They were things that I could start doing right away, and basically on my own. I had always sickened and paled at the thought of having to undergo anything resembling training before I could hop aboard the metaphorical pommel horse. Year after year of abortive first sessions of gymnastics camp and karate classes and piano lessons failed to make the slightest lasting impression on me -- at least in terms of actual knowledge or ability. Somewhere at home is a shelf full of my "athletic trophies" that I earned at various points in these endeavors. One is marked "participant," another "most improved," and a third -- "most unlike a car" (this for our entry in the Pinewood Derby). At the gymnastics camp, I was awarded the "Alfalfa Prize" -- ostensibly for always showing up to class with the most egregious cowlick.

Whenever I hear some conservative complaining about how in our allegedly Mr. Rogers-inflected society, "every kid now has to get a trophy," I wish to remind them that most of these trophies are actually insulting -- or else, they are so patronizingly indulgent that no kid could ever be fooled by them for an instant ("most improved," my eye!) So they can rest easy in the knowledge that the unsuccessful child's feelings are still getting hurt, even in modern America. In my case, I would have much preferred to do without the trophies altogether. One had the feeling that they were awarded simply because no one knew what else to do with me at the end of a camp, checked out as I generally was. I don't think my hair actually did stand on end more often than other people's. Our Pinewood Derby entry actually did look like a car, it just didn't earn "fastest" or "best," and there was only one other award left over. Also, in cross country, I don't think I improved, and certainly didn't do so the "most" relative to anyone else.

I was and am, in short, essentially a dreamer and an autodidact. Being taught how to do anything almost always spoils it for me. It becomes no longer mine alone. I always ached for solitude in which to do my own unobserved creative projects, and not have to submit them to anyone else's judgment or scrutiny. Like John Clare: "I long[ed] for scenes where man hath never trod." In any class or camp or after-school activity, I always made the earliest possible mental escape, and once I was home I could usually be found in my closet, toiling away on tiny notebooks that were filled with things that needed to make sense to no one but me. "I had simply wanted to muddle away with it in my own way," writes V.S. Pritchett in his first memoir, A Cab at the Door. "[...] I still feel this jealous fear when I hear that someone has read what I have written -- No (I think) this is a private thing. I do not want it to be seen."

Even once I was thoroughly entrenched in writing, as my life's mission -- pretty much a forgone conclusion by age seven, if not earlier -- I always shunned anything remotely like a writer's manual or guidebook, or anything that purported to teach the crafting of English sentences. I found the notion that writing -- or any art, really -- could be "taught" a great insult to the muses.

Still less could I tolerate the idea that I was a "student," and that someone else, a master, had something to teach me. From the very beginning, I came to Orwell and Hazlitt as to equals. This enormous, Satanic pride of mine, particularly about my creative efforts, has always subsisted uneasily with a no less striking tendency to guilt, self-doubt, self-mortification and self-deprecation. Put together, they were bound to produce an absent-minded type like me, compassionate and humble, but with odd storms and passions and incommunicable thoughts stirring within, invisible to the external eye -- a person who, in short, recently had to try three times -- while his colleagues watched -- to find which direction was "up" when trying to right a miniature table.

This has always been a distinct excess of mine, but it has also, of course, been encouraged by the liberal Romantic individualist culture in which I was schooled -- and which is, for all its failings, inevitably still the primary element of my worldview. I have always basically believed that writing or any form of creative expression is compulsive. It can neither be trained nor willed. You, as the scribe of whatever the divine or subconscious forces are communicating through you, are essentially just putting a pan out to collect the gushings of the secret fount.

Nor did the educational system ever try to talk me out of this, really. And it is a fortunate thing that they didn't, since otherwise writing might have been spoiled for me the same as everything else. The American school system -- both public and private, and I have been in both -- seems to have adopted the view that English and History are insignificant enough fields that they can be left alone to be overgrown by the weeds of otherwise outdated "progressive" methods. They can be handed back to the jungle. And so we children were left to run wild, without formal grammar or rhetoric or prosody -- apart from some extremely dimly-understood and forgettable stuff about Shakespeare's sonnets and iambic pentameter. Science and math -- meanwhile -- were still being actually "taught" to children, which is probably why I hated both. I guess it was assumed that these were the useful skills that were actually worth imparting to the young. An odd delusion, since in my adult life so far I've never had to use anything more complicated than addition and subtraction, whereas I've needed to churn out English copy on a daily basis.

English and History were still the preserve of the Rousseaus and the Bronson Alcotts, in short. It was assumed that whatever grammar and spelling we needed we would simply acquire "naturally" -- which was exactly how I intended to do it. It was an enormous stroke of luck that no one took these subjects seriously anymore, and they were therefore left to my autodidactic excavation. We were allowed to still believe that we had beautiful artistic truths inside of us waiting to be unlocked. The spigot just had to be turned on and it would erupt from us. And even if such a belief is not utterly and completely true, per se -- even if there were a lot of technical tricks still for me to pick up, in my own time and my own way -- I couldn't have learned any of them if I wasn't already writing. I wouldn't remember any of the rules if I hadn't first tried and failed to write without them. And I wouldn't have had the nerve to write anything if I had believed that I was so humble and stupid a thing as a "student," rather than what I inwardly believed myself to be -- a native genius, merely awaiting the appearance of paper before him. As Langston Hughes affectionately parodies the view in an instructor's gentle sing-song:
Go home and write
    a page tonight.
    And let that page come out of you—
    Then, it will be true.

Of course, this is exactly how I have always assumed things are supposed to work. It simply comes out of you -- so long as it is really you doing the writing, and not some impression of someone else.

The view is not without its detractors, however, among the professional hewers of sentences. Alasdair Gray, in one of his essays collected in Of Me and Others, seems to have met a few too many young writers who were schooled in this Romanticism -- shocking, I know. And he finds that this approach to the craft is not, among other things, particularly conducive to the practice of constructive criticism. "The trouble is that writers seldom see their earliest poems and stories as things made up of cheap, easily replaceable words," he writes, "but as small bodies they have given birth to and animated with their blood. The more easily they wrote a thing the more they feel nature or a divine spirit inspired it, and think alteration can only damage."

Gray's matter-of-fact alternative of seeing writing as a craft has the ring of truth and rationality to it. But it also just does not fit with my worldview, or with my experiences (which that worldview has undoubtedly shaped and partially pre-selected, to some extent). I have many a time ruined something pristine by trying to take someone's advice about it, or imitate another. And I have never managed to put anything on paper that had genuine quality to it that wasn't first motivated by some hidden reservoir that I didn't ask for and couldn't predict.

The downside of this Romantic attitude -- and its inculcation throughout my schooling -- is that I managed to fancy myself a "writer" for close on a quarter century without ever actually learning the basic terminology of the craft. My grammar is largely instinctual. I can occasionally be caught (in the title of this series of posts, for example) sneaking an adverb into the middle of an infinitive phrase. My rhetoric has been acquired by happenstance. I am not of those who can pull off a casual reference to Metonymy. Litotes I know -- I confess it -- only from its appearance in a Monty Python sketch. Pritchett, in the memoir cited above, notes how he was the star pupil of the progressive-era instructor whom he idolized as a youth, Mr. Bartlett, who trained his young charges by actually exposing them to modern literature and encouraging them to try their hand at impressionist painting, rather than drilling them in in formal rules (Pritchett writes convincingly of his despair later on, when Mr. Bartlett is replaced by a lady teacher who insists above all else on the importance of "volume and shading"). Bartlett's method had the effect on Pritchett, as it would have had on me, of making him a would-be writer. But at the same time, it left him utterly unequipped to pass a school entrance exam in English, where "facts" and "knowledge" were still expected, even in this literary field. That's roughly the position I was in.

And so as my twenty-seventh year began, I decided it was time to change all this. I guess I figured that the bogies of school life were far enough behind me now that I could risk extending an exploratory appendage into the world of the more technical arts. I was on my own now, after all. Any learning I did in this field would be self-directed. No teachers could spoil anything for me, apart from those found between the covers of a book that could just as easily be set down again. Plus, there was the aforementioned success with Spanish. Maybe it wasn't always so bad to have an instructor. And if, for all the reasons stated above and in the previous post, it really was high time I learned "how to actually do something," I had the least excuse of all not to know how to practice my own chosen craft.

And so it was that I started reading some books at last about prosody, albeit with trembling hands. I half-feared perhaps that all along my untutored naïveté had been the key to any artistic success, and that I would be spoiled immediately by any contact with civilization. I fancied myself a sort of peasant poet, a John Clare. Plainly, like any Rousseauian primitive, I needed to keep at a remove from all formal knowledge and expertise, if my true genius and virtue were not to be contaminated. I ought to remain on some level that dreamy kid with the cowlick who always got the left-over trophies and retreated to fill out little books with half-understood words in his closet at the end of the day.

The writers of textbooks on prosody,  however, are on to me, and they are not impressed. They have heard this sort of Romantic trash from countless undergraduates before and have tried to stamp it out (perhaps I somehow knew this might be case, and this was the true reason I did not study English in college -- or perhaps it was simply the fact that I stated at the time, with considerable self-awareness it now seems to me -- that literature was something I preferred to learn on my own). By process of self-selection no doubt, professional prosodists tend to take Alasdair Gray's side in the craftsman/Romantic-genius debate. The poets they exhume as the obvious technical masters are precisely those "greats" who have always done the very least for me -- Eliot, Auden, Frost, Yeats. Beum and Shapiro seem particularly mad on Robert Bridges -- who was evidently a personal friend of theirs. Look here! An experiment with syllabic rather than accentual verse in English. And here, a Sapphic! Or an Altaic. Or something. Whatever's actually in the poem soon fades from view.

Now, the Prosody Handbook of these two authors was indispensable to me, don't get me wrong. Thanks to it, I will forever possess and be able to deploy a functional understanding of feet, spondees, trochees, and the like. Because of these men, I will never now have to suffer the embarrassment of revealing publicly that -- for much of my would-be poet's and wordsmith's life -- I thought that "blank verse" and "free verse" were the same thing.

But the crucial question is -- did it make me a better writer or reader of poetry than I was before? This is the great proving ground. All the prosodic manuals assure you that an understanding of the technical aspects of form is essential to a truly cultivated appreciation of a poem. And in reading various works of poetry since delving into these textbooks, I have occasionally been able to delight myself by recognizing, say, which of Housman's verses in A Shropshire Lad are written in the "Ballad Stanza," and being able to count the feet in Rochester and the early Roethke. Yet I cannot say that any of the actual poems affected me more deeply for this knowledge than they would have otherwise; and to pick up on any of these elements generally required a second or third "technical" reading anyways, in which I largely let the meaning of the words themselves dangle. I'm not sure I ever managed to appreciate the "poem as a total work of art," then, as the professors say.

Moreover, for every coup I'd manage to execute involving a prosodic discovery, there were a multiplicity of other times in which -- even in the "formal masters" -- I'd start to pick up on the beginnings of what seemed like a meter -- Ooh! That's an anapest! -- only to lose it again. And always I came away thinking, my pig-headed Romanticism intact, that what the poets had ultimately chosen to put on the page just sounded better than whatever the more properly metrical alternative would have been, and that's all there was to it.

And then there is the danger that prosody seems to suffer in common with all formal fields of knowledge, as diagnosed in the last post -- namely, that of teetering on the brink of tautology. A dactyl is one accented syllable followed by two unaccented ones, we are told. And we have no choice but to believe it. It has a right to be whatever it defines itself as. But it is very hard to avoid noticing that a dactyl would not, on this definition, be outwardly distinguishable from a trochee and the beginning of an iamb. And two dactyls is the same thing as a trochee, an iamb, and then a pyrrhic. And two plus two is four, and all bachelors are unmarried.

I shall quoth an example from Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter & Poetic Form. Scanning a stanza of Pope, he finds a dangling unaccented syllable at the end of the line, impossible to account for within the metrical scheme that is otherwise comprised of disyllabic feet. And yet, there are trisyllabic feet in our armory, are there not, so can't we just use one of them to explain it? No. "[W]e must scan the lines as if each contained, at the end, a supernumerary syllable," Fussell decrees. "[... I]n the eighteenth century, the substitution of trisyllabic for dissyllabic feet is not good form." (p. 48-49). Which is a fascinating utterance, since a "supernumerary syllable" at the end of a disyllabic foot and a "trisyllabic substitution" would be exactly the same thing. In terms of the actual words on the page, they are impossible to tell apart. Shouldn't both, then, be equally bad form?

Confronted with such specimens of "prosodic theory," I can do no better than to quote the words of William James, from the Varieties:

[E]very difference must make a difference, every theoretical difference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that the best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining what practical difference would result from one alternative or the other being true. What is the particular truth in question known as? In what facts does it result? What is its cash-value in terms of particular experience?”

Of course, being an autodidact with no college training in English, I am merely coming around lately -- and tiresomely -- to what is evidently a familiar complaint against the discipline that is made by every 19-year-old undergraduate who takes it up. Beum and Shapiro have, once again, already taken my measure. I'm not the first to accuse them of tautology, or of ignoring the crucial distinction between what Hume called "matters of fact" and "matters of the relations between ideas."

"[O]ver the generations," they write, "a common and fatal error has vitiated instruction and confused the republic. Here is what happens. One learns the [prosodic] paradigm, goes over the lines, honestly fails to see certain iambic feet in places where they are supposed to be, and concludes that the lines are not really iambic; sometimes one goes so far as to maintain that the whole idea of iambic meter is a myth, a superstition."

Yes! Quite! They've named exactly the inarticulate suspicion that had been creeping up on me all throughout my reading of their book. They're solution to it, however, does not quite silence one's doubts. They proceed to examine a few Elizabethan lines from Fulke Greville that end in yet another of Fussell's "supernumerary syllables." In this case, the final word is "glóry," with the accent of course on the first syllable. This looks very much like a trochee, or like the end of one iamb and the beginning of another -- yet it is supposed to be the end of an iambic pentameter line. Beum and Shapiro reassure us, however, that the other half of the iamb is there, in a Platonic sense, even if it does not appear on the page. It enjoys a higher form of reality. "An iambic unit (foot) does always exist in its theoretical position if the first of the two syllables is more weakly accented than the second," they declare. Much as Joseph Smith's early disciples are said to have witnessed the Golden Plates "in a spiritual sense."

As an incorrigible Romantic, one does not find oneself convinced by this rationale, and one does not particularly feel that one needs to be either. Isn't it enough just to say that "glory" was, all round, the better word to use in that position, le mot juste for that time and place, and that the author has no responsibility to explain it or account for it in some calcified metrical scheme so long as it basically sounds right?

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But enough of those two. Fussell, by contrast, mixes in enough sardonic wit and literary Romanticism to come as a breath of relief after Beum and Shapiro. He is very explicitly not so enamored of Robert Bridges -- for one -- and for just the reasons here adduced. Fussell thinks formal mastery is all well and good, but it can't quite be the sum total of what a gifted poet offers to the world. He warns against the prosodist's temptation to "overemphasis" on the significance of his contribution to the finished work of art: "It is true that great poems are great metrical achievements. But great metrical achievement alone does not make great poetry. A poet like Robert Bridges is an example of how little mere technical skill in versification [...] will in the long run serve to redeem and make permanent poetry without any compelling intellectual or emotional impulse." Thank you!, I wrote in the margins -- trochaically.

Fussell warns as well against "the danger of a priori proceedings," in the scanning and reciting of poetry. What he means is the reading of verse in a way that forces it to obey a metrical pattern that cuts too forcefully against the grain of the ordinary pronunciation of its words. Any speaker of English knows that if we were to simply read aloud the phrase, say, "A new day will dawn," in isolation, it will be accented as follows: "A néw dáy will dáwn." Fussell is trying to get out in front of the undergraduate who encounters this phrase in an iambic line and wants to shift the first accent to the "A" when reading it aloud. Good for Fussell. He issues the right warning. Yet-- my point is -- is there not a tragic whiff of the "a priori" as well in Fussell's talk of "supernumerary syllables." Supernumerary to what? It's part of the poem, isn't it?

Fussell is aware, of course, that good poets often break the rules. Indeed, he sets up a plausible hierarchy of verse in which the very worst poets are those who -- like, say, the notorious MacGonagall -- don't know how to make the first use of meter or form, and may not in fact be aware of its existence. (I'm afraid that we will see, as this list proceeds, that most of my poetic works to date would only make sense in this category.) The next worst poets are those who deploy meter slavishly and unvaryingly. And the best poets are those that establish a metrical pattern within their verse, but who know how to make significant variations from the pattern when it supports the meaning of the verse.

That all sounds reasonable enough, but Fussell seems eventually to so love this theory of "the significant variation" that he sacrifices a great many possibilities to it. "[E]very substitution or variation from the metrical norm [...] should justify itself by the sanction of meaning," he writes. And again, "every technical gesture in a poem must justify itself in meaning." As soon as one imagines trying to do this consciously, and to hunt this up in poems, the despair sets in. What a very depressing project, to try to figure out how every departure from a metrical pattern is somehow a symbol for our whole poem. Surely there is once again that "danger of the a priori" in such an exercise. I look back on one of my own poems, for example -- what seems to me one of the better ones. I notice that it is -- as is typical with me -- sort of in free verse, with periodic rhymes happening without much definite pattern. (I had briefly entertained the hope, after reading these texts on prosody, that I would go back to my own earlier compositions and discover that I had actually been writing in meter all along, "naturally." Alas -- no.) I also notice that there is one line rather longer than all the others, which leads into the enjambed opening of the next clause. And, try as I might to see things with Fussell's and Beum and Shapiro's eyes, I can't see that this one line is improved by analyzing it in their scheme. Its length, compared to the lines fore and aft, cause one to rush through it as one reads -- this is true enough. This breathless effect lends the halting "Please" at the end of the line, following the dash, a greater pregnancy. A more rational inner voice is intruding on the earlier, hysterical one, so as to return the reader to the insight from the first line of the poem, echoed in the closing. Okay, okay, so maybe it is a "significant variation" that justifies itself in meaning. But I doubt if I'd been consciously trying to pull this off as a metrical stunt it would have been any good. It just happened that way, and labeling it after the fact comes close to spoiling it, like trying to explain a joke. Maybe the real threat in the analysis of poetry, then, comes not from the a priori, but the a posteriori.

The only instance I can really point to of my experiencing a "prosodic insight" on the strength of reading these books was a pretty jejune one. But I offer it here regardless. Fussell writes several times in his chapter on metrical variation about the comic effect that is generally conveyed by a "trochaic substitution in the terminal position." He doesn't specify why. But suddenly, I realized. "Because of bathos!" I triumphantly scrawled in the margins. Yes, the trochee ends on a down-beat, so by appearing at the end of an iambic line in which the meter has taught one to expect an accent, it has the effect of a miniature raspberry. It is a let-down. Bathos! Bathos, I say, a timeless comic device! So there it was... my one and only original contribution to prosodic theory. And Fussell may well have already come up with this, in fairness, and just thought it too obvious to commit to paper.

One other post-Fussell moment that stands out in my memory. This was the closest I have yet come to actually appreciating a poem in a different way than I had before, by virtue of having acquired in the meantime a limited prosodic understanding, and you can see that it was a modest enough success. Looking back over Paul Laurence Dunbar's short poem "The Debt," I was struck by the closing line, which I had always remembered before as "But God! The interest!" Now I discerned that it was actually "God! but the interest." I see that my memory had unconsciously tried to recast the line in iambic trimeter. I had missed the fact that Dunbar had intentionally begun each line of the poem with a trochee, which contributes undeniably to the poem's stirring emotional quality. "God!" had to be first, therefore, in that final line. Although the line could also, technically, be a dactyl followed by a trochee followed by another trochee with one of Beum and Shapiro's invisible closing syllables... -- but enough of that.

--

Fussell's final and most compelling defense of poetic form is, at last, a dialectical one, and it has more than a little to tell us as well -- as he notes -- about our cultural politics more broadly. He recognizes that art must break the rules at times. But, in order to do so, there must be rules to break. In an utterly formless world, there could be neither true freedom nor true tyranny. What exactly would be liberalism, what would be literary Romanticism, if it didn't have some mold from which it was always struggling to break free? You can't be a regicide if there is no king. You can't be a rebel if there is no social order. "Radical and reactionary live together as in an unhappy marriage," writes Tomas Tranströmer in a poem, "molded by one another, dependent on one another." (Hass trans.) And just the same is true of free verse and the strictest meter. One cannot really subsist without the other. This, at least, is the substance of Fussell's message and warning: If we don't take some care to conserve poetic form in our literature, the value of free verse as a dialogue partner with it will be lost as well. A whole rich vein of artistic meaning, a whole universe of possible artistic effects, might then be lost to us.

All of this makes intellectual sense to me. After all, this line of reasoning could hardly fail to move me, given its structural similarity to the transcendental argument. We know from the previous post that to pull a card like this out is simply not playing fair with me. But I recognize as well that I may already be one of those living après le déluge. Prosodic folk memory was already done for, when I came into the world. Poetic meter and form weren't really a part of my intellectual upbringing, and they are not especially part of the set of expectations and presuppositions that I carry with me into the reading of a poem. Thus, their absence, or significant variations from them, does not especially stir me. I am, in brief, precisely the sort of new breed of philistine that Fussell feared.

Yet I would try to reassure Fussell as to the future if I could, I suppose, by noting that there will always be new orders and new pieties against which liberty will be straining, even if they are not the ones he was familiar with. I notice, intriguingly, that in a much earlier attempt at poetic criticism on this blog, I did focus on just this theme of the dialectic between rules and rebellion that is so often present in the enjoyment of poetry -- I just framed it in terms of a contest of ideas, rather than of forms. I was writing at that time, of course, without even the very modest degree of prosodic sophistication I have since acquired, thanks to Fussell, Beum, and Shapiro. But even if I had had these guides with me back then, I doubt I would have focused on this theme.

For me, the interesting dialectic in poetry, then as now, has nothing to do with form. It has to do with the way in which forbidden thoughts -- forbidden by our official ideologies -- can find voice in poetry in a way that would simply be too uncomfortable in any other medium. Pessimism and meditations on the transience of life, atheism shorn of any outward sap of scientific humanism -- these are among the classic subjects of poetry, from Omar Khayyam and Rochester on. They are the dominant emotional tone even in such prosodic traditionalists as Housman. And they would never be permitted for an instant to anyone who tried to type them up in a treatise and present it as their final view on life. Yet for some reason, we accept them in poetry -- whence the medium's eternal fascination to me. "Sweet verse embalms the spirit of sour misanthropy;" said Hazlitt, commenting on some lines of Byron, "but woe betide the ignoble prose-writer who should thus dare to compare notes with the world[.]"

This is why the fascination with pure form is largely lost on me. I was not raised in it. The deep parts of my brain are not seared in patterns of stanzas and strophes. I don't hear the repeated accentuations of iambic and trochaic verse echoing through my head. Thus, it is no great artistic thrill for me to hear the expectations generated by these patterns upset by the sudden eruption of a spondee. It is indeed the rebel poets who appeal to me, as they did to Fussell -- but not the rebel artisans pressing the envelope of form, but those pressing beyond the reach of acceptable ideas. I suppose this is why the poets who are supposed to be so technically astounding -- Eliot, Yeats, etc. -- are of infinitely less interest to me than those who seem to be driven above all by the will to communicate an idea, or a feeling -- even if it is only rage. MacDiarmid, Claude McKay, Owen and the other war poets, Lawrence, Brecht, Roque Dalton, Edgar Lee Masters. These are my poets. None especially distinguishes himself by prosodic innovation -- perhaps with the exception of Owen. Most are either uninteresting traditionalists in this regard, or partitioners of free verse by default. (Or else I'm reading them in translation and haven't got a clue as to their original meter.) But they are engaged in Fussell's dialectical conflict with convention nonetheless, just on a different plane. They write with political fury, and with scorching wit. They are unsettlers of ideological and emotional forms.

--

I came to the end of my prosodic studies, then, with some new vocabulary, but not really as a convert to the technical arts they prescribe. Once again, my effort at self-reinvention failed. I emerged at the end of it essentially the same person I was before, still the Romantic individualist, despite all the good arguments made against this position. Perhaps the solution adopted by Ezra Pound in his ABC of Reading -- which I turned to with gratitude at last because, after all that Beum and Shapiro and Fussell, I needed to hear from an artist on this subject, rather a scholar -- is the best one. There are in fact technical effects at play in any great piece of art, says Pound. It takes more than just intense sublimated emotion to carry it off. But the only proper training in those technical rules is not to learn "about them" -- still less to learn fanciful Greek names for them -- but to try to write until one finds the need of them, and has to discover them for oneself. This, at least, is the chief lesson I draw from Pound's rather laconic text. "Ignorant men of genius are constantly rediscovering 'laws' of art which the academics had mislaid or hidden," he writes.

Later, he gives a curt but convincing dismissal of the value both of my childhood's literary Romanticism, in which I believed I was of necessity a creative geyser that was bound eventually to go off, and the plodding technicism of the Beums and Shapiros. Here is Pound's middle way: "In London as late as 1914 the majority of poetasters still resented the idea that poetry was an art, they thought you ought to do it without any analysis, it was still expected to 'pour forth'." (Ahem, that would be me.) Pound continues: "The usual game of quibbling over half truth, starts just here. The best work probably does pour forth, but it does so AFTER the use of the medium has become 'second nature', the writer need no more think about EVERY DETAIL, than Tilden needs to think about the position of every muscle in every stroke of his tennis. The force, the draw, etc., follow the main intention, without damage to the unity of the act."

What this amounts to in essence, however, is that I am back where I started. The best I can really do is just to read other works of literature and pay attention to them and then wait for inspiration to strike. It is typical of me that I would find my way to Pound so soon after soldiering valiantly through more technical writers. The effort to break out of my expert generalism, to find my way toward a more than literary knowledge -- toward fact -- always leads me straight back to the former again. There is no true escape for me from humanism. A little earlier this year, for example, before the prosody explorations, I got it into my head that I ought to learn some of the technical details of typography. I found my way to Eric Gill, who managed to say some interesting and memorable things about aesthetic theory, but whose passages on the precise details of the typographic arts I have all now forgotten.

The same thing happened with photography. After taking a few pictures for work recently that turned out pretty well, I thought maybe I ought to learn something about the formal aspects of this art too. Hunting for a book on the subject that I might be able to stand, I ended up with Susan Sontag's On Photography. Good book. But also an egregious instance of "expert generalism." A week or so after finishing it, I found myself in the position of having to take photographs again. I suddenly remembered that there were all these formal rules that I had set myself to learn about when I first went seeking for books on photography -- composition, the "rule of threes," etc.-- and that I still didn't know any of them, after 200 pages of Sontag.

Always I find my way back to expert generalism in the end. I manage, by the most mysterious and indirect means, to avoid acquiring any actual practical knowledge. Even when I set myself to learn about photography, I am only able at last to be interested in whatever volume on that bookstore shelf will convey the least concrete information about it, and the most nebulous literary observation.

--

One possible conclusion of all of this is that one ought not to try too hard at self-reinvention, since one will always find one's way back to oneself eventually. This is the great theme of just about every poem by John Davidson, for instance. Accept life, he bids us, in all its horrors. Remain the workman at the anvil, or the clerk on thirty bob a week.

It follows just as logically, however, that one should feel free to follow the periodic manias for self-reinvention, where'er they listeth, for the same reason: they cannot really lead you too far astray. They cannot take one off one's true path and destiny, even if they want to. I am, then, a sort of video game character on a mine cart ride. I can lean a ways out to one side or the other, but I cannot truly change direction, or lanes. And in the course of all my leaning here and there, I do catch a few coins and bananas. By which I mean to say, I manage to acquire new knowledge -- it is just knowledge that is ultimately pressed into the service of the old expert generalist self. It becomes, somehow, still more grist for my mill. I read all of Paul Ceruzzi's History of Modern Computing at the start of this summer, for instance. The cockamamie idea at the time was that I was going to develop some new talent with computers that I'd never betrayed any sign of before. That didn't happen. But I did, in the course of reading it, stumble upon some incidental fact about the biography of Ross Perot, which then found its way into a blog post on some utterly unrelated subject. I still can't code. I don't know HTML. But I never would have picked up this useful factoid about Perot and Medicare processing if it were not for Paul Ceruzzi!

The chief lesson of my own Romantic conception of art, after all, is that one ought to allow oneself to be guided as much as possible by subconscious inspiration. And so, while this idea appears at first blush to be at war with technicism, it actually does not warn one off of that or any other course. Go where the spirit wills, it says, and -- in ways you cannot yet fathom -- the new knowledge you gain will somehow prove useful later on. In the fullness of time, according to this conception, nothing is ever truly wasted. You never know where Ross Perot might turn up.

So far, this theory has done mostly well by me. Pretty much everything good that has happened in my life was never really willed -- at least not by me. Almost everything bad was willed, and usually by me. The art of living and of poetry are quite similar in this regard. You really shouldn't force anything. And there's a lot to be said for waiting.

I suppose this is what people mean when they speak of trusting themselves to God. There's a reason why William James offered up the power of the "subconscious" in his Varieties as a phenomenon the reality of which both atheists and believers could attest. Both it and the divine seem to shape the course of one's life with a logic that is not always immediately visible or accessible to conscious awareness. In most cases now, when I am stuck in life and cannot decide what to write or what to do, I simply pause. "The Lord will show the way." Anything good I've ever written eventually materialized because it just had to come out. Anything bad, because I tried to satisfy someone else, or some notion of propriety. The right ideas will come to the patient.

"[Ernest] did not understand," writes Samuel Butler, "that if he waited and listened and observed, another idea of some kind would probably occur to him some day, and that the development of this would in its turn suggest still further ones. He did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to go hunting expressly after them. The way to get them is to study something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses one’s mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a little note-book kept always in the waistcoat pocket.  Ernest has come to know all about this now, but it took him a long time to find it out, for this is not the kind of thing that is taught at schools and universities."

Inspiration -- it is God as gut; the divine as the human subconscious, engaged in its subterranean operations and brewing up solutions that one's waking self has not yet dreamt. Trust in its guidance. Allow yourself to walk in its footsteps. There is a reason why Samuel Butler -- that great infidel -- nevertheless chose as the epigraph for his novel the following line from Scripture: “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God.”