I call Djokovic the greatest begrudgingly. My heart will always belong to Federer. My brain knows the record, it knows the head-to-head against Djokovic and Nadal. Still, I fell in love with tennis in high school because of Federer. I would wake up early just to watch him. Plenty of writers have written about his grace and art on the court. I, like them, believe such things count for more than records. My friend insists the greatest is Nadal, that Mallorcan mountain Federer could never quite overcome. In college, after all-nighters, we would turn on the TV instead of going to bed, nursing a hangover or a comedown, and watch the finals. I remember 2008, the greatest match of all time, when Nadal finally won on grass against Federer. I remember 2009 when Federer finally won on clay (albeit not against Nadal) and completed his grand slam. I remember, too, when Djokovic started inserting himself into the conversation. At first a third wheel, then a three-way rivalry. We ignored him until finally, like every one else, we had to admit that there were three great players. He simply wouldn’t go away. I remember 2019 when Federer had two championship points and still lost to the Serb, in what became the longest ever Wimbledon final. I’ll never forgive Djokovic for that. Federer played the better game (that’s statistically true, not just my opinion), but it turned out the three greatest players the sport had ever seen all played in the same era.

But that era is over now. The Golden Age is gone. The wheel has turned. It’s been turning since before Federer or Nadal retired. It’s been turning since the arrival of Alcaraz and Sinner. With Djokovic losing to Fonseca, it seems definitive. The torch has been passed. The new guard has overtaken the old. Federer was 19 when he beat Sampras in the fourth round of Wimbledon in 2001. That was also a five set thriller. Two years later he won his first slam. Sampras and Agassi were the old guard then, Federer the new. Djokovic is the old guard now, Fonseca the new. The wheel has come full circle, after two decades of Federer/Nadal/Djokovic. I’ve seen one generation come and go. One full turn of the wheel.

It’s the end of the school year, too, and a different wheel has come full circle. Students I’ve known, some for one year, some for four, are leaving. This wheel is annual, it spins faster than sports eras. A wheel within a wheel. It reminds me of an art project someone made on YouTube, a gear reduction system, where the first gear has to turn a googol amount of times for the last gear to make one complete rotation. (This would apparently require more energy to complete than exists in the universe.) One wheel spins and turns another, a little slower, and that one turns the next one, and the next one, on and on. Wheels within wheels, turning.

I think of all the wheels I can perceive in my life. I try to imagine where they are on their paths of completion. How many am I a part of whose circles will not be finished in my lifetime? How vast are their cycles? The tennis era has turned over, although it won’t be another Golden Age that replaces it. Fonseca most likely is not going to be the next Federer. And it’ll be a long time before anyone else comes close to the grand slam records of those three greats. How many turns until the next Golden Age of tennis? That’s a much larger, a greater wheel, that turns much slower.

The word secular comes from the Latin saeculum, an “age” or “epoch.” Originally it marked the time it took for those who did something like found a city to pass away. This was about 100-120 years. The Romans would count their history by saecula. In 17 BC, Augustus inaugurated the Ludi saeculares, games which were meant to commemorate the “fifth age” since the founding of Rome. Five ages since those who’d founded the city died. Five ages since the founding itself had passed beyond living memory. What keeps the memory alive beyond the first age becomes a matter of ritual, of religion, in that original sense of the word meaning “to relink” or “reestablish.” The religious differs from the secular in this way, in that it gestures toward those greater wheels whose rotations we cannot always recognize.

Early Christian writers used the word secular to distinguish the earthly realm from the divine. What is secular is the temporal, transient, worldly. It rises and passes away, constantly in flux, mutable. In contrast, the divine realm is eternal and unchanging. It is the real, the true realm, while the secular is the realm of appearance and seeming. The difference is between the fast spinning wheels, whose rotations we can see completed in our time, and those slower wheels that seem to hardly move, if at all. Yet like the gearbox, the wheels interlocking, each one’s turning turns the next; wheels within wheels, all connected, in one unending Chain of Being.

This year is the 250th year since the founding of America. We celebrate the anniversary of its founding every year, (annus, “year,” and versus, “turning”) but this time we’re celebrating an even larger wheel, a wider arc representing a much longer story. Where we are in that story, who knows. The decline? The end? Although it may seem so, in 17 BC Rome was already twice as old as America, but they still had another millennium to go, depending on who you ask. There may even be a greater wheel turning, for America, like Rome, believes itself to be the product of all history. Of what circumference is that great wheel of civilizational progress? And the one of Being itself? Whatever one believes about such things, it is ultimately a religious and not a secular question, for religion refers to that which we remember beyond what we can know. We hand these things off, we leave them in monuments, testimonies, records, documents, festivals, anniversaries, in hopes that they will not be lost, as the next age begins over again.

Summer is starting, and I have some more free time now. I’ve finished revising The Redwood. Everyone who’s read it so far has said they would prefer if it were a physical copy, and I agree. Substack isn’t conducive to getting absorbed in an epic. I’m sure it won’t ever find a publisher, it’s so unwieldy and unmarketable, so I plan to self-publish it, with illustrations, although that probably won’t be finished until the end of the year. I do all the typesetting and layout and cover design, and a longer work like this will take more time than normal. I’d like it to look as nice as possible, so people would be proud to own a copy. I’m still surprised by how many readers actually read it. It wasn’t very popular compared to other things I publish on here, of course, but it averaged 500 views a chapter, which is still more than most small poetry journals, and the views were consistent across its serialization. I’d eventually like to do an audio version as well, because it should really be read aloud, but that’s another undertaking.

Another manuscript, Madysyn Amandalynn, I finished this year. It’s a verse novel, a romance, set in San Francisco during the Pandemic. It’s much more commercial, so I’ve sent it off to some presses, although I’ve never had much luck with publishing in general, so I don’t hold out much hope. Anyway I don’t think presses matter that much anymore in the age of Substack and direct-to-consumer marketing. Nobody who cares about writing is unaware of the state of publishing today. There’s an article every other week about the decline of the Big Five, or the reality of the publishing world, or AI tanking the integrity of a once-prestigious magazine. There’s simply not much opportunity. Publishing with small presses has about the same results as self-publishing. I get solicited by poets for book reviews who’ve been published by the same small presses that I’ve submitted to. They’re betting on Substack to drive traffic. The presses themselves are on here, trying to drive traffic. That’s not to say there’s no value in traditional publishing, only that the value is no longer that of advertising, and less and less is it about prestige and recognition. There is still, I’m sure, value in the collaborative process, in meeting and working with like-minded readers, in networking and building relationships. But I’ve also managed to find those things on Substack anyway. Still, the allure of having a manuscript accepted, the sense of validation for one’s work, is too compelling to resist, so I’ve sent it off. If things don’t pan out, I might eventually serialize it on here, probably behind a paywall.

I’d like to try the paywall model for some of my work. I’m currently serializing a sonnet sequence, The Scroll, every other week, and I’d like to make the entire sequence available in advance for paid subscribers. I’d also like to do that for my two previously self-published books. I’m also looking ahead to writing more about rhetorical devices, which I’ve been writing broadly about in previous posts. I’d like to get into specific devices, as I’ve collected lots of examples to look through. I also want to finish a series I started working on a couple of years ago about the end of the Roman Republic. That wheel ended up turning a lot more slowly than I expected, but I still think the work is good, and I’d like to finish it. We’ll see how much I can actually get to this summer, in those still moments between life’s unceasing turnings.

VII.

Sometimes I use it as a stimulant.
Exceedingly as a means to an end. 
I race my thinking with its thoughts.
Other times I linger like a lotus eater,
let its dewy words intoxicate me,
swoon with pathos and nobility.
Other times, often by mistake, I become
a zombie nodding off on a sidewalk.
Squalls of men and women trace
their soundless paths around me
and I do not know what I am.
My personality, my pharmacy,
dispensing one immutable potion
dependent on the mood entirely.

The Scroll

I - Tell them there’s nothing left of the tribes of the Internet

II - Decorous thoughts strung from profiles, posts nailed to a slat

III - The man alone at his computer

IV - As it was written, so is it literal

V - I have the feeling nothing online is meant for me

VI - What ambrosia fills the timeline’s cup!

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring

—George Herbert, “The Flower”

In a recent post, Victoria Moul of Horace & Friends wrote about the value of the religious tradition, observing that the best contemporary poets today are religious “broadly speaking.” The poets themselves might not be religious, their work might not deal directly with religious themes, but they’re familiar enough with the canon, and their work is richer for it.

Poets who had some kind of religious formation have direct experience of this kind of depth of linguistic association, of what it means to hear the same significant texts repeatedly, to have them in your head.

The depth Mrs. Moul speaks of is the complexity and significancy that arises from situating oneself within the religious tradition. Any tradition really, but the religious one, being the foundation of all literature, has the most depth, having given rise to all others. There’s a term in Information Theory called Logical Depth, coined by Charles Bennett in the latter half of the 20th century, which I think offers a good explanation of the phenomenon.

Bennett was responding to the work of Claude Shannon, the father of Information Theory. Shannon, in developing his ideas on information and how it could be sent across long distances on telephones lines, was interested in the transmission of a message and not its semantic content. Bennett, on the other hand, wanted to develop the idea of meaning within the field as a way of understanding what, if anything, made a message meaningful or interesting. What he came up with was Logical Depth, which is a measure of all the processes that go into making a message. Logical Depth equates depth with those processes which exist in the message as context, informing its meaning. To be able to understand any written text, for example, its language must be situated within the grammatical and linguistic structures that give rise to meaning. To be able to use words is to know, at some level, their etymology, the history of their usage. I’ve used this example elsewhere, but knowing that the word window was originally a Teutonic kenning of vindr (“wind”) and auga (“eye”), and that it meant something like “the wind’s eye” or “an eye of wind,” it’s possible to use the word in such a way that summons its original sense, giving it a sense of depth. An allusion to an earlier usage is essentially a signal of depth, however shallow.

Literary traditions summon a depth of linguistic association by alluding to religious traditions within which they’re situated. An awareness and familiarity with these texts, regardless of whether the poet is religious or secular, seems a prerequisite, then, for good poetry, whether their aim is to renew, restore, reject, transform, subvert the tradition. The more one understands how a message is situated within these hierarchies, linguistic, grammatical, literary, the more depth one’s writing can be said to have.

It’s exactly this sort of familiarity that makes Kilby Austin’s debut collection, This Way to Warmth (2026, Prisca Publishing) so compelling. As she said in a recent interview, Mrs. Austin grew up practicing devotions once or twice a day with her family. Praying, reading scripture communally, singing hymns and psalters. She has thoroughly absorbed the religious canon, its text and its orality, and this sort of background lends her poetry, at the very least, a depth which is readily apparent and which rewards multiple readings. The significancy of her imagery, the rhetorical efficacy of her lines, and the music of her verse, are all rooted in a very old, very rich tradition, which she draws on to great effect. Its lineage includes George Herbert, Mary Sidney, Edward Taylor, Charles Wesley, and, most of all, Hopkins.

Compare the opening of Hopkins’ “Easter Communion”

Pure fasted faces draw unto this feast:
God comes all sweetness to your Lenten lips.
You striped in secret with breath-taking whips,
Those crookèd rough-scored chequers may be pieced
To crosses meant for Jesu’s

with the opening of Austin’s “Heart of Christ” which acts as a prologue to the book.

O heart of Christ to whom my own heart cleaves
but half-hearted, weak-willed, only weal-whiles;
O heart of Christ whom my own heart believes
but dull-hearted and in-turned; heart whose smiles
my ingrate heart forgets

The music in This Way to Warmth is as sumptuous and intricate, if not always as original or wild, as in the best of Hopkins. She likes the same words as Hopkins (“dappled,” “sweet”) and indulges in the same alliterative constructions (“weal-whiles,” “oyster-ache,” “brackish soul, sin-stirred,” “Pharoah-flesh”). Like Hopkins, her ear for syllable-sound and prosodic stress is impeccable, and allows her to achieve some remarkable lines like “Let Law lay by, low let waters pour” or these, from the opening of “Lunacy”

I grow weary as the moon that drags the tide.
I, tied
to weight inchoate,
gnawing need, deep
as the darkest deep,
ever frothing at the mouth
at the mouth of endless rivers

In her lyrics, too, one hears the music of the hymns she grew up singing. But never merely devotionals, they are meant to be read and not sung. Take “Apocalypse,” my favorite.1

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At twilight this evening
  it seemed that the world
in its turning and burning
  had been a great pearl.

Had we a great pearl
  of pain wrapped in beauty
where it curled and furled
  where it was conceived;

and were it conceived
  in an oyster-ache;
and retrieved or thieved
  when the seashells break;

when the sea shall break
  at its bounding shore,
the earth quake and shake
  to its simmering core,

to its shimmering core,
  at inscrutable meaning,
our pearl were the world
  at twilight this evening.

There’s something medieval about it. The internal rhyme in the third lines. The image of the pearl as the world, the way it views all creation in miniature. The repetition and variation of the last and first lines of the stanzas.

A major part of Austin’s style operates on this repetition and variation. Many of her poems feature refrains, or else repeat words that establish a rhythm or motif. In the sonnet “Sei Getreu” the word “steadfast” appears eight times in eight different ways. In “Passover,” “death” and its variations appear eighteen times. Here it borders on monotony, although the dullness is intentional. It is an ominous dullness, the same kind that must’ve occurred to the slaves of Egypt as they waited out the night. She uses polyptoton, the repetition of words derived from the same root (“die,” “dead,” “death,” as in Genesis 2:17, “Thou shalt die the death”) in “Passover,” and in these lines from “Black”: “When the accuser’s accurate finger / fingers the fatal faults that flower.” Repetition and variation.

Her rhythms and schemes, too, are varied. One never encounters the same tune twice, and the range of her musicality extends from her lyrics (the best being “Apocalypse,” “Fruiting Bodies,” “A Divine Lullaby,” “The Raven and the Dove,” and “The Wound”) to the prose rhythms of her free verse (see “For Heidi, Who Has Learned How to Fly” or “You Are the Salt of the Earth”).

She is also a perfectionist and self-professed grammar nerd. In the aforementioned interview, she goes into great detail about the significance of John’s description in Revelation of the placement of the Tree of Life. “On either side” and “in the middle of” the River of Life. The meaning of the Tree, she says, can be found in the choice of prepositions. Her insights into grammar, on Substack Notes and in my DMs scrutinizing my own poor placement of commas, demonstrates an attention to language at the level which is the real province of the poet. She takes seriously the smallest units of grammar and syntax which convey meaning however imperceptibly. It might be more apt to call her a precisionist than a perfectionist.

She is also primarily a devotional poet. She is tied, in my mind, with Kate Bluett for the title of best devotional poet on Substack. Though not nearly as prolific as Bluett, Austin makes up for it by the formal variety of her verse.

All devotional verse is essentially an exercise in faith. It is an act of training the will to see what is often either invisible or absent from the world. In practice, it is willing oneself to see what is not there. Paradoxically, such an act of will requires a great deal of submission. Humility, as Eliot would say; the only wisdom we can ever hope to acquire.

To nonbelievers this might seem like an act of self-deception, the poet making stuff up to make themselves feel better. But if we look at the imagery in the best devotional verse, in Herbert and Hopkins, or in the psalters or books of prayer, we find that it tends to be grounded in the natural world. Metaphors of rivers and mountains, stars in the sky, budding flowers, trees from seeds. The desolation of winter, the return of spring. The devotional poet sees into these things the forces which govern their nature. Their notions of hope and grace, mercy and salvation, are no less a product of their observations of nature as those who observe that life is only suffering, only cruel and brutish, and then you die. What the devotional poet pursues, even in their lamentations, is the mystery of what is there but cannot be seen. In this way they train their faith through writing.

In “Signposts,” Austin’s flagship poem that lends its line to the collection’s title, we see this fundamental aspect in practice in the way the poet sees in the figure of a bare and bowed tree its opposite significance.

I felt the cutting chill
and thought how wintry months
had carved the tree with icy skill
and bent it towards the south.

A kind of signpost now
I thought it looked to be:
“This way to warmth and summer glow”
was written in the tree.

The cycle of the seasons are (forgive the pun) a perennial image in the Christian poetic tradition. It’s no accident that the major solemnities coincide with what were once pagan seasonal festivals. In the darkness of winter, the birth of Christ, and in the spring, his death. What the Christian sees is the opposite of what he sees: the way out of winter’s darkness, the end of spring in spring’s arrival. The opening of George Herbert’s “The Flower” is a great example:

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         How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring;
         To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
                         Grief melts away
                         Like snow in May,
          As if there were no such thing. 

(See also Hopkins’ “Spring” which asks of the renewal it catalogues in the first stanza, “What is all this juice and all this joy?”)

You see this everywhere in Austin’s collection. In the image of “one old gnarly tree” that somehow points to summer. And in the image of the yellow gorse in “That Day in Lockdown” that exhales through its thorns a perfume that intimates to the poet what they themselves cannot articulate in the midst of suffering: “Grief may yet yield grace.” Austin makes explicit the dual image of the gorse’s thorns as both that punishment of Adam’s and its redemption through the thorn-crowned Christ. This coincidence of opposites, as McGilchrist calls it, is present in “The Raven and the Dove” which ends with the triumphant “where sin abounded, graces abounds the more.” It’s in the parable-sonnet “O Death, Where is Thy Sting” in the image of the bee’s sting and its honey. And in the poem “That He Should Come in Winter” when the poet declares triumphantly, “He should come to the very bottom // of our misery if he would raise us up at all.”

Devotional verse is the training of the will to see what is not there, but might be. Abundance out of dearth. Grace out of sin. Relief out of suffering. The exercise of writing is in finding the image and working out the argument, to glimpse the mystery and strengthen one’s faith. In Austin this practice takes the form, as it does in certain sects of Christianity, as a desire for suffering as a way of coming closer to God. She alludes to this quite often, but perhaps most explicitly at the close of “Peniel”

but in my weakness you were strong for me;
and only when I knew I couldn’t manage it,
I saw you face to face.

This desire for the salvation suffering brings often becomes a desire for suffering itself. In her most zealous poems, which become more frequent in the last section of the book, the distinction disappears altogether. Austin has said in a recent post promoting the book that one of its themes was “eschatological longing.” In the first section, “Meditations,” this longing takes the form of the personal and the natural. The poems generally have to do with nature, friends, or otherwise ordinary circumstances. The desire manifests as a psychological one, a longing for comfort in hard times, or for the renewal of spring, etc. The imagery is natural and grounded. In the second section, “Images from an Old World,” the imagery is historical. This section features longer, narrative poems that retell Biblical stories of great upheavals, from Adam’s ejection from the Garden to the Exodus from Egypt to the destruction of Jericho. In the third and final section, “Latter Days,” the desire becomes fixated on Christ’s suffering. We have several poems on the Passion that linger on images of the crucifixion and Christ’s wounds. The poet’s desire is not for worldly relief or historical resolution but for the End of Times, for the Second Coming signified by the blood of Christ. The language becomes the language of Revelation, mystic, apocalyptic. A longing not for relief but for reunification. In “Hoc Est Corpus Meum” Austin cries out

Oh, let your deadness hallow out the tomb in me,
rotting its living corpses clean away!
Exhume all other loves out of this earthen soul
and in the emptiness, oh, make me full.

Here the coincidence of opposites is taken to its eschatological extreme. In Christian theology there’s a concept called kenosis which refers to the “emptying-out” that Paul says Jesus experienced when he relinquished his divinity and became human. I don’t know if there’s an opposite or complimentary term that characterizes Austin’s desire to annihilate her human form and return to the Pleroma, but that would seem to characterize the longing here. It’s not a Buddhist emptiness; not an emptiness of the mind, but of the flesh, too. In “The Lord, the Lord” she calls it her glory to “drown and suffocate” in “skin and blood, in baptism, and in love.” The exuberance is overwhelming and masochistic, but that might be the point. One cannot anyway argue with the aesthetic force of the final line, when the image Austin has been shaping, of God’s glory revealed to Moses, culminates in her own desire to be destroyed by His immanence.

I will put on a naked body and die.

I’m not this zealous, but I do admire the power of the rhetoric. It summons the ancient sense of awe, fear in equal proportion to wonder.

What I do not like about The Way to Warmth is the artifice surrounding the poetry. The overly long epigraphs, the Note to the Reader that wants to narrate the intended experience of each section. A precisionist is always in danger of becoming a contriver, always in danger of overfitting or overengineering what might otherwise work fine without all the scaffolding. She tells us in that same post promoting her book that there are “51 poems, in 3 sections of 17,” and that 51, 3, and 17 are all prime numbers, and that if you take away the prologue and epilogue you have 49, which is seven 7s, “seven being the Hebrew number of perfection.” As someone who grew up Seventh Day Adventist, and whose father used numerology to predict, unsuccessfully, the end of the world and the identity of the antichrist, I find this sort of stuff unconvincing.

But overall, I enjoyed This Way to Warmth. Austin is a fine poet. She’s technical but not overly so. Her lyrics and formal verse are softened by contemporary and folk tellings. Her free verse has a zealotry to it that’s aesthetically forceful. Her historical narratives are learnèd. Most of all, she does not wallow in grief (though she may indulge in suffering) but leads one through it somewhere that is strange and compelling.

VI.

What ambrosia fills the timeline’s cup!
The sweet milkskin of boiling prophecy
rises to the top for hungry eyes to skim.
Oracular men and women, full of wise saws.
What lucid wit, what remarks intoxicating.
The pleasure of the bon mot, the conviction
of the proverb. Epistles unwavering,
apothegms faultless and decadent.
What sobering epiphany and elegiac
has struck me to the core but for a moment
and pressed its seal upon a strand of time
smoothed by otherwise mindless tides.
Scrolling deeply is as good as praying.
Here nothing goes without saying.

The Scroll

I - Tell them there’s nothing left of the tribes of the Internet

II - Decorous thoughts strung from profiles, posts nailed to a slat

III - The man alone at his computer

IV - As it was written, so is it literal

V - I have the feeling nothing online is meant for me

Like The Paris Review’s Art of Poetry series, these interviews focused on the practices and circumstances that give rise to a poet’s work. The interviewers had a good understanding of that work, but it was the craft itself that was of greatest interest. As such, the interviews are valuable for any fans who might happen to be interested in, say, which critics influenced Auden, or why Ashbery used a voice recorder, or that Wilbur finds Wordsworth “damnably earnest.”1

In 1970 Allen Ginsberg was interviewed, and although he was loath to speak of it in those terms (“Capital C-R-A-F-T,” he joked) he was nonetheless quite open about his process of poetic composition.

Ginsberg was a neoromantic poet, like most of the Beats, and like many of the postmodern schools of the midcentury.2 He believed, like Wordsworth, that poetry was essentially “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.” Sometimes Ginsberg induced that feeling himself with drugs, as in “Wales Visitation” which he tells NYQ was written while under the influence of LSD; sometimes the occasion was more impromptu, as in “Sunflower Sutra,” written in twenty minutes while Kerouac was waiting for Ginsberg by the door.

I said, “Wait a minute, I got to write myself a note.” I had the Idea Vision and I wanted to write it down before I went off to the party, so I wouldn’t forget.

Ginsberg wrote most often in fits of inspiration, when the feeling came on. His ideal mode of poetic composition was the “prophetic illuminative seizure.” He wrote in states of epiphany, and paid attention to the activity of the mind in that moment of poetic creation. The greater the attention, according to Ginsberg, the more feeling emerged from it.

That’s the idea: to be in a state of such complete blissful consciousness that any language emanating from that state will strike a responsive chord of blissful consciousness from any other body into which the words enter and vibrate.

“Sunflower Sutra” is Ginsberg’s “Tintern Abbey.” They’re both poems of joyous epiphany, where the poet, struck by the beauty of the natural world, “sees into the life of things.” Wordsworth on the banks of the Wye, Ginsberg on “a tincan banana dock.” Wordsworth looks out at the “steep and lofty cliffs” from the shade of a sycamore, Ginsberg at the sunsent over the “box house hills” from the shade of a Pacific locomotive. Both are meditations, recollections of transcendence, spurred on by nature and by the sight of their companion. Dorothy stands beside Wordsworth, Kerouac sits next to Ginsberg. Through Dorothy, Wordsworth intuits “the language of my former heart,” and through the sunflower Kerouac hands him, Ginsberg imagines the perfect beauty of humanity that defeats both death and “human locomotives.”

that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown—3

If we’re to believe Ginsberg, it took him only twenty minutes to write “Sunflower Sutra.” There was little revision to his poetic process, so what we have is likely what he managed to write in those twenty minutes. As he tells NYQ

When attention is focused, there is no likelihood there will be much need for blue penciling revision because there’ll be a sensuous continuum. […] if you’re interested in writing as a form of meditation or introspective yoga, which I am, then there’s no revision possible.

Ginsberg had developed a mode of poetic production that was meditative, immediate, and spontaneous. His improvisation of images is impressive. The way he summons, one after another, a heap of broken images. A master of the catalogue and the long breath line; of asyndeton, too, that rushes the images by; and of an accumulation of adjectives, disordered but repetitive, rhythmic, that compels one to pay attention to the sound of words. These were the skills that he perfected throughout the course of his career.

In the interview, he describes the act of writing as “secretarial.” A poem, for Ginsberg, is something transcribed, taken down like dictation, from an endless, uninterrupted interior voice.

You observe your own mind during the time of composition and write down whatever goes through the ticker tape of mentality.

What passes through the mind is the poem. The subject is the activity of the mind in that moment of composition. The poet need only attend to it, need only keep up with it in order to get down what’s there. Traditional forms, then, with their imposed structures, are a hindrance to Ginsberg’s process. The form is instead the “time of composition,” the time it takes one to write things down. The craft, for Ginsberg, therefore, lay in the act of observing in that moment “the flashings of the mind.”

The craft is observing the mind. Formerly the ‘craft’ used to be an idea of rearranging your package, rearranging. Using the sonnet is like a crystal ball to pull out more and more things from the subconscious (to pack into the sonnet like you pack an ice cream box). Fresher method of getting at that material is to watch mind flow instantaneously, to realize that all that is, is there in the storehouse of the mind within the instant any moment.

Of course, in the case of “Sunflower Sutra,” Ginsberg was also consciously imitating “Tintern Abbey.” The incident with the sunflower awakened in him not only “memories of Blake,” as he says in the poem, but memories of “Tintern Abbey.” Wordsworth was a great influence, and Ginsberg had probably committed the poem, and its form, to memory. So he did in fact have a form in mind. His subject, too, was his time with Kerouac on the tincan banana dock, and the experience of holding the sunflower and seeing in it something which he thought Wordsworth must’ve also seen looking down into the Wye. What that something was, and what Ginsberg would say about it, however, would be a matter of the moment, a matter of that “blissful consciousness” in which Ginsberg aimed to compose, which, in the case of “Sunflower Sutra,” lasted twenty minutes before leaving for a party with Kerouac.

It took Ginsberg twenty minutes to write “Sunflower Sutra.” While we don’t know how long it took Wordsworth to write “Tintern Abbey,” we do know that five years had passed since he’d seen the waters rolling inland from their mountain-springs. “Five summers, with the length Of five long winters!” So in one sense at least, it took him five years to write. The poem at the very least suggests a depth of recollection that “Sunflower Sutra” lacks.

Compare the insight that culminates in Wordsworth’s poem

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

to that of Ginsberg’s

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!

We don’t know what time passed between Ginsberg’s experience on the dock and his writing it down, but it certainly feels like it could have been the same day. One assumes it would need to be fresh enough in the mind to be able to get down with some fidelity. The immediacy of the poem was also a function of Ginsberg’s process. The difference in depth between them, and what makes “Tintern Abbey” superior to “Sunflower Sutra,” in my opinion, has to do with the way in which the poets conceived of their processes.

For Wordsworth the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” was always something the poet reflected on. It was not a part of the process itself, but simply the material for it.

I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.4

Here the act of contemplation creates a similar but not identical emotion. What exists before the mind when writing is something which lends itself to inspection. But for Ginsberg the act of writing was itself the spontaneous emotion. For Wordsworth the feeling was the subject, for Ginsberg the subjectivity. This is the crucial difference between the English Romantics of the 19th century and the American Romantics of the 20th.

One finds the same thing in Charles Olson, the founder of the Black Mountain school. Olson, in his Projectivist manifesto outlined a similar program of immediacy.

Now the process of the thing, how the principles can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down to one statement […] ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION

His famous dictum, “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” is no different than Ginsberg calling the subject the activity of the mind in that moment, and form the “time of composition.”

Olson’s Projective Verse was published in 1950, four years before Ginsberg began working on Howl. On either American coast, the same romantic project was unfolding. Bloom would’ve called it a misreading of English Romanticism. What the Beats and the Black Mountain poets discovered5 was an automatic writing which, like the surrealists, sought to probe the depths of the irrational and the novel: a kind of writing which wants always to ride on the edge of consciousness, to cross the bar and sail beyond its horizons and see the other side. It’s also one that privileges the individual’s experience. If it was a misreading, it was a uniquely American one.

But the limits of such a process become obvious when one compares “Tintern Abbey” to “Sunflower Sutra.” One sacrifices in the pursuit of an eternal present a depth of introspection. Ginsberg’s transcendence is an immanence without content. Intense because immediately felt, yet conspicuously lacking in anything like the recollection it purports to possess. It does not, after all, reflect, it experiences.

Ginsberg is consciously imitating “Tintern Abbey,” he clearly wants us to draw comparisons with it, yet “Sunflower Sutra” does not reach anything like the depths of recollection of its predecessor. How could it? Ginsberg’s mode of production did not admit of such reflection. He banged out “Sunflower Sutra” twenty minutes before heading out to a party with Kerouac. His technique was to write in the moment of epiphany, when the feeling came on, and to write only in that time. And he did not admit revisions that might alter the fidelity of the poem from its original moment of ecstatic creation.6

Given the constraints, it’s impressive what Ginsberg managed to come up with. But it’s not impressive in the same way that “Tintern Abbey” is impressive. Its revelation not nearly as profound, nor its feelings as moving. Iain McGilchrist called “Tintern Abbey” one of the greatest poems ever written. I would put it high on my list, too.7 I return to the poem again and again because its gifts are unlimited, while the more I reread “Sunflower Sutra” the more its flaws reveal themselves to me. Its pleasures do not increase but empty themselves over time. It’s an ephemeral pleasure, the moment of ecstasy, not the pleasure of wisdom in recollection. It is the pleasure of gustation, of tasting words and images in quick succession. They dissolve on the tongue and leave nothing substantial. In that way it’s neither like “Tintern Abbey” nor the Indian Sutras which Ginsberg suggests by his title. “Sunflower Sutra” is neither reminiscence nor wisdom. It’s the pleasure of sounds, though not necessarily music. There’s nothing very musical in the poem. Even Ginsberg’s recital of it is strangely tuneless. He uses a droning voice, something between meditation and reading the newspaper.

Ultimately, Ginsberg falls short of his own standards of composition. His writing simply doesn’t, can’t, strike “a responsive chord of blissful consciousness,” because the language always lacks depth. It’s meant to be, after all, immediate and spontaneous language. It’s meant to float on the surface. It’s all bliss and no consciousness. And no amount of accumulation or repetition will make up for a lack of richness in language that does not make use of reason. This is the flaw in all automatic writing.

Wordsworth knew this, too. Though he rebelled against the Age of Reason and the idiom of the Augustans, against the “habits of expression” too polished and too remote from real language, “against the triviality and meanness both of thought and language,” yet he did not deny reason, he did not abandon it for mere spontaneous overflow.

For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings …

The midcentury neoromantics were more antagonistic to reason. Their rebellion against the sober and learned spirit of the modernists was total. Such a process had happened before, a hundred and fifty years earlier, but not to the same degree.

I much prefer Wordsworth’s concept of blissful consciousness which he goes on to articulate.

… and as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so by the repetition and continuance of this act feelings connected with important subjects will be nourished, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much organic sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced that by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits we shall describe objects and utter sentiments of such a nature and in such connections with each other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, his taste exalted, and his affections ameliorated.

This is enlightenment and not only bliss. I find it nobler, more desirable, than anything in the neoromantics. History will bear it out, too, because one will be returned to more often, its lifespan longer, its fruits more nourishing.

The difference between the English Romantics and the American neoromantics is one of process. It’s a matter of the powerful feeling’s role in that process. In one it takes the shape of thinking “long and deeply.” in the other, characterized by Olson in Projective Verse, speed.

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!

So there we are, fast, there’s the dogma.

If you’ve got this far, which mode do you prefer? What does your own poetic process look like?

V.

I have the feeling nothing online
is meant for me, but is instead uttered
to an audience of idea-eating gods.

O Babylonian bazaar! This one sings
a hymn of Inanna, this one prays
at the foot of the huluppu tree. 

Living history, phosphorous, backlit.
But what are their prostrations to me?
They seem relentless in their worship.

They speak knowingly, as though
they had been offering sacrifices
and kept the practice a long time.

The further back the Scroll reaches
to the start of things, the more it forgets
how not to look like hieroglyphs.

What if they think I was like them?
How violent, how wretched, how horrible.
I must tell them what I was right away.

Someone hands me a bowl
of smoking incense and tells me
breathe deeply, breathe deeply.

The Scroll

I - Tell them there’s nothing left of the tribes of the Internet

II - Decorous thoughts strung from profiles, posts nailed to a slat

III - The man alone at his computer

IV - As it was written, so is it literal

I don’t know anything about Philip Traylen. He wrote me asking if I would review his book because I’d once said his poetry was bad. He thanked me sincerely for saying this, and told me he was afraid of only getting good reviews, no doubt because he cultivates a sort of cult following on Substack, with fans buying into everything he says, even though it’s mostly nonsense. It’s mostly trolling and begging. Occasionally he’s fun to read. Occasionally I’ll dip into the madness of his “philosophical diary” or give a go at reading his short story in The Metropolitan Review (I could not get through it); or his book review in The Republic of Letters about the act of reviewing books itself (I got through it and did not understand it); or I’ll stop to read his Notes because I know he’ll break up the tedium of scrolling, when things start to feel too familiar (one reads the same kinds of Notes over and over). I’ll indulge in Traylen’s unpolished, rambling stream-of-thought because he is a genuinely odd and interesting writer. A curiosity. He does not write like anyone else. He’s won a dedicated following on Substack by being unconventional, which is not an easy thing to do on a site that rewards the opposite, that breeds conformity and convention like rabbits.

His writing is that of a style of “pure literature” that C.S. Lewis said was “without subject.” He does not have topics. When he does, they are only the pretense, only the means to come by writing. His references, arguments, passions, insults hurled at other people’s moms, it’s all technique. His writing is essentially play. He is at play with language, which is what makes it pure. This is refreshing to see on Substack. He does not, after all, write about anything. He does not make points. He does not chase discourses. He does not offer advice. He does not (as he would be loathe to do) teach anybody anything. He just writes, and sometimes it’s fun to watch him play. Sometimes. I admit I’m not the audience for it, except occasionally.

What I actually said about Traylen’s poetry was that it was better in his prose than in his verse. I was commenting on how bad the poetry section was (and continues to be) at The Metropolitan Review, in which Traylen had been featured. “Rural Adventure II” is still not a good poem, in my opinion. It’s certainly not the best that his collection, Under her Adidases, has to offer. Except for the phrases “the deep comprehensibility of the weather” and “planning some enormous farewell,” it falls flat for me. The opening line is emblematic of Traylen’s style. “I’d like to milk a goat.” At once inane and subtlety erotic. Traylen has, in general, great opening lines. They sound like they should be the titles of poems, if not of whole poetry books.

Beguiled by sadness into thinking I was
a fruit tree.

—

Halfway through the poem
God died.

—

The moment of freedom has seen
how you look at her hair

—

It’s entirely unbearable to me, hence
my love for it.

—

Let the night be a lesson
to all creatures

—

A girl with a triangle
for a face seduced me
without even looking

There’s an absurdity and philosophical candor that is honest and engaging. Sometimes he descends to the level of meme-humor, as in

Take your wife’s name out
of your own mouth, for once.

—

How many people has this sparrow
had sex with, seven, eight?

—

You know what, bro? I somehow feel like singing.

—

I’d like to milk a goat

Indecent, juvenile, amusing. It’s this contrast of high and low that in part makes Traylen interesting. The grand with the prosaic, the profound with the profane. It makes for rich confusion and unresolved ironies. In “Rural Adventure II” what begins with a desire to milk a goat ends with the speaker’s mother returning with her “kitten army,” her beliefs running alongside the speaker like children in a movie waving goodbye. This is meant to be both lofty and a bit overbearing. Mothers are a staple throughout the collection, as they are in Traylen’s Substack Notes. A cypher to understanding who Philip Traylen is, in “Apologies on her behalf” he tells us that “if you want to adjust the meaning of the word life, place the word mother before it on the page.” For some reason I imagine Traylen as a middle-aged man who lives with his elderly mother. A hermit, he either takes her on long walks along English cobblestone streets, or else he wears her dresses while she decomposes in a cellar. Both are plausible interpretations that reflect Traylen’s fixation as well as his mixing of high and low styles. Either way, he loves his mother very much.

Poems usually fall short of their opening lines, though not always. In “Rilke” what begins rather badly with “The muse is a / dog, this dog, that / dog, basically any / dog” ends with the suggestive symbolism of

Seriously, yesterday
I woke up and
realised Germany
didn’t exist, it was
all a dream
of her blouse in
fast water. I
called out to it
but as I said it
was just a piece
of women’s clothing.

This is good symbolism. Germany as “just a piece of women’s clothing.” The plain style of “just” and “Seriously” and “but as I said” grounds and deepens the sense of the surreal. The unattached pronoun of “her blouse” is uncanny. The dream logic in “The Balkan Erotic” is equally vivid and sensuous, a view of “Long mountains rising north” literally knotted together with the lover’s body.

The rope
is the body, stretching out
across the days, seasons,
hours.

Traylen is essentially an English symbolist. He’s in the tradition of Arthur Symons (1865-1945), and is probably just as mad. Symons had a turbulent upbringing with his nonconformist family in Wales, and described himself as a vagabond during his early adulthood. He had a mental breakdown and spent some time in an institution until 1910, after which his work was never the same. All of this seems like it could apply to Philip Traylen, and I don’t anything about the man.

Symons’ book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) was the first major work in English on French Symbolism. His own work was heavily influenced by Verlaine, as Traylen’s is by Emil Cioran.1 Symons’ opening lines are also pretty good

Music first and foremost of all!
Choose your measure of odd not even,
Let it melt in the air of heaven

—

Why is it, child, you choose to wear
That artful 1830 air
of artlessness made artifice?

—

Intoxicatingly
Her eyes across the footlights gleam,
(The wine of love, the wine of dream)
Her eyes, that gleam for me!

—

A silver-vested monkey trips
And pirouettes before the face
Of one who twists a kerchief lace
Between her well-gloved finger-tips.

Traylen obviously lacks the music of Symons (I would describe his poetry as anti-verse) but otherwise they’re very similar. I admit, I’m not normally the audience for such poetry. I outgrew Rimbaud in my twenties (the same age he outgrew his own writing), and I appreciate Mallarmé and Verlaine but don’t often return to them for pleasure. I do like Apollinaire. One of my favorite books in my collection is a 1920 Gallimard edition of Alcools which I stumbled on at the Paris bouquinistes, but it’s mostly for sentimental reasons.

The problem with symbolism is that every reader wants to trust, on some level, that the poet knows what they’re up to. One wants to feel one is in good hands, that a poet will not waste one’s time. But with the symbolists it’s hard to tell because they purposefully don’t want to know what they’re up to. A lot of symbolism is willful unknowing. It’s about letting the images make their own sense, letting them find their own associations. It’s automatic writing. This is fine if one is a genius, or if they’re writing on the forefront of such processes, as Mallarmé and Rimbaud were; or if the poet has had a piece of shrapnel lodged in their temple from World War I, as Apollinaire did. The results, in each case, will be interesting. But so often nowadays symbolism is just an excuse for bad writing. Symbolist processes of composition are not so different from the processes that produce bad writing, because both refuse to know, to a certain extent, what they’re up to. The result is that the difference between a deliberate rejection of sense and a rejection out of ignorance or laziness ends up looking the same in a symbolist poem. Unless the poet is already interesting, chances are the work is going to come across hopelessly obscure or confused.

Philip Traylen is interesting enough that I was intrigued to read his book. I think there’s promise, though I find him to be very inconsistent. There’s dynamism in his voice, in the incongruity of tone and train of thought, in the contrast of high and low, in the significance of some of his phrases.

The pleasure I get from reading Traylen is similar to the pleasure I get reading the koans of the Blue Cliff Records, or from Tang poetry. This is the other major tradition I see in Under her Adidases. He’s clearly a fan of Chinese luminaries like Zhuang Zhou and Du Fu and Li Po. The plain style, the domestic scene, the seasonal image, the philosophic introspection, all of it is present, for example, in “Chinese Poem II”

Last July, I left home
and travelled to Fujian.
The sea was wild, waves
as high as my father’s
storehouse. First we betray
our family, then we betray
ourselves. I stripped to my
cotton pants
and drowned myself.

Like so much Chinese poetry, the parataxis compels the reader to fill in the relationship between the lines. Traylen plays this both for profundity and dark comedy. His humor, as I said before, is as low as an allusion to Will Smith’s Oscar slap, and as high as the transcendent eroticism in “A New Theory”

If only we could sexualize
climate change. The clouds are wet
and tight, the enormous hard mountain
is at risk of
something

This made me snort with laughter. I can’t remember the last time I read something like that in a poem. Ribald and intelligent. Or when he says in “Apartment Complexes” that he will “inseminate” himself into the gaps of the Russian-made apartment complexes to overhear the lives of its tenants. There’s no other voice like it in poetry today.

A koan (or gong’an in Chinese) is meant to break the normal flow of sense by introducing a situation, a scene we can follow or question we can understand, and then demonstrating how we do not really understand at all, how our ego is only clinging to structures which are not really there. The rift we feel when we lose our grasp of things is called “the bottom of the bucket falling out.” Traylen achieves this in “War” through the abrupt shift in narrative framing and in the dialogue absent context.

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My mother walks in, a shocked look
on her face, through which something else
tries to emerge. The Holy Spirit? Shall
The Holy Spirit find accommodation
in whatever gaps we have left open
in our orgy of death? Don't
ask me that, my girlfriend says, I told you
not to ask me that. I wasn't
speaking, I say, my mouth has been shut
this whole time. So, she says,
you know the answer.

The mother walking in with a shocked look on her face establishes a situation and a mood, and the mind grasps the significance of the question “Shall The Holy Spirit find accommodation in whatever gaps we have left open in our orgy of death?” both in relation to the mother, through which that Spirit is trying to emerge, and in relation to the larger theme of war indicated by the poem’s title. But no sooner have we grasped such things than the poem shifts abruptly to dialogue between the speaker and his girlfriend, and all sense breaks down. What we’re left with are a web of suggestions, unanswered but no less provocative. Did the mother walk in on her son committing war against his brothers? Is the shocked betrayal of a mother’s love the sublime image of the Holy Spirit’s abnegation of war? Did she also walk in on her son having sex with his girlfriend? The progression of “mother,” “orgy,” and “girlfriend” is telling, and Traylen’s fixation on mothers is clearly Oedipal, and not only in his poetry. Is the mother’s shock, then, the betrayal of his son’s psychosexual desire? Is the mother really the girlfriend, and the speaker has kept his mouth shut the whole time? The poem ends with “you know the answer,” which only adds to our sense that the bottom has fallen out from the bucket. But the ellipses are not so great that the reader cannot skip across them from conclusion to conclusion.

Traylen is a remarkably sensual poet. I say remarkably because that sensuality is often found side-by-side with his black and trollish sense of humor. Yet somehow the sincerity of the former is never entirely undone by the latter. It may even play a part in helping us to better believe it. His statement on love at the ending of “In great anger…” is hard to resist

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                       And
the important thing
the poet must remember
is that to love
is utterly different
from all of this, to love
is to fail to achieve all
your goals in such a
way that in the last instance
everything is revealed to you
to have always been beautifully,
righteously, incomplete

Overall, Under her Adidases is an uneven collection. Traylen’s poems seem best when in the style of the Eastern tradition,2 when they resemble the voice of the koans or the Chinese lyricists. This is “Chinese Poem II” and “Chinese Poem III” and “War” and “Phrenology I” (another poem that features a mom, this time “spectacularly untouched”) and “You lean out of the window…” Combined with his postmodern preoccupations, his subtle and not so subtle eroticisms, the result is something original. His symbolist poems are successful less often, but there’s usually something to admire in them, such as the ending in “Rilke” or the ending in “Norwegian Painting” or the ending in “Religious Poem IV”. I also like the register in “London Travel Problem”. In general his style is sensuous, intimate, irreverent, juvenile. I don’t know if I’ll return to any of the poems any time soon, but I will return to Philip Traylen, because he is a singular personality. There is something authentic and playful about him. Even his begging seems admirable, as a writer trying to make it on originality and talent alone. And, of course, he loves his mother, which is also commendable.

IV.

As it was written, so is it literal.
What manifested there has been removed,
a sense disembodied of its visceral,
and in your interior it must be renewed.
You must take it to a holy place of the mind
and make it offerings of ample attention.
With a shaman’s help it can be revived,
refigured, like incense dancing with figuration.
Ah! he grins beneath his hood and cloak.
What is it, you ask, leaning in. What does it mean?
Over the altar you stoop, to listen and to know.
These words are not exactly what they seem.
An irony that, by our magic, we can’t invoke.
They wear the garbs of a story told in a dream.

The Scroll

I - Tell them there’s nothing left of the tribes of the Internet

II - Decorous thoughts strung from profiles, posts nailed to a slat

III - The man alone at his computer

More than that, though, I think the point resonated because everybody already knows it to be the case that poets make stuff up. It’s true, yet it’s a truth rarely repeated. We often forget what it means that the poet is first and foremost a Maker. Those who forget most often are the poets themselves.

Poets are gifted with certain powers of language, endowed with gifts of imaginative creation. The poet believes himself to be in possession of an ability to communicate with the divine, within or without, and to speak truth as a matter of fact. But Plato knew that poets are not truthtellers by nature. They are makers, but not always makers of truth. They often make things up that aren’t true. The winning poem from the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition is about just such a poet staring up at a ceiling, making things up that aren’t true. And the judges, poets themselves, made things up about the winning poem that also weren’t true.

This has been a point of contention between the public and the poet since Plato. In the Renaissance, Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, the first major work of literary criticism in English, was a defense against exactly this charge. But Sidney did not argue contrary to the fact. He and everyone else agreed that poets made stuff up. Rather, his argument was that it was precisely this power that made the poet a better artist than either the historian or the philosopher. The poet, by virtue of his imagination, could move and delight, where the philosopher and historian could only teach.

The idea that art should do these things, move, delight, teach, is a classical formulation. Horace, in his Ars Poetica, said that the aim of poetry was dulce et utile, or “delight and instruction.” Cicero, in his work on oratory, said that the aim of rhetoric was docere, delectare, et movere, or “to teach, delight, and move.” The aims were similarly conceived since, as we looked at in a previous post, rhetoric and poetry were once considered to be the same thing.

Sidney argued that, whereas the philosopher seeks only to teach, the poet both moves and teaches. He tells stories, sings sweetly. The philosopher merely states things and reasons about them. The poet can move a reader even before the reader has understood why. In this way he is more persuasive than the philosopher who can only make arguments and give proofs. The philosopher puts forward propositions while the poet implies, suggests, alludes to, things which are not strictly speaking there. The historian, too, is “bound to tell things as they were” while the poet is free to select and order events in such a way that reveals universal truths. He embellishes, or lies, as the saying goes, to tell the truth. In the historian and philosopher this is dishonesty, in the poet, a matter of craft. The poet can say a great deal more than either the historian or the philosopher because he can be lyrical, dramatic, figurative. We accept these things as natural in poetry, while in philosophy and history they’re much harder to pull off. And to the extent that the philosopher or historian does pull them off, he is “subject to the poet.” His skill in that instance is always a matter of poetry.

Classical and Renaissance literary criticism would say that the poet invents things. But crucially invention here involved, not making things up from nothing, but discovering and ordering, so as to illuminate, what was “true or likely to be true.” This idea comes from Aristotle, who thought that poetry was a generalizing or universalizing art, one whose purpose was not to copy Nature so much as draw from it, and figure, certain principles or patterns inherent in Nature. What the poet made was the artifice of the poem, a work of art that ordered and represented what was otherwise the chaotic material world. Natural phenomena, historical contingency, human behavior. All of it impenetrable, insensible, nonsensical. The poet, as Maker, recreated Nature in such a way that its meaning and significance were suddenly made clear, illuminated, by their skill and insight. In this way the poet was like a gardener, bringing out in Nature what was already there, tending to it as a way of furthering it along. In the Renaissance there was also the belief that the poet added to Nature, “delivering her a golden,” as Sidney famously put it. Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie (1589) said something similar:

In another respect arte is not only an aide and coadiutor to nature in all her actions, but an alterer of them, and in some sort a surmounter of her skill, so as by means of it her owne effects shall appeare more beautifull or straunge and miraculous

In this way the poet, according to Puttenham, was like a physician who not only cures an ailment but can also, by his science, extend the life of his patients. This is poetry doing something more than Nature, transcending it in some important way. The poet creates what is not there in Nature except by inference and intuition. In this way he ‘makes stuff up.’

Yet to the extent that the poet spoke the truth, it was according to Nature, which was, crucially, a separate thing from the poet and the poem that reproduced it. This view assumed truth was implicit in Nature and not something made up by the poet. One could be wrong about the truth they claimed. Today many poets have no such idea. They believe that truth, being relative, is self-created, and that being a Maker, anything expressed by them, by virtue of their having expressed it, makes it true. There is a certain kind of poet who believes that whenever they express themselves they are being truthful regardless of what is expressed.

There are many reasons for this change in thinking about poetry. I’ve been sketching out the idea in previous posts. The change happened slowly, then all at once. For the Renaissance writers, the poet was a Maker insofar as he was like God, but he was certainly not God Himself. But with the Romantics, who made subjectivity the primary subject of their poetry, the tools of the craft were turned upon themselves and their own processes of imaginative creation, and the distinction became, over time, less and less apparent. The poet was a Maker, and what he made with his poems was himself. Possibly this thinking began in the Renaissance, but with the Romantics it had fully taken shape.

There is, of course, some truth to the claim that whatever a poet makes is true by virtue of his having made it. Art is both imitative and creative, a matter of craft and a matter of inspiration. There is always something true about his expression. But it is a trivial kind of truth. Self-expression is as significant and miraculous a thing as the miracle of creation itself, but equally it is as insignificant as throwing up some lines from your Notes app and calling it poetry. In the first sense, we feel the necessary connection to the divine, original source of Being. In the second, we are adrift in the contingency of finitude, claiming, in vain, art for art’s sake. Too many poets today believe their work falls automatically into the first category. They want to create significance by staring at ladybugs on a ceiling and thinking about Gaza. It may, at least for them, be the case. After all, they have expressed themselves, and maybe they have learned something. And the judges have offered their justifications and been satisfied that they made the right choice. But what is revealed to the reader ends up being something not entirely of the poet or the judges’ making. An obliviousness, an insincerity, a false conscience betraying itself.

For the Renaissance poets like Sidney, the aim of poetry was not self-expression but learning. Learning here is broadly conceived, as broad as the way poetry itself was understood, not only as verse but as that faculty of the imagination that made things up. The kind of learning Sidney had in mind was not our kind today when we think of stuffy classrooms and busy work. It is not the indoctrinating kind of learning that involves the mere putting of facts in the receptacle of the mind. Sidney thought of learning as “the purifying of wit,”

this enriching of memory, enabling of judgement, and enlarging of conceit—which commonly we call learning, under what name soever it come forth, or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.

The kind of learning Sidney had in mind, to which the arts of poetry and history and philosophy all conspire, was enlightenment broadly conceived. It was an augmentation of consciousness, to use Harold Bloom’s term. A kind of learning that, by helping us to see the world, made us wise. Learning that enriched in the truest sense, for it made us virtuous. Sidney said that poetry had this aim and scope: “to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying of his own divine essence.”

The poet is a Maker in so far as what he makes illuminates the truth of things to the mind, to see clearly and to know. The poet finds truth, he does not make it up. What he makes is the means whereby he may come to know it, and may help others to know it, too; and not only by feeling, but by knowing. One cannot expect to learn by feeling alone, but with reason and judgment. But too much poetry today is satisfied only with feeling and not thinking, only with figuring that which it wants to express but does not want to understand.

My greatest complaint with the winning poem is that it does not do any real thinking but wants, in the end, the right to claim that it has, that it has thought through something to the end, when really all it’s done is express its nebulous anxiety (and poorly). Ambition, said Shakespeare, should be made of sterner stuff. And if we are to believe like Sidney, that poetry’s purpose is learning and not self-expression, then it should be made, too, of nobler stuff. It should not content itself with mere expression, but also with moving, delighting, and instructing.

III.

Checking in on his curated world,
a video playing in another tab,
something that happened yesterday, unsure,
he's had to cycle through the bookmarks bar
to see what's new, confirming a suspicion, 
amused by his and someone else’s opinion.
The man alone at his computer
admires the Grecian statue of himself,
the marbled acuity of his interests.
His personality’s a loaner,
borrowed from his and others’ ignorance.
He thinks he knows himself as well as those who
carve his content with the edge of a chisel,
and plunges, like Narcissus, into blue.

The Scroll

I - Tell them there’s nothing left of the tribes of the Internet

II - Decorous thoughts strung from profiles, posts nailed to a slat

Its judges this year were three poets whose collective careers comprised many such milestones, including a Forward Prize, a PEN Heaney Prize, a shortlist for the T.S. Eliot Prize, a longlist for the Jhalak Prize, and even two National Poetry Competition Prizes.

For this year’s prize the judges chose “The Gathering” by Partridge Boswell, a US poet from Vermont.

The Gathering

Above my meditating head, a record herd of god’s tiny cows
grazes on the blank page of ceiling. How they slipped in via
crevices, god only knows. Yet another testament to a seamed
world where cracks widen and swallow our hungers whole.

A thousand or so volunteering for the next lower case i,
period, ellipsis or umlaut… interrogating the bare expanse
upside-down, a pair here and there posing as colons—
brave pacifists of summer’s coda, ensuring exclamation

and question won’t end in pointless machete and scythe.
Losing count of gaunt warmer days, all placidly repair
to a colorless gulag of ceiling pristine as the sky after 9/11
or Gandhi’s mind, banished of muddy boots. Foraging air,

do they miss their dirt and grass? Diapaused in stark sterile
contrast to the fermenting carnival of sweet decay coloring
autumn’s kaleidoscope a glass pane away… did they cross
the border with families and dreams intact ahead of a killing

frost? How we continue to innocently decimate each other
and blame gravity, god knows. God who drifts now nowhere
and everywhere again, sleeping in the churches of our cars,
insisting every story still ends in love and ones that don’t

are so starved they’ve lost their appetite for what feeds a soul
on its famished flight from an Gorta mór to the salted shore
of Gaza. The honey water you set on a sill last year, they
drowned in. No, seasons can’t be sweetened with intention

yet in a week when summer’s still putting up high numbers
and two friends leave by their own design, it seems an illicit ill-
timed conceit to reckon a wish to euthanize with a will to survive—
while conducting a threnody for yet another ending / impending

genocide of life, truth, hope or love plying the complicit silence
of a bedroom where sleep’s erasure can’t hide the heinous crime
of negligence or revise a rehashed history that passes as news.
Their bright robes shine incarnadine, a congregation reciting

in unison psalms and proverbs of limbo. You whistle a living
wake as tacit prayer gestates to hunger-strike. Exploring safe,
prosaic pages of snow, they procrastinate then power down.
Black iotas cluster in corners, gathering a geometry to trace

the contour of your starving heart—the ravenous reticence
that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s
odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft—
stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.

I read and reread this poem in a state of “perfect contempt” which Marianne Moore describes in “Poetry,” itself a much better poem, which begins

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

Moore, one of the great 20th century poets, refers to a common attitude many have toward poetry, a hostility and impudence at the poet saying things a certain way. “The Gathering” is exactly the sort of poem I imagine Moore had in mind. Frivolous. Inscrutable. Flatulent. “So derivative as to become unintelligible.” All the accusations made against poetry today, its navel-gazing subjectivity, its pomposity, its poor grammar and form, its glibness, its speciousness, its vacuity, all of it can be found in “The Gathering.” It’s everything that makes us believe there are much more important things we’d rather be doing than reading poetry.

The poem opens with literal navel-gazing, or rather, ceiling staring. The poet is trying to make sense of all the terrible stuff he’s read on the news (he calls this sort of writing “meditating”) and the punctuation marks that will help organize his thoughts appear like a herd of tiny cows grazing “on the blank page of ceiling” [sic]. The cows “volunteer” to be the linguistic symbols of the poet’s next poem. This is somehow “yet another testament” to “a seamed world where cracks widen and swallow our hungers whole.”

According to the Poetry Society’s website, Boswell said of his win: “Funny how this works: one minute, I’m spacing out, staring at the ceiling. Next, I’m on a flight to London…” One can believe that it happened like that, too. Boswell says the poem’s creation involved “following the media for a long while” and “writing elegies, parodies and rants to unpack my discomfort and disbelief, until the psychic toll became too great.” “The Gathering” seems to be all three, elegy, parody and rant, ground together and strained like playdoh through a mold of quatrains.

In “Poetry,” Moore wants to defend the value of poetry as “a place for the genuine.” She really does believe poems have the potential to affect us, to raise the hair and dilate the eyes. “These things are important,” she says, “not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful.”

What is useful about “The Gathering” is the portrait it paints, of a mind addled by the overconsumption of media and incapable of articulating anything meaningful about it. Thoughts are carried downstream like a river, continuous and undifferentiated, glinting with occasional rhyme and alliteration. Eddies of image and connotation swirl beside muddy banks before slipping again into the brown, meandering stream.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

No, seasons can’t be sweetened with intention

yet in a week when summer’s still putting up high numbers
and two friends leave by their own design, it seems an illicit ill-
timed conceit to reckon a wish to euthanize with a will to survive—
while conducting a threnody for yet another ending / impending

genocide of life, truth, hope or love plying the complicit silence
of a bedroom where sleep’s erasure can’t hide the heinous crime
of negligence or revise a rehashed history that passes as news.

The “psychic toll” Boswell speaks of is apparent in the way he strains at any rational statement, and in the way there is an absence of insight into the nature of his experience. This is the Imitative Fallacy par excellence. If the thinking is amalgamated through association and non sequitur the poet has accurately, therefore successfully, represented their interior world.

The poem is about the poet’s desire to write down something that might help make sense of his feelings, but the feelings overwhelm him, he cannot do it. What we get instead are signs and signifiers whose emotional content corresponds roughly to what the poet wants to say. The blankness of a ceiling that is either like the sky after 9/11 or Gandhi’s mind after muddy boots had stomped it. Or like God’s silence on matters of suffering because he “drifts now nowhere and everywhere again,”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

                               sleeping in the churches of our cars,
insisting every story still ends in love and ones that don’t

are so starved they’ve lost their appetite for what feeds a soul
on its famished flight from an Gorta mór to the salted shore
of Gaza. 

The drifting of the metaphorical framework from one phrase to the next is presumably intentional, if incoherent. It mirrors God’s drifting “nowhere and everywhere again,” a painful platitude. But God is actually asleep in the churches of our cars, which is either a reference to the way a lot of American live out of their cars nowadays, or to the way we feel in the driver’s seat, in solitude, on the open road. I suspect the first, but I would bet that Boswell, and the judges, would say that any interpretation is the right one.

Nothing in the poem is apt, nothing of significance emerges from the churn of symbols, since there’s nothing the poet is either trying to say or understand. If we wanted to find out what really did feed a soul on its famished flight from those places of suffering, Boswell is not interested (he wouldn’t have anything interesting to say anyway), he’s on to the next association, to the “honey water you [him? we?] set on the sill last year.” Nothing has been said, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all expression. All vibes. Impotence and ignorance are some, and a sense, too, of personal guilt at something which is hinted at in the more idiosyncratic imagery, but which is hard to determine without context. Yvor Winters called this “pseudo-reference.” The reader has the sense that connections are being made, that there is some sort of internal logic at play, but are not given the context in the poem to come to that judgment themselves. They must take it on faith that the poet intends something, and is not just grabbing at bubbles in the mind.

Nothing happens until the end of the poem when the poet must, by virtue of conclusions, find some way of bringing things to an end.

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                                                      Exploring safe,
prosaic pages of snow, they procrastinate then power down.
Black iotas cluster in corners, gathering a geometry to trace

the contour of your starving heart—the ravenous reticence
that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s
odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft—
stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.

The poet takes refuge in writing, although this is cold comfort since language seems insufficient. “Meaning’s odometer is broken,” a phrase which seems like it should be in a much funnier poem. The theme of the failure of language, and the resentment at the realization that one must nevertheless use it, is a cliche in poetry. It’s akin to the novel about the writer or professor, or the movie about Hollywood. It’s meta-subject, often used as a substitute for actual substance. If one can’t find suitable material to write about, one can always write about writing. And if one can’t find something to say, one can always write about trying to find it. It’s popular among poets who, seeking always to 'transform' language or 'go beyond it,' are constantly disappointed or perplexed by its ineffectiveness.

But words being all a poet has, there must be some glimmer of hope at the end of “The Gathering,” however ambiguously made by so many mixed metaphors. The poet believes life will go on, something will survive, and the poem will flash like one of Auden’s ironic points of light, presumably for the same reason as Auden says: because the poet, deep down, believes he is one of the Just Ones, and has exchanged his important message, i.e. expressed himself.

Has anything actually been exchanged? Has anything really succeeded, if, as the poet says, “meaning’s odometer is broken?” I’m suspicious of the claim. The only thing that I know for sure has been accomplished, is that Partridge Boswell has won £5,000 and gained an important milestone in his career.

In her poem, Moore says good poems are important “not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful.”

“The Gathering” is a bad poem, chosen, we’re told, from “more than 21,250 entries.” The judges, whose careers span many prizes, praised Boswell’s poem for its “emotional stakes” and for “the philosophical perspicacity of its ideas.”

“With its striking opening images of cows on a ‘blank page of ceiling’, the poem slowly unfurls, becoming an ever more expansive interrogation of language and morality.”

The word “interrogation” is doing a lot of work on the poem’s behalf.

The speaker reflects on the tensions of personal grief against the backdrop of state violence in Gaza and elsewhere —

The throwaway “and elsewhere” made me laugh, as did the questions the judges thought the poem not only asked, but diagnosed and solved.

How do we maintain language’s potency amidst the anaesthetizing relentlessness of the news cycle? How do we resist false narratives, eclipsed histories? This poem both diagnoses the failures of our collective conscience and proposes through its logophilia the potential of language to challenge those failures.

The problem with poets, which Plato figured out two thousand years ago, is that they make stuff up. You see this all the time in the way poets talk about the work of other poets. They are incapable of not being poetic. They compulsively stretch the truth and make things appear other than they are. They want to break the bounds of language, as I mentioned before. Susannah Dickey, a judge of the contest, is one of these poets. “I’ll be looking for poems that sit uneasily with the very language they’re crafted from,” she says, blurbing for the launch of the competition, “poems that are frisson-ridden and dynamic.” By her own standards she has succeeded. She also says she wants to read poems “that feel like a collaboration between the poet’s intent and their acquiescence to that which remains uncontrollable.” I have no idea what this means. Dickey, the inaugural winner of the PEN Heaney Prize, probably doesn’t know what it means either. It doesn’t matter. Poets make stuff up all the time. That’s why Plato kicked them out, because they make stuff up and because they hide behind the license poetry affords them to do so. Just as the judges can say a great deal about “The Gathering” that isn’t true. The poem neither interrogates nor diagnoses nor proposes. At best you could say it “meditates.” More accurately, to quote Boswell, the poem “spaces out.”

In Moore’s poem, “Poetry,” she says that good poetry must be distinguished from bad poetry when the issue is “dragged into prominence by half poets.” Such is the case with the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition, “one of the world’s most prestigious prizes.” I am not against poetry contests in principle (although I am against the careerism they breed). A good competition is a way of representing to the wider public the virtues and skills of its artform. Readers who don’t always read poetry might pick up a T.S. Eliot Prize winner. And they might judge from it the current state of the art. It should be something worthy of attention. A poem chosen for so “prestigious” an award as the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition should be of considerable merit. Sadly, “The Gathering” is not. Genuine poetry, Moore says, is like “an imaginary garden with real toads in it.” Boswell’s poem is an imaginary garden with imaginary toads in it. It’s fancy. Moore urges us instead to be “literalists of the imagination.” This is not unlike Plato, for the poets he allowed into his imaginary city were the ones who spoke the truth and whose aim was the Good. This requires poetry to be more than expression. It places obligations on the poet. To be useful, knowledgeable, artful, wise.

Last year’s winning poem, Fiona Larkin’s “Absence Has a Grammar” is a much better poem, which succeeds in all the ways that “The Gathering” fails. It’s simple, beautiful, touching. A more elegant and profound statement about the relationship between language and life. Read it and compare the two. Larkin’s poem is both delightful and useful in a way that Boswell’s is neither.

His most famous speech, On the Crown, was a vindication of his position against Philip II of Macedon and an attack on his rival Aeschines. He delivered the speech in 330 BC. On Style is a work purportedly written fifty years later by another orator and statesman, Demetrius of Phalerum, but which probably comes from the 2nd century AD. In this handbook the author analyzes some passages from On the Crown as examples of what he calls the forceful style. He distinguishes this style from the plain, the grand, and the elegant.

One of the examples he uses from Demosthenes’ speech is

‘I did not say these things and then refuse to move a proposal; I did not move a proposal and fail to go as an envoy; I did not go as an envoy and fail to persuade the Thebans.’

The forceful figure at work here is gradatio, or climax. The word climax in Greek literally means ‘ladder.’ “This passage is like a man climbing higher and higher,” Demetrius says. Indeed, each clause raises the stakes, increasing the significance of Demosthenes’ actions by their careful ordering. Saying then proposing. Proposing then going. Going then persuading.

Other figures used, anadiplosis, when a word from the end of one clause is repeated at the beginning of the next, and anaphora, when a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive clauses, add to the forcefulness of Demosthenes’ speech. Demetrius says the overall effect is one of abruptness, hence energy. There’s vehemence but brevity, which is characteristic of the forceful style.

If you were to put it like this: ‘After my speech, after moving a proposal I went as an envoy, and persuaded the Thebans’, he would be narrating facts, but saying nothing forceful.

Demetrius was one of the few ancient writers to treat rhetoric as a literary and not only a persuasive art. His analysis of the figures is in relation to the way in which they shape voice and character. His four styles, the plain, grand, elegant, and forceful, characterize four different ways of speaking. The conventions of each one are essentially a collection of figures, and the figures themselves represent the conventional speech patterns of a person in just that emotional state or attitude.

Longinus is perhaps the only other ancient writer to analyze rhetorical devices like this, in terms of their literary significance.1 He, too, cites Demosthenes, his use of apostrophe and anthypophora (question and answer) to create an impression of “spontaneous emotion.” He also notes the use of asyndeton in The Odyssey and Xenophon’s Hellenica, how the phrases “tumble out unconnected in a sort of spate, almost too quick for the speaker himself.”

And locking their shields,” says Xenophon, “they pushed, fought, slew, fell.” […] The phrases being disconnected, and yet none the less rapid, give the idea of an agitation which both checks the utterance and at the same time drives it on. This is the effect the poet has achieved by his use of asyndeton.2

This sort of literary criticism, revived during the Renaissance, dies off after the Romantics, as we looked at in the last post. Rebelling against a writing style that had become too rigidly prescribed, the Romantics abandoned the processes that had given rise to it, and this included the use of rhetorical figures, deemed to be too artificial and stifling. This opinion had existed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was not uncommon among those who’d spent their youths memorizing and practicing by rote from handbooks like the Ad Herennium. The Augustans, Pope and Swift and Gay and Gray, represented both the apex and nadir of this high style of rhetoric, and it was against it that the Lyrical Ballads took aim; after which, the nature of poetry would never be the same, which is why it’s said all modern poetry begins with the Romantics.

Poetry, considered an imitative art since Plato and Aristotle, came to be understood during the Renaissance as an essentially creative one. An art whose aim was not only imitation but the augmentation of Nature through the imagination. When Scaliger declared that “the poet maketh a new Nature,” and Sidney that “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich Tapestry as diverse Poets have done,” our attention turned to this undiscovered country, the imagination and its role in poetic composition. It was the seed whose fruits would become Coleridge’s Biographia and Wordsworth’s Prelude.3

In poetry, the creative aspect was emphasized, while the imitative took on negative connotations. To imitate something was to merely copy it, to reproduce it mechanically and unoriginally. The tools of imitation were rhetoric, its devices and processes of composition, despite the fact that rhetoric was, until the Romantics, synonymous with poetics. Both were understood to be part of the same language art, that of figuration. What the rhetorical devices figured were the kinds of voice and character that Demetrius and Longinus pointed out. Far from being merely ornamental, these figures were the natural patterns of speech whose effects were perceived as such.

Longinus makes afresh the discovery that the schemes and tropes are basically stylizations or records of man’s natural emotional behavior as expressed in language, which when properly applied form the best stylistic means of re-creating the details of human emotion in literature.4

What the rhetorical figures imitate is the nature of human communication. This would seem to make them invaluable to a poet. But because their use was associated with a style that had grown stale and overprescribed, they became the victim of their own success.

What the Romantic shift away from rhetoric also signaled in poetry was a change in the idea of what a poem was. No longer a made thing, no longer something to which technique was applied, a poem became a spontaneous act of creation, sui generis. Character and voice were not made but found. This change did not begin with the Romantics but, as we looked at in a previous post, was part of a historical process of understanding what we were doing when we wrote. No doubt there were much larger forces at play during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involving the Enlightenment and the Great Shift of Object and Subject.

Of course, this isn’t to say there’s no discussion of rhetorical techniques today. There remains in poetry the occasional reference (mostly to schema), and in prose figures are sometimes identified with certain stylists (Hemingway likes polysyndeton, McCarthy asyndeton, etc). But in general this sort of criticism is incidental or secondary to other considerations. Technique is no longer seen as the cause of style but a consequence of it.

There are several problems with this view, among them Barthes’ claim about the death of the author, and more generally the New Criticism which questions the author’s role in a text Subjectivity in poetry, the kind instantiated by Wordsworth, may have already suffered a death like the death of God. It might be the case that all there really is to a poem is its technique.

At a more practical level, the study and practice of rhetoric seems an invaluable part of the poet’s repertoire, for rhetoric is precisely the stylization of certain patterns of human speech and behavior. To represent these things in poetry would involve an understanding of such patterns as a matter of craft. It might anyway be the case that the disregard for rhetoric has the effect of making poetry sound less and less like the way people actually talk, a claim commonly brought up against it. If one wants to write better poetry, one could do worse than imitate Nature.

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II.

To be taken by the slipstream, to be raised upon the tide,
a requisition is in order, your name upon the Scroll.
You must not only speak at the meetings when you arrive,
your record of attendance must be noted on the roll.
If you would have the public take your words seriously
they must have access to the contents of your character,
to measure, as atoms in a tube, with scrutiny,
your soul. Five to seven posts daily to make yourself known.
An avatar, a self stitched together of opinions,
carved of curiosity, beliefs and proclivities
made into a graven image, an altar to an idea
to be admired and judged, exhibited in galleries.
Decorous thoughts strung from profiles, posts nailed to a slat.
The halls are wide and deep, the statues must be looked at.

The idea of poetry as an artcraft dies with the Romantics. Their explicit break with certain techniques and processes of composition accelerates a shift of emphasis in poetry as an art of representation to one of creation. This continued an evolution of our understanding of art, first as imitation, then imagination, which we looked at in a previous post. In truth, art is both, but throughout the history of the idea we’ve understood it as different things at different times.

Insofar as poetry is imitative, it is a craft, and insofar as it is creative, it partakes of divine inspiration. All art has this duality as its essence. Poetry, being an art concerned with figuring language, has a body of knowledge which includes poetics, grammar, rhetoric, and logic. All of these language arts essentially figure language. Their knowledge is knowledge of various kinds of figures. I use the term figures here broadly. There are certainly plenty of other ways they’ve been categorized in the past, which I looked at in the previous post, but for the sake of simplicity and coherence I place them all under the banner of figura. Tropes, like irony and metaphor, and schema, like repetition and parallelism, and logical entities, too, like syllogisms and correlates, are all figures in the sense that they are patterns that have some recognizable shape in the imagination. The trivium was the form in which these language arts were studied going back to the early universities of the Middle Ages. But with the Romantics a change took place. Wordsworth and Coleridge rejected the writing processes of their predecessors on the grounds that the style they had produced had become too rigid. Their techniques had exhausted the potential to produce meaningful expression. This included large parts of the language arts.

The Romantics completely disengaged rhetoric from poetry, and their hostility to the concept of poetry as art led to the dismissal of all the rhetorical processes and their offshoots. […] Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads dismisses such rhetorical concepts as ‘presentation’ or ‘effectiveness’, and with them the whole Renaissance and Neoclassical structure of literary creation and literary criticism.1

Of course it makes sense, if your immediate predecessors are Popeans, that you would have a natural aversion to a certain kind of artifice.2 As a result, tropes, schemes, figures, gradually fell out of fashion in poetry. Genres too. The epic, the satire, were done away with. In preparing a collected edition, Wordsworth, for example, grouped his poems not according to traditional genres but autobiographical relevance, with categories like ‘Poems founded on the affections’ or Poems of the fancy or the imagination or reflection.

The poet’s feelings dictate the genres now. […] The new form is the ode or lyric, the subject-matter the introspective emotions of the poet, no longer public, generalized emotional concepts but the subtle, individual states of mind. As De Quincy put it, ‘the problem before the writer is to project his own inner mind; to bring out consciously what yet lurks by involution in many unanalyzed feelings.3

Wordsworth eschewed the artifice of technique for the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling. The highly wrought and rhetorical poetry of Pope and Gray was exchanged for the relaxed, free and intimate style of the Lyrical Ballads. The imitative mode was subordinated to the creative mode in an attempt to reinvigorate a stale art that, even by the early 18th century, had grown too rigidly prescribed.

In 1711 Joseph Trapp, the Oxford Professor of Poetry, attacked ‘those Books of Rhetorick that are usually read in Schools . . . so full of dry logical Definitions’4

These were the sorts of books, no doubt, that had shaped those poets before Wordsworth. I share in Trapp’s frustrations with the tedium of studying rhetorical devices, having been recently diving into Renaissance literary criticism. It’s interesting for its historical context, but for understanding the devices themselves it’s not very useful. One figure will often go by several different names. Use cases are always slightly different and lead to new definitions. Categories often overlap, and the minutiae of their logical distinctions can be confounding. And then there’s the names. Epizeuxis. Erotesis. Catachresis. Apoplanesis. It’s all quite literally Greek to me. The terms are ill-defined in name and in use. Richard Lanham comments playfully on all this confusion by beginning his Handbook of Rhetorical Terms with a quote from Quintilian.

I much prefer something condensed and comprehensive, like Lanham’s book, or Brian Vicker’s Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry from which I’ve been quoting. Farnsworth’s series is good too.

Instead of memorizing them from a handbook, Trapp preferred to appreciate the figures in the context of the literature in which they appeared.

Every one that is conversant with the best Authors, that reads them with Understanding, and true Relish, cannot but be acquainted with all the Figures of Speech, and the Art of using them, tho’ he never heard so much as their Names, or their Definitions.5

I, too, prefer this style of appreciation to rote memorization out of a handbook. Every good writer knows, after all, that the best way to learn how to write is to read. Read enough and you’ll start to notice patterns. You don’t need to know the names. But of course, Trapp is speaking with a tacit knowledge that I lack. He already knows such figures by heart, can recognize them, and use them, with ease. Someone like Trapp would have spent hours at a time each day copying, repeating, memorizing reciting the names of figures. That “Understanding, and true Relish” he gets from literature is at least in part a consequence of his education. His skill in writing, too. You don’t need to know the names, but sometimes it helps. But after the Romantics that sort of education first introduced by the Medieval scholastics and humanists was in decline.

The entire approach to poetry would change as a consequence. The idea of constructing a poem, of the poem as a made thing, gave way to an understanding of the poem as a thing discovered, found within oneself. This mode of poetry is less about acquiring and applying techniques than it is about maintaining a certain disposition toward oneself. The poet’s voice becomes the shape of the poem, his personality its primary technique.

Although this change didn’t happen right away. It’s a long road from the Lyrical Ballads to Milk and Honey. Wordsworth rejected some parts of the tradition, others he kept. The English Romantics still demonstrated meticulous construction, an attention to meter, for example, or intricate grammatical structures that seem to us now more a part of the tradition than a departure from it. Probably those techniques they kept they’d internalized, and believed that they were really their own. Often what we think belongs to us and what we have just borrowed from elsewhere is a tenuous distinction. Personality, after all, is just as much a construction as genre. One learns to speak in one’s own voice by first speaking in others’.

It is a paradox that (in the traditional scheme of things) it was only by subordinating himself to the conventions of art that a writer could ‘express his personality’ (notice the inescapable Romantic assumption that this is his whole raison d’etre), or rather express his personal vision in a coherent, objective form. But it is a paradox which did not disturb Shakespeare or George Herbert (even the originality of Montaigne is expressed via wholly conventional literary processes). It only disturbs those who regard ‘conventions’ as being by their very existence inimical to creativity.6

The issue, as Vickers frames it, is between convention and spontaneity. How much does one need to know in order to write well? And is there such a thing as too much learning? Can attention to conventions stifle spontaneity? Vickers does not think so.

Conventions do not destroy spontaneity: in fact they even offer expressiveness through their own systems. Just as in classical music the ‘language of harmony’ has a distinct range of effects of tension and relaxation, of progressions, discords, resolutions, quite independent of any melody or thematic argument, so in rhetoric the figures contain within themselves a whole series of emotional and psychological effects, almost prior to the presence of meaning or argument. As with harmony, they exist at certain basic levels almost independently of the skill of the user—but equally, only realized to the full by the great artists.7

Certainly the idiom Pope perfected had become stifling by the time of Wordsworth. Spontaneity was exactly what was needed. A fresh break. The cost, however, was a whole field of the language arts, rhetoric and its offshoots, its techniques and writing processes. Traditionally there was no conceptual difference between rhetoric and poetics. After the Romantics there was. What they were really rejecting was a theory of Eloquence, so pervasive at the time it had been deemed the sole aim of all writing.

More broadly, it was a way of thinking about poetry, what we believe we’re up to when we write it. Are we creating or representing? The emphasis, the aim, matters, although in truth, what we’re doing is both. Art is both imitation and creation. It requires both expertise and a certain artistic disposition. The relationship between the two is dialectic. I personally don’t think there can be too much learning in an age of amateurs. When what passes for knowledge of craft is mere idiosyncrasy, it’s perhaps better to turn to the handbooks and find something you can actually use.

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I.

In the beginning was the protocol
and the net was formless and void.
And the Spirit of Man moved
upon abstractions of the layer.

And they said let there be a packet,
and there was. Let there be the link
and the internetwork, the transport
and the application layers.

A suite of commands to transmit data.
And then the hypertext.
Stories about us we most wanted to know.
Sin and flood and catastrophe.

Forty years of wandering later
tell them there’s nothing left
of the tribes of the Internet.
No Promised Land, no milk and honey.

George Puttenham, a contemporary of Sidney’s, summed up the view in the opening paragraph of his Arte of English Poesy (1589)

A poet is as much to say as a maker. And our English name well conforms with the Greek word, for of poiein, to make, they call a maker poeta. Such as (by way of resemblance, and reverently) we may say of God, who, without any travail to His divine imagination, made all the world of nought […] even so the very poet makes and contrives out of his own brain both the verse and matter of his poem […] The premises considered, it giveth to the name and profession no small dignity and pre-eminence, above all artificers scientific or mechanical. And nevertheless, without any repugnancy at all, a poet may in some sort be said a follower or imitator, because he can express the true and lively of everything is set before him and which he taketh in hand to describe, and so in that respect is both a maker and a counterfeiter [imitator], and poesy an art not only of making but also of imitation.

That part of poetry which is imitative we have yet to consider, but now turn our attention to, which is the poet’s repertoire, all that is at his disposal.

The craft of poetry, insofar as it is an art, refers to any way in which language figures or gives shape to the imagination. Anything from the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric to the forms and figures of the field of poetics. Verse and prosody, but also grammar and logic, which are the work of thought.

I follow in that tradition of Puttenham and Peacham and Sherry in considering all these arts, logic, grammar, rhetoric, poetics, as being fundamentally concerned with figures of one kind or another, whether of thought or speech or sound. Traditionally rhetoric and poetics were not differentiated, but were considered part of the same language arts. Together with logic and grammar they formed the Trivium.

Professor and scholar Sister Miriam Joseph (1898-1982) said of these writers that “their concept of figures is so inclusive as to omit little of what has ever been included in a theory of composition, for the approximately two hundred figures of speech which they distinguish represent an analysis of practically every aspect of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.”1 Grammar, having to do with symbols, deals with figures of a kind, and logic with figures of thought.

You get a different picture reading the Ramists, the other school of thought popular during the Renaissance. Petrus Ramus subordinated rhetoric/poetics to logic, which he thought took precedence in the study of language. The figures of rhetoric were mere style, mere ornamentation. They were something added after the fact. I don’t believe this to be the case, and I think it’s generally understood today that how something is said has a great deal to do with what it means. The relationship between logic and grammar and rhetoric is not hierarchical, but insofar as they all have to do with language, I consider them to be kinds of figures which shape the imagination. Rhetoric and poetics are more important than the Ramists suspected.

Consider how our understanding of metaphor has evolved from a mere trope of substitution to one of Burke’s four Master Tropes. The ‘turning’ involved in metaphor describes not only a superficial comparison between concepts, but a transformation of the fundamental organization of our imaginal space. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have shown how metaphors map imaginal space onto reality, and how their entailments reveal and make clear to us certain aspects of experience.2

So, too, do seemingly ornate schemes like isocolon reveal to us by their parallel construction both the delight and pleasure we take in symmetry, but also the balance the poet affords the substance of what’s said. The use of isocolon reveals the poet’s wit and his ratiocination. It may be stylish, overpolished, or fitting; either way, it is meaningful in the same way that Burke’s Master Tropes are, in that it reveals motives and values by fashioning them in the imagination.

The poet is the maker and counterfeiter of figures. Whatever language figures, whatever gives shape to our imaginations, lyrical, narrative, dramatic, logical, is part of the craft of poetry. Those techniques which have been proven and which the poet makes use of knowingly, imitatively; and those, too, which he does not yet fully understand but invents in the act of composition. For poetry is both imitation and expression, and it’s true that we do not always know what we are trying to express in the act of expressing it. But those who have at their disposal a good understanding of the figures of language will be better suited to find the means of expression, or to know when new ones are needed. There may be many unknown figures, old ones fallen into disuse, and new ones yet to be discovered. There are figures we know but do not yet fully understand, and those we have not yet put to all the uses they may be capable of. Rhetoric, poetics, grammar, logic, these are the language arts at a poet’s disposal, the figures of language whereby imagination is shaped. Who practices one and not the others will not master any.

And everything is a footnote to Plato.

In the Ion Socrates claims poets do not possess technē, craft. That is, they do not possess a formal body of knowledge that can be passed down, which is what craft is: teachable technique. Instead, Socrates says, what poets are up to is a matter of inspiration, in the old sense of the word meaning “breathed into” or “animated.” What poets do is enter into a state of possession, whether by gods, muses, daemons, geniuses, etc. Their composition is a kind of trance, and they less active participants than mouthpieces or receivers for divine beings. Such enthusiasm cannot be an art because it cannot be taught in the same way that carpentry or surgery can be taught. You can’t take a class on it. Though plenty of workshops and writer’s programs try to teach it. They call it ‘mindset coaching,’ a kind of corporatized version of divine inspiration.

This is only one definition of poetry, but no doubt anyone who’s ever written a poem has experienced, at least to some degree, inspiration like the kind Plato had in mind. We’ve all written something and later wondered how we did it. The novelty or felicity surprises us. We know we must have wrote it, but from where did the words come? Sometimes, after a frenzied, prolonged state of flow, we look down at what we’ve written and can’t believe it was us. Nor can we explain how we did it. “I don’t know,” we might say if asked, “it just sort of came to me.” That’s why the poet is perhaps the person least qualified to talk about his work. He cannot say what it means anymore than the reader, because he does not really know what he was up to when he wrote it. It makes more sense to say that he received the words than that he came up with them. It makes more sense to say they were bestowed on him from on high. This is one kind of poetic experience, and it’s what Plato was getting at. But such an act, involuntary, inconsistent, is nothing like an art. Even if one could learn how to become possessed, to enter into union with the muse at will (an improbable scenario, she’s so capricious) there’s no guarantee she would say anything so great to someone who did not already possess the poetic sensibility. Some people simply are vessels, others not.

An opposing or complimentary definition of poetry can be found elsewhere in Plato. In the Republic, Socrates calls the thing poets do mimesis, or imitation. He says that poetry is a mimetic or representational art. What the poet does is try to imitate, re-present, figure forth, the natural world. Here we encounter the possibility for art, for presumably there are better or worse ways of going about representing things. From this definition will follow the whole body of knowledge that is technē: poetics, prosody, rhetoric, all the figures of speech and thought and sound that in language represent our world.

Imitation is the prevailing theory of art, although its meaning has shifted to include not only representation but also creation. As Puttenham said, the poet is both a maker and a counterfeiter, or imitator.1 Today when most poets talk about poetry, they use the word ‘expression.’ The aim of poetry is to express oneself. This is basically the creative principle, and I would not tend to disagree, if only it weren’t so often claimed as a way of refuting the idea that art is also imitative. It’s often asserted as if to say that art is this and not that, as if the two were mutually exclusive, which they’re not. Art is both imitative and expressive. In so far as poetry is imitative, it is craft. In so far as it is expressive, it partakes of the divine.

The theory of expression does not anyway refute the claim that art is imitative, for whatever we express is always expressed through a medium, and that medium is essentially mimetic. Even dance, which seems the most spontaneous and direct art, the line so thin between what we feel and how we express it. Yet it is still a form of representation, for the expression is never entirely identical with the conscious state that gave rise to it. Art is both imitative and expressive.

Poetry is the art of figuration. Poetry figures through language whatever is expressed. This is how it represents Nature. Although for Plato the undertaking was ultimately an unsuccessful one, and perhaps dangerous, because what is being imitated, Nature, is merely an imitation of the ideal reality of the Forms. Poetry, then, is an imitation of an imitation, a copy of a copy.

Aristotle followed Plato in thinking poetry was mimetic. However, unlike Plato, he did not distinguish between Nature and the realm of the Forms. For Aristotle, the poet does not imitate an imitation. Rather, what they represent is the general and the probable. “The kinds of things that might occur.” In his Poetics he contrasts this with history, which is interested in the actual and particular. Poetry, on the other hand, represents the universal in Nature.

Now this doesn’t seem all that different to me from claiming, as Plato did, a realm of eternal, abstract Forms, as what else are universals if not something like the Forms? The only difference is that Plato denied that we can represent such things, while Aristotle believed that that was exactly what the poet does represent.

No doubt my conflating the two has to do with the way the ideas have come down to us. The Neoplatonists are partly to blame, for in conceiving what the artist does, they emphasized the imagination over imitation. In the first century, Dio Chrysostom claimed that, in order to represent the world, the artist must have a mental model within the imagination which sustains a continuous identity across changing observations. He used the example of the sculptor Phidias carving a statue of Zeus. In order for Phidias to have been able to fashion Zeus’s likeness over many years, he must’ve had in his mind a persistent idea or image of the god. Other Neoplatonists took up this example, eventually rejecting altogether art as imitation. Instead, they claimed, art is imaginative.2

C.S. Lewis described the change that took place in his Oxford History of 16th Century English Literature:

A century later [after Dio Chrysostom] Philostratus has gone farther. Again citing the works of Pheidias, and this time adding those of Praxiteles, he says that they were never produced by imitating nature. ‘Imagination made them, and she is a better artist than imitation; for where the one carves only what she has seen, the other carves what she has not seen’ (De Vita Apolloni, VI, xix). In the third century Plotinus completes the theory. ‘If anyone disparages the arts on the ground that they imitate Nature’, he writes, ‘we must remind him that natural objects are themselves only imitations, and that the arts do not simply imitate what they see but reascend to those principles from which Nature herself is derived. … Pheidias used no visible model for his Zeus (Enneads, v. viii).

Lewis says that such theories could be reconciled with Aristotle’s, but that they really pointed in a different direction. Art no longer as imitation but imagination. In this view, the artist does not merely imitate an imitation, as in Plato, nor does he represent the universal aspects of Nature, as in Aristotle: now he creates in his imagination a new world.

Art and Nature thus become rival copies of the same supersensuous original, and there is no reason why Art should not sometimes be the better of the two. Such a theory leaves the artist free to exceed the limits of Nature.

This is where our idea of art as creativity comes from. Although today the word, in its neutered, secularized form, has nothing like the force it once possessed. The idea that poets created from their imaginations something new was a scandalous and often heretical claim. The act of creation was something reserved for God. If we participated in it at all it was as vessels for divine possession, to return Plato’s first definition, not as creators but as receivers or transmitters. But after the Neoplatonists art was understood to be an act of the imagination. It became “creative,” which led the Renaissance scholar Scaliger (1540-1609) to conclude: “The poet maketh a new Nature and so maketh himself as it were a new God.”

The spirit of this idea was taken up by Renaissance poets. Sidney defended it against charges of heresy by arguing that it’s in keeping with the idea of Man being made in the image of God.

Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature; but rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth surpassing her doings …

He earlier claims in his Defence that all art takes Nature as its “principal object.” Yet here, as in the Neoplatonists, imitation is not only representation, but creation. It’s not unlike Plato’s first definition of poetry as inspiration, for in the act of creating we draw on the divine breath of God. Yet at the same time the imitative is still present, for our ability to create rests on our being made in the Maker’s likeness. Our creative power is like that power that animates Nature. Art is both imitative and creative.

And Sidney believed, like the Neoplatonists, that what we create may “exceed the limits of Nature.”

Nature never set forth the earth in so rich Tapestry as diverse Poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely: her world is brazen, the Poets only deliver a golden.

The Renaissance poets would embody this new spirit of poetry, as that which we create in our imagination, imitating Nature but refashioning it, delivering it golden. Bacon would divide the three faculties of understanding accordingly, grouping history with memory, philosophy with reason, and poetry with the imagination.3 And thinkers like Hobbes and Descartes would attack poetry along these same lines, calling the imagination la folle du logis and criticizing poetry for being mere ornamentation or fancy that added to Nature things which were not real.4

Indeed, when Sidney or Aristotle or Plato spoke of poetry, they did not mean verse, but the mind’s ability to ‘make things up.’ Plato banished the poets for this very reason, and Sidney defended them for it. Aristotle contrasted poetry with history, emphasizing its ability to universalize, removed in a sense from reality, yet revealing its truth in doing so.

Poetry, in the sense in which I’ve been I’ve been discussing it thus far, has referred to this faculty of the imagination. What has not yet been touched on is any discussion of craft, of the thing that makes poetry an art. These things, more technical, more tedious, are perhaps less interesting, for they do not inspire, but are no less essential. They have to do with how one represents things. A body of knowledge built up over the history of language that includes poetics and rhetoric. They have nothing to do with divine inspiration, apart from having been created by it. Once created, they can be looked at dispassionately, and used dispassionately, as tools are used, with practice and precision.

There’s so much meaning to the mind
it needs a dam to keep its city of the plain dry.
A wall to hold unconscious waters behind.
A reservoir instilled with the deep of the sky.
A sluice of focused thought to spin the turbine.

Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon;
burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc.

I.

The city and the Tower
it’s belittled by:
Open in extreme wide
as in Bruegel.

The Tower’s grandeur,
buttressed by port, city, sky,
in its unfinished design figures
ambition’s folly and imposture.

Walk its several sides,
it cannot be encircled.
Remark how at every angle
it seems absurdly self-similar

until the sense becomes
a sinking one
that there are infinitely
many sides.

What need for it, though?
Don’t we have them already?
If it were up to me there wouldn’t be any.
If it were up to me it’d’ve been done long ago.

There was a time, it’s said,
when they began it, brought together
to set it down somewhere in the city
where a Tower did not yet exist.

No one can verify but all are free
to add, brick by brick,
their clarifications, and as it rises
be raised by its immense awareness.

But the Tower…
it houses at its center
a huge mass. It bends nature 
and our wills around it.

Scabbing masonry, roads unfinished,
overgrown, flights of stairwells,
vaults and arches and crypts
to peer into its darkness.

Unmade, yet among arcades, a space
where a temple’s falseworks lay,
how it might have looked one day
if there were a sacred, needful place…

One age culminates in astonishment,
then turns to stony reverence. The next
inherits it, unimpressed, often incredulous.
They too are on their way to astonishment.

They will take up the work
and fashion it in their own image,
an image of the same Tower,
layer upon layer, recursive.

Golden in ratio. Always unfinished
yet symmetrical. Ancient and new.
Answering a dreamy prayer.
Cleaving heaven in two.

The Tower’s myth
the boy made real
the granted wish.
Wisdom is in remembering this.

So colossal so hyperbolical
those who work one side do not know
what on the other side goes on.
The right hand does not know its left.

Yet we’re certain we know our neighbors
are not like ourselves.
Men know their neighbors
better than themselves.

It will not be finished
in our lifetime.
It may not be finished
in any timeline.

Still it rises. Still it’s raised.
Still spacetime ekes out infinity
never knowing itself completely
for we’ve arrived cosmically

and what there is to know
cannot be known by accident.
The right hand
will never know its left.

II.

Tonight is jubilee.
Tonight a coterie
of demons will be
banished in ceremony.

No one who gathers 
in the square speaks.
No one who goes into the woods
will enter unhooded.

The rite is called, translated,
Past becomes the Present again.
An effigy is burned, then a dance.
Something is recalled, and all is forgotten.

Things go on like this all night.
They once went on for several nights.
Our failed crops must be dug up.
The dead roots of another year.

What has been troubling
the mind.
An absence of love,
a cruel hand.

We gather to perform
on the woods’ edge
on the eve of spring.
We do not remember what it means

and this is partly to the point.
One imitates
then becomes
then is.

Tonight we begin by asking
a question we once knew
the answer to.
A new year will begin.

The cold will give way.
We must find out again
so we are not too late for spring,
as flowers are not late opening,

as deer are not late 
to their lands in the north
where they know, when they arrive,
there will be green waiting.

III.

Intercut with prophecy.
An Ezekiel’s beard-spittle.
A Cassandra’s white, rolling eyes...

The earth forgets and
learns again in spring.
Men rise and fall replacing
themselves and their reigns.
Only the Tower remains,
The great burden of its city.
It increaseth without end,
to the edges of the city,
until the city is in the Tower
and the people do not know
the inside from the out.
And their children grow
in the shade of the Tower
and do not know the sun,
and when it shineth on them
they raise up the walls
to keep its light from their eyes.
And the Tower will grow too tall.
It will not last. Its stone will buckle
and snap all its falseworks like stalks.
Its great body will fall and sunder
the city to ruin, and the people
will live in caves and breathe dust
and wander three generations
before they behold the sun again.
So saith one of them
preaching in the square.

In that day shall five cities
in the land become one city
and speak one language,
swearing to the Lord of Hosts,
and be called the city wherein
the Tower was begun.
The righteous will seize it
and ring its bells and walk its halls
and set the prices in the market stalls,
until the people can remember how
the Tower was made by them and
must remain in the possession of all.
Then the foolish will seize it and they,
neither ringing bells nor walking halls,
will unbuild it, stone by stone.
They will start at the top, taking
the topmost stone and casting it
on the ground, and swear
not to build it up, but they
will increase it all around.
In those days one city
in the land will become ten
and speak ten languages.
So saith one of them
preaching in the square.

And the vision of all
of the Tower
will become unto you
as the words of a book 
that is sealed.
I say unto you then,
when it comes to pass:
Fashion the instruments
of thy labor fast.
The season is spring.
A time for turning over soil.
Get thee to thy work.
Get thee to thy toil.
Do so happily, and sing
in the city and in the fields.
It must be you who breaks
the book’s mysterious seal.
The season is spring.
Fashion thy instruments.
Not arms of strife
that maim and pillage
but tools of civility.
I say unto you Reason
is the best of these.
Its mettle more valuable
than any won in war.
It leaves no wasteland
but increaseth its lands
more and more. 
It subdues men without
stealing life from them.
It increaseth the life
of men more and more.
So saith one of them
preaching in the square.

IV.

Where will adventure be found
when the Tower’s imposing walls
enclosing Earth tenfold around
delimit all knowing within its halls?

Though everything there ever is
to know exists inside the Tower—
everything in its appointed place
under countless unnamed arcades—

Tomorrow strike out and seek
a space within those walls to wield.
Even a heart satisfied allows itself
to seek, to strive, and not to yield.

A day will come when a single
freshly observed idea will erect
its own Tower inside the one 
grown gluttonous and grotesque.

And we will seek it out within,
venturing deep in its labyrinth,
into cloisters where none have been,
out of what dreams we cannot yet reckon.

V.

The wasteland grows.
Yellowing, whorling fringes of trees.
Curious attention a dog’s ears make
lifted to the wind as it clips the leaves.

We lay down our tools in confusion,
or wield them, in fear, to the breaking.
Subject to insensible warnings,
dire trumpets sounded by the future.

I’ve lost the meaning the Tower had
when I had first envisioned it.
What it meant then
now I can’t remember.

Woe to him who hides wastelands within.
Heaven is higher than we thought
but we will not content ourselves
with the blue nothing of the sky.

The next level is done but there remains
to be finished still another side,
and still a greater threat to decide.
The terrible dread weight of history.

Memory leaves devastation in its wake
when its ship descends the offing line,
sinking beyond sight, into oblivion,
all hope marooned, unmastered by time.

The child, inconsolable, rocked asleep
by its mother who whispers, Hush dear, hush!
Much was like this before you came.
Much the same will it be after you leave.

Disturb only the smallest part of it
and what was solid becomes like water.
The Tower ripples, shakes itself free
the way an autumn wind clips the leaves.

VI.

The brimful halo of the city,
its dome of bright against the dark.
All have found out what they are.
Some meant for rest, others pity.

The top of the Tower has fallen in.
Its broken fingers grasp at sky.
All of us who saw could not say why
though we saw it as it happened.

Earlier they cried out in the street,
a chorus of voices like waves
crashing down upon the deaf graves
of ancestors, raining down as sleet.

The Tower, they said, was corrupted.
Some added “It’s always been so.”
Devastation drives out all we know.
Naught will continue uninterrupted.

No night ever followed day
nor morning wore to evening
without some heart breaking
or will shattered on its way.

All have staked their claim.
All feel themselves in possession
of an answer to a deep question
and broker their chance to exclaim.

All proclaim to have been taught
yet each and every day we perform
uncountable acts that have not borne
a single scrutinizing counterthought.

What errors have been made believing
the right way is the way we know?
The Tower fell, and fell, too, long ago,
deep in the past, beyond all retrieving.

Conscience roams, mouthing corpse words,
sounding them out as a toddler does
to overhear a sense of what it was
that ages past many others had heard.

Our words come apart at the meaning.
Ours is rubble we no longer recognize.
The effort it took to raise it to the sky.
This ruinous debris of all our yearning.

VII.

Who sitteth down to feast?
To whom will the largest
portions be given?
And who among us
sitting down to eat
has understood the least?

The intrigue of the state
is fertilizer that sustains
next year’s wheat.
What group, when it 
comes time, will harvest
what has been sown? 

Let the whole land lie fallow.
Though we clamor to be fed
there must come a time
for replenishment and renewal.
A time for turning over soil
and quitting ceaseless toil.

A time when all things pass
out of memory and return
to us again, having shed
all that’s unnecessary.
Vital and restored from sleep.
There must come a time like this.

Every purpose under heaven
has its time, and everything
made beautiful in its own time.
The world is set in our hearts.
No man can find out the work
he makes from beginning to end.

VIII.

When I asked for Wisdom
I was given eyes to behold
all the work of God, and Lo!
A man cannot find it out,
all the work done under the sun.

He cannot find Reason
that will not dissolve
moment to moment
into opposing resolve.

Cannot find justice
generation to generation
that will not corrupt
and wrought devastation.

Though he toil all his life
to make sense of it, yet he will
be taken by contradiction,
will find himself mistaken.

If he build up his house
by years of labor, and it fall,
still he will not comprehend
how time and chance happen to all.

How can one who is ignorant
hope to understand? Everything
bears more thought. For all this
I considered and declared to my heart:

All things come alike to all.
There is one event
to the righteous
and the wicked.

To him that sacrifices
and to him that does not.
To both the same thing 
meaning what it is not.

Then even the hearts
of the sons of men
are full of evil in them.

Madness is in 
their hearts
while they live

and then they go
to their end as of
no great matter.

The oldest story is
how the dead die and
know nothing after.

Yet what persists
though love and hate perish—
God, the Form, the Ideal—
make their appeal

and we who come after ask
What is it?
and gather up our things
and make our visit.

So go thy way. Eat thy bread.
Drink thy wine merrily.
God accepteth thy work.

Live joyfully with the wife
whom thou lovest all the days
of thy vain, blinded life.

That is thy portion in life
and in the labor which 
thou takest up under the sun.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth
to do, do it resolutely, with all
thy might, for there is no work

nor knowledge, nor device,
nor wisdom in the grave
whither thou goest.

And under the sun
time and chance happens
with or without our knowing.

The race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong,
nor the bread to the wise

nor wealth or favor
to men of understanding
but time and chance to all.

IX.

Lord, give thy servant
an understanding heart
and I promise, whatever the soul is,
to build it a house and a hearth,
and tend to it as long as I live.

Later. Not continuous.

Thou didst well it was in thy heart,
when things were going well,
when there was plenty to eat
and safety everywhere to dwell.
Every man under his vine
and under his fig tree.

Cut to: the Dream.
Everything is golden.
A wife who loves him.
Kids eating ice cream.

He says whoever confesses
his lonely heart will know
the house of the soul
is a house of forgiveness.

X.

This wondrous workshop is abandoned.
The weird work of time broke it.
All the burnished masonry of cornerstone and cornice
Nature has reclaimed with clutching vine and tree.
Pavement uprooted. Stone faces strewn in rubble.
The roof gone, and green grows from the gables.
The artisans, who once forged miraculous figures at its benches,
quenched the braziers and hung up the tongs to gather rust.
On shelves their tools and masterpieces collecting shadow and dust.
The Master, whose solitary cottage with heavy heart I look upon,
the Muse to whom they all were apprenticed, where have they gone?
Only shades remain, the voided forms of voiceless specters
rehearsing absent rituals, repeating senseless gestures.
If it were rebuilt, would the shape regain its substance?
If the brush were cleared, and stone remade upon its foundation,
if the fire in the furnace were rekindled in abundance,
would the flame itself return of that sublime imagination?

The duty of a teacher is twofold. His first job is to encourage. He must encourage his students on their way to knowledge. His second job is to teach them to discriminate, which is the means by which one comes to knowledge.

In the former mode he is like Kent when he dotes on Lear, even after Lear has dismissed him, and in the latter, like Kent when he chides Oswald saying “I’ll teach you differences!”

So Auden in his introduction to Viking’s anthology of English poets distinguishes between two kinds of plays when describing the innovations of Elizabethan drama. And in doing so, he teaches us something important about subjectivity and objectivity.

Many people today claim not to believe in objectivity. They reject the idea of a universal or absolute truth, or perhaps even an omniscient god whose existence manifests such truth. Often this skepticism does them a great harm intellectually. They might conflate the objective with the subjective, and mistake everything which is objective for subjective. In doing so, they miss something fundamental about reality.

What is meant here when Auden speaks of subjectivity and objectivity in drama, is the difference between the internal and the external, between representing what we experience within us and what we observe without. One only has to keep in mind the etymology of the words to understand the difference in meaning (the sub- in subjectivity means “below” or “underneath,” and the ob- in objectivity means “in front of.”)

II

What Auden distinguishes between is drama of consciousness and drama of situation.

The drama of consciousness is the representation of the subjective. It is the imitation of an action1 experienced by the subjective 'I'.

Auden says this is typical of morality and mystery plays of the Medieval period.

The play characteristic of this period, he says, is Everyman (1510), an anonymous morality play, itself the inspiration behind Knopf’s popular Everyman’s Library series.

The motto of Everyman’s Library, which you’ll find inside all its books, is the line

The motto comes from the play, and it’s quite fitting for a library that purports to contain the best works of world literature, for it’s spoken to Everyman by the sister of his Good Deeds, Knowledge.

The play Everyman is about a journey Everyman must go on to give a “rekeninge” at the end of his life. The inciting incident which opens the play is God’s unhappiness with His people. He looks down on them and is dismayed that they do not know Him.

Every man liveth so after his own pleasure
And yet of their life they be nothinge sure.

…

They thanke me not for the pleasure that I to them ment,
Nor yet for their beinge that I them have lent.

So He summons Death and sends him down to Everyman,

to shewe him, in my name,
A pilgrimage he must on him take,
Which he in no wise may escape;
And that he bringe with him a sure rekeninge

And Death, God’s willing servant, obliges

Every man will I beset that liveth beestly,
Out of Goddes lawes, and dredeth not foly.

The scene is not unlike the beginning of the book of Job, where God, bickering with the devil (really called Adversity), grants him go down and test His most faithful subject.

What follows in Everyman is a series of meetings our protagonist has with various aspects of himself. He meets Fellowship, and Kin, and Cousin, all of whom, though they love him, will not accompany him on his journey. He meets Goodes, who also refuses, and this leads to a soliloquy by Everyman in which he summarizes the preceding action of the play.

Than wente I to my Goodes, that I loved best,
In hope to have comforte; but there had I leest,
For my Goodes sharpely did me tell
That he bringest many into hell.
Than of myselfe I was ashamed;
And so I am worthy to be blamed.
Thus may I well myself hate.
Of whom shall I now counseill take?

Then he meets his Good Deeds, and Knowledge, and Beauty, and Strength, and Five Wits, and they offer him support of various kinds. It’s all very allegorical, very on the nose, and typical of morality plays of the Medieval period.2

Auden calls these morality plays the “pure drama of consciousness” because they imitate the action of the subjective 'I'.

If I try to present my own experience of life in dramatic form, the play will be of the allegorical morality type, like Everyman. The hero will be the rational willing I that chooses, and the other characters, states of the self, pleasant and unpleasant, good and bad, for or against which the hero’s choices are made.

The aim of the hero in these plays, Auden says, is to attain “true felicity.” Felicity here means either happiness or, most importantly, the ability to find correct expression for one’s thoughts. Everyman, after all, does not escape his fate. By the end of the play he descends into the grave with Good Deeds. But his fate is no longer something to be feared, nor is it something for which he is unprepared, for he has found the right expression for his thoughts, and speaks his final words to the audience before descending.

Into thy handes, Lorde, my soule I commende.
Receive it, Lorde, that it be not lost.
As thou me boughtest, so me defende,
And save me from the fendes boost.
That I may appere with that blessid hoost
That shall be saved at the day of dome.
In manus tuas, of mightest moost
For ever, commendo spiritum meum!

The ending is a happy one, as Auden observes, “the play is a comedy if he succeeds and a tragedy if he fails.” Everyman attains felicity and the plot is resolved.

Auden goes on to describe this kind of plot as “only a succession of incidents in time, and the passing of time from birth to death the only necessity; all else is free choice.” Indeed, nothing really “happens” in the play. After the inciting incident, what we have are merely more incidents, encounters, not with characters who live somewhere, but with aspects of conscious experience. What is imitated is a consciousness that acts. And the action is inward, not outward, as Auden observes that we act toward our states of being, not toward the stimuli which provoked them.

[M]y action, in fact, is the giving or withholding of permission to myself to act.3

It’s an insightful point. In our subjective experience of the world, we act by giving ourselves, or withholding from ourselves, permission to act. The action of subjective experience presented in the drama of pure consciousness is, therefore, the action of our free will. It is the choosing at each moment which faculties it will engage with. The drama is in finding out if we will choose correctly. If we succeed, the play is a comedy; if we fail, a tragedy.

Science backs up Auden’s claim, too. Benjamin Libet’s famous experiment from the 1980s, wherein participants moved their fingers at will according to a clock, demonstrated that while consciousness does not actually initiate action, it does decide whether or not that action will be carried out.

Free will, that giving or withholding of permission to act, is one of the qualities that Elizabethan drama inherits from the morality and mystery plays of the Medieval period. This is markedly different than what we see in that other type of drama Auden describes: the drama of situation.

III

This is the drama of the Greek tragedies. Auden mentions Sophocles specifically. It is drama that imitates the action of the objective picture of things.

The drama will consist, not in the choices he [the hero] freely makes, but in the actions which the situation obliges him to take.

The action imitated here is essentially an objective one, for when we observe others, we do not see individual states of being that constitute their internal world. Instead, we see them, as Auden says, as individuals in states. They are magnanimous, as when Oedipus is obliged to help the people of Thebes discover the cause of the plague. Or they are angry, as when Oedipus is accused by Tiresias of bringing the curse upon his own people. Or they are horrified, as when Oedipus learns of his birth and realizes he has in fact married his mother and killed his father. Each of Oedipus’s states is a consequence of the situation he finds himself in. Hence, the drama of situation. The action being imitated is not the action of free will but rather action in response to external stimuli.

I see people acting in a situation, and the situation and the action are all I see; I never see another choose between alternative actions, only the action he does take. I cannot therefore tell whether he has free will or not, I only know that he is fortunate or unfortunate in his circumstances.

We do not watch Greek tragedy in order to see what the character will choose, for he cannot choose any differently than he does. We are not trying to figure out whether what we’re watching is a tragedy or a comedy, as in Everyman we are wondering if the protagonist will succeed or fail in his reckeninge. Oedipus has already failed. Everything important to his journey has already happened to him before the play begins. He’s already solved the Sphinx’s riddle and become the king of Thebes. He’s already run away from Corinth, defying the oracle’s prophecy. He’s already failed to defy it, having killed his father and married his mother. In the drama of situation, Auden points out, “it is impossible at any point in the play to call out to the hero, ‘Don’t choose this, choose that.’ He is already in the trap.”

In an Elizabethan tragedy, in Othello, for example, there is no point before he actually murders Desdemona when it would be impossible for him to control his jealousy, discover the truth, and convert the tragedy into a comedy. Vice versa, there is no point in a comedy like The Two Gentlemen of Verona where the wrong turning could not be taken and the conclusion be tragic.

In the pure drama of situation, it is not a matter of choice but recognition. The hero must not choose, but recognize what sort of play he’s in. This is why Aristotle says that every tragedy must have a recognition scene.4 Oedipus must recognize what sort of play he’s in. We as the audience already know. The hero’s motive will be, not achieving true felicity, but “some concrete satisfaction of desire.”

[A]nd the tragedy will lie in the knowledge, granted to the audience but withheld from him, that in fact his actions are going to have the opposite effect.

Oedipus desires to save his people, but brings his city to ruin instead. This outcome has been ordained by the gods from the beginning, and is the objective picture of things. What we observe is the cause and effect, sans free will. We cannot know what Oedipus experienced subjectively that led him to be in a tragedy, both because those events happened off stage, and because what happens onstage gives us no intimation of them. There’s no interiority to the dialogue. Everything is externalized. The characters are merely characters. Oedipus, in the moment of realization that he has killed his father and married his mother, declares that he will look upon the light of the sun no longer, and gives us a formal, poetic rendering of his fate before running off stage.

I who first saw the light bred of a match
accursed, and accursed in my living
with them I lived with, cursed in my killing.

If this weren’t clear enough, the chorus remains to make sense of things. The chorus is the voice of objectivity in all classical plays. It exists to make sure everything is externalized.

IV

Having distinguished between these two types of drama, the pure drama of consciousness and the pure drama of situation, Auden is now better able to characterize the innovations of Elizabethan drama, which he says represent a “new, more complicated type.” What Elizabethan drama represents that is more complicated is a representation of the dynamic relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. Elizabethan drama is imitation of action within and without, such that the audience is made aware of some relationship between the two.

This drama’s evolution away from the plays of Antiquity and Medievalism, says Auden, began with the chronicle play, with adapting the history of England for the stage.

The writer of a chronicle play cannot, like Greek tragedians who have a significant myth as subject, select his situations; he has to take whatever history offers, the humdrum as well as the startling, those in which a character is the victim of a situation, and those in which he creates one. He can therefore have no narrow theory of aesthetic propriety which separates the tragic from the comic, no theory of heroic arete which can pick one historical character and reject another.

Auden’s point is that Elizabethan dramatists had to find, within the givenness of history as they knew it, the motives behind the situations they represented. And being Christians and believing in free will, they imagined such situations as the consequence of internal dramas playing out. Here is a new, more complicated type of drama: the fusion of the objective plays of Antiquity and the subjective plays of the Medieval period.

It’s easy to trace this evolution in the development of the chronicle play from the very first instance, Gorboduc, to Marlowe’s Edward II forty years later.

Gorbuduc, published in 1565 but first performed in 1561 for Queen Elizabeth during Christmas, was written by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. It tells the story of an ancient British king who unwisely divides his kingdom between his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex, an act which leads to instability and civil war. The play was a thinly veiled warning to Elizabeth about the necessity of having an heir and ensuring clear dynastic succession, something the people of England, after a hundred years of civil war, were keenly anxious about.

The chronicle play at this time still resembles the drama of situation we find in Oedipus Rex. At one point Gorboduc even paraphrases the famous last line of that play, after learning of the death of his elder son Ferrex at the hands of his younger brother Porrex.

“O, no man happy, till his end be seen”5

The main action happens offstage, as it did in the plays of Antiquity. Characters merely find themselves in situations and react to them. And their reactions reveal very little of their personalities. We do not know much about Gorboduc aside from his being a king. Even when he learns of the death of Ferrex by letter, it evokes little of his true self.

If any flowing wealth and seeming joy
In present years might make a happy wight,
Happy was Hecuba, the woefullest wretch
That ever lived to make a mirror of;
And happy Priam with his noble sons;
And happy I, till now alas, I see
And feel my most unhappy wretchedness.—
Behold, my lords, read you this letter here;
Lo, it contains the ruin of our realm
If timely speed provide not hasty help.

He tells us of his “most unhappy wretchedness,” and we feel it only insomuch as we know that he is both a king and a father. It makes sense for him to feel this way. His reaction befits his character, yet reveals little of his personality, of his inner, subjective self. It’s all very formal, very stiff. The play is famous for being the first play about English history, and the first play written in blank verse, but otherwise its dramatic conventions are still those of the past.

Contrast this to Edward II, published forty years later in 1594. Marlowe opens his play with Gaveston receiving an invitation from the king.

‘My father is deceased; come, Gaveston,
And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend.’
Ah, words that make me surfeit with delight!
What greater bliss can hap to Gaveston
Than live and be the favourite of a king?

Here we have personality and not only character. It’s Gaveston who is the favorite of the king, Gaveston and not merely the character who will act as a wedge between the king and his noblemen. Gaveston, as we learn in the opening soliloquy, is, among other things, romantic, as when he compares himself to Leander swimming across the Channel to reach his beloved Edward. And he’s vindictive toward everyone who is not the king (“Not that I love the city or the men But that it harbours him I hold so dear”). He is also someone who uses his relationship to the king to raise himself, in his mind, above others (“Farewell base stooping to the lordly peers”). And he’s even willing to manipulate the king to realize this end (“I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits, Musicians that with touching of a string May draw the pliant king which way I please”).

This is, of course, what we mean when we say that Elizabethan drama has more psychological depth. We are given insights into Gaveston’s character that we are not given in Oedipus’s character.6 What we’re seeing is the interplay of the subjective and the objective picture of things.

Gaveston may not even be aware of some of his motivations, but we as the audience can intuit them and can observe the consequences of them in the play. Marlowe makes the subjective visible in the objective, such that we understand why someone like Gaveston would be a wedge between the king and his noblemen.7 We understand, too, why someone like Edward would risk the stability of the kingdom for him (“Because he loves me more than all the world”). And why someone like Mortimer, with his “burning zeal,” would rebel against the king, because he cannot stand that someone like Gaveston has risen so high.

But this I scorn, that one so basely born
Should by his sovereign’s favour grow so pert
And riot it with the treasure of the realm.

Auden observes in his introduction that, of the pre-Shakespearean chronicle plays, only Edward II is still readable. Indeed, what makes Gorboduc so dull is that it lacks what we’ve come to expect from drama, a psychological depth which is the interplay of the subjective and objective picture of things. Edward II achieves such a representation. Warwick, a nobleman who sides with Mortimer and Lancaster against the king, suggests such a dynamic when he says, bitingly and with scorn for the king, “We know our duties. Let him know his peers.” Here is the conflict at the heart of the play. It is the conflict between character and personality, between what the situation obliges us to do, and what our subjective selves choose instead. It’s this complexity which makes for a richer representation of life, and better reflects the reality we find ourselves in. For this reason, the chronicle play in Elizabethan drama marks an important stage of development for the possibilities inherent in all drama.

V

One last point Auden makes that I find interesting is about what Elizabethan drama did with the chorus.

In Gorboduc there’s still a chorus in the play. Indeed, it seems very un-Elizabethan. Its voice appears at the end of each act. Its purpose, as in classical drama, is to reinforce the themes of the preceding action, to externalize and make sense of what the audience has seen and heard. But by Edward II there’s no such voice. Instead, Auden suggest, the audience itself has become a silent chorus.

Whereas in Greek drama the hero and the chorus argue the truth out between them, in Elizabethan drama the hero receives no such help. He stands there alone, he makes his soliloquy to a silent chorus, the audience, who are expected by the playwright to supply the appropriate lines themselves.

It makes sense that the role of the chorus would become untenable. Another consequence of the chronicle play was that Elizabethan dramatists were disabused of the simple morality of Medieval and Classical plays. The moral ambiguities of political action would not allow it. The success or failure of a character was no longer tied to their virtue or vice, to their goodness or badness. Thus, how can a chorus adequately externalize the meaning of what’s taken place? A dramatist can, of course, put those sentiments into the mouths of other characters. They can add a fool, or a hermit, whose view of things might be more objective. But ultimately it falls to the audience to fulfill the role, to bring to bear what judgements will be rendered.

The new, complicated type of Elizabethan drama, which represents both the subjective and objective picture of things, would naturally involve the subjective participation of the audience. It is for ourselves to choose, of our own free will, what to make of what we have seen.8

Thus, when Hamlet asks “to be or not to be,” we judge for ourselves whether it’s really the case. We weigh the felicity of his expression against the situation which he finds himself in. And silently, as we watch, we think the words which were once spoken by the chorus.

An Elizabethan play, therefore, is always at the mercy of the audience; if they are lazy or unperceptive, its significance and meaning are diminished and blurred.

This remains true today of film and television, and novels and poetry, any medium which employs the dramatic. The English tradition flows from Elizabethan drama, and takes as a given a view of things both subjective and objective, one in or underneath the other. It assumes a relationship, a causality, which is that of a free will choosing within a situation.

We sometimes are so accustomed to seeing them represented together that it’s easy to mistake them for the same thing. But to understand their differences, and we can by looking at the evolution of drama, is to know how they are really two threads intertwined yet separate.

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