One of the most long-standing infections that modernism introduced into poetic consciousness has to do with choice of diction and syntax. It remains, like a dormant strain of herpes, in the thinking of many poets who were born after 1920.
The infection is simple but virulent. It is the notion that any word, idiom, or verbal structure that is “obsolete” or “out-of-date” or “no longer current” cannot be legitimately employed in a contemporary poem. As a result of this sick notion, an entire swath of linguistic tools and lexical treasures is declared off-limits to a poet.
The core argument in defense of this infection might go something like this: The average community-college graduate doesn’t use certain words or structures, so a good contemporary poet shouldn’t use them either.
I can’t begin to sort out the absurd prejudices and misperceptions of the mindset behind such a statement—the anti-intellectualism, the populist/democratic assumptions, the reflexive trendiness, the total misunderstanding of the poetic task. Suffice it to say that people who make such a statement don’t belong in the world of letters. Let them take entry-level positions in an ad agency.
There are indeed some obvious and hackneyed archaisms that competent poets do try to avoid. Most writers will eschew ne’er and o’er, although these variants certainly were once useful. I believe a good case could be made that such apocopated forms were modeled on the omission of the -vi- syllable in Latin verse, when one needed a shortened form of a perfect-system verb. Here the pious modernist will smirk and say that in both instances the omission was done “purely for metrical reasons,” as if that were a felonious act. Of course it was done for metrical reasons, you jackass! What the hell else is the job of a formal poet except to mind his metrics?
But if quaint archaisms like ne’er and o’er were the only source of complaint, I wouldn’t be writing this essay. The infection goes much deeper than that. You actually have Carl Sandburg throwbacks out there who claim that you can’t use the words nor or upon, or any variations from the subject-verb-object sentence, since such usages are no longer current in the quotidian speech of the average buffoon. These partisans of the lowest common denominator will employ stupid metaphors that say poetry “must move forward,” or poetry “must not look back.” But metaphors aren’t arguments. I can just as well say that poetry “must advance to the rear,” or that it “must gaze into the receding distance.” In both cases the metaphors don’t prove a swiving thing.
By the way, there’s no political component to the state of mind that I am criticizing. Literary critics of a marked right-wing bent, like Hugh Kenner and Jeffrey Hart, were taken in by the plain-diction-and-syntax shpiel as much as anyone else. Because of their ingrained modernist assumptions they refused to value poetic language and metrics. Kenner would speak disparagingly of the “Wardour Street English” of the Edwardians and Georgians, or of “puttying out a line” with unnecessary words; while Hart could not take seriously the poetry of Roy Campbell, even though he shared Campbell’s anticommunist and pro-Spanish Nationalist views. The prejudice in favor of the plain style, verbal simplicity, and a conversational register is wide, and cuts across party lines. I suppose one might call it Kneejerk Americanism.
It’s amusing to see how Robert Frost is often held up as a model of how to write for the common man, for ordinary folks, for persons without pretentiously “literary” tastes. (Note: When you hear someone use the adjective literary as a pejorative term, you can be fairly sure that you are dealing with a person who hates literature.) Frost is lionized as the Great Communicator, the poet whose homespun artlessness and country-boy humility make his verse truly democratic.
Well, let’s see about that.
I’m going to analyze a part of Frost’s popular poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” And I’m going to do it in the feigned voice of a workshop jockey obsessed with the fetish of contemporaneity. Here’s what one of those MFAssholes might present as a critique of the poem:
Commentary on “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Mr. Frost’s poem really needs a lot of work. The first quatrain of this piece is highly problematic, since it is completely out of touch with modern speech:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though.
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
This simply won’t do. The blatant syntactical inversion of the first line is obviously contrived just to allow for the rhyme of know and though. Nobody starts a sentence with a relative pronoun. Here’s how the first two lines could be re-written:
I think I know the guy that owns these woods,
but he’s got a house in the village.
Now that’s a thoroughly modern revision. The syntactical inversion is gone, and so is the silly affectation known as rhyme. And we’ve dumped the archaic possessive pronoun whose, a form that never appears in rap-lyrics. And by writing the guy that, we dispense with the tedious and pretentious distinction between who and that, which is now moribund in modern chitchat. In addition, the restraining regularity of meter has been done away with. We have wonderful, trendy, het-met lines!
The ending of the quatrain also cries out for modernization. Who the hell says “will not”? Everybody I know uses the contracted form “won’t.” And the phrase To watch his woods is a glaringly obvious alliteration, an archaizing figure that no one alive today would employ. It has to go. Here’s the revision:
He won’t see me stopping here
to look at the snow falling in his woods.
Let’s move on to Mr. Frost’s second quatrain. There are issues here as well, but of a different nature:
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
The first problem is the homophobic term queer. We cannot tolerate this sort of horrific intolerance! It has to go. And I don’t care of Mr. Frost had no intention of referring to anyone’s sexual preference—the word itself is still taboo. Everything depends on audience reaction! In the same vein, the poet is insufferably patronizing and insensitive to the rights of animals when he uses the word “little” to describe his horse. This is quite as offensive as saying “my little wife” or “my little girlfriend.” It presumes that the horse is an inferior and subordinate being, and as P.E.T.A. has shown us this is just retrograde thinking. The word little must be eliminated.
The second problem is the syntactical structure of think it queer. This is what old-fashioned grammarians call “indirect discourse with an ellipsed verb of being.” Other examples would be the sentences I consider it settled, or We think him a fool, or He deems them guilty. These are profoundly non-colloquial and antique utterances. Their structure grates on modern ears. Here’s a better version:
My horse must think that it’s strange
to stop without a farmhouse near.
The final two lines have a number of problems. The verse Between the woods and frozen lake is generally OK, but it’s better to omit frozen as a redundancy. Since it’s snowing, we know that it’s winter, right? And the lake would naturally be frozen, right? So let’s dump it on the general modernist principle that adjectives are a menace and should be suppressed whenever possible.
The last line, The darkest evening of the year, presents a really tough knot. It sticks out as a dangling phrase, with no obvious syntactic connection to the rest of the sentence. Some commentators say that there is an ellipsed “On” to be understood at the beginning of the line, making it a hidden prepositional phrase. Others say that it is an English form of what in Latin is called an “accusative of duration of time,” where an otherwise disconnected phrase without a preposition is understood as simply a temporal marker. In either case, Mr. Frost is doing something literary! It’s intolerably elitist and undemocratic.
Besides this, the word darkest is both overdramatic and inaccurate. It’s the silly figure known as hyperbole. After all, how does Mr. Frost know that this particular evening is the darkest of the year? There might be a darker evening next week. The superlative darkest is pure presumption on the poet’s part, and has to go. And once that’s omitted, the phrase of the year becomes redundant. We can dump that too. And evening? Who says evening anymore? The last time I heard it was in a Fred Astaire movie. Let’s just make it night.
OK, here’s the entire poem after our modernization:
I think I know the guy that owns these woods,
but he’s got a house in the village.
He won’t see me stopping here
to look at the snow falling in his woods.
My horse must think that it’s strange
to stop without a farmhouse near
between the woods and lake
on a dark night.
There it is, workshoppers! How wonderful! How stark! How up-to-date! How liberated from the deadening restrictions of literary tradition! If only poor Mr. Frost had had the opportunity and privilege of attending one of our workshop sessions! He would have written a truly cutting-edge poetry, attuned to the temper of modern times and the intonations of modern speech!
˜
Some readers will retort that the above is an unfair lampoon. It isn’t. There are thousands of people in the po-biz world who speak this way, and what is worse, who think this way. They consider themselves intelligent and au courant. They run poetry workshops, teach seminars, and edit magazines. They offer their opinions at on-line discussion groups and conferences. They are as common as horseshit, as my elderly Irish aunt used to say. They might not state their views as blatantly as I have feigned above, but their predispositions towards a stark, pared-down, and resolutely non-literary colloquialism are deep-seated. The active dislike of rhetoric and ornament is part of their DNA, so to speak. And don’t try to tell me that the workshops and the MFA programs don’t consciously promote and nurture this dislike. The evidence to the contrary, in the form of what is being published and praised, is overwhelming.
These people and their habits of thought and composition represent what can best be described as linguistic anorexia. They resolutely refuse to make use of the verbal nourishment that their mother tongue offers. Like those pathetic starveling scarecrows of neurotic females who increasingly fill our psych wards, refusing to eat lest they lose their wraith-like figures, the enemies of non-colloquial diction and syntax have deep-seated disorders. The larger question is why so many otherwise sane formalist poets have allowed these crackpots to influence their writing style.
