Open Questions

One way of describing the form of a poem is to refer to it as 'open' or 'closed', but all poetry, whether free or formal verse, partakes of some combination of enclosure and release as soon as the reader comes to the first line break. T. S. Eliot makes the definitive point: 'Verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of punctuation; the usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently employed' (TLS, 27 September 1928).

For Emily Dickinson, whose stone valves and closed carriages often widen the circumference of empty space (or the space of emptiness) at the heart of her verse, a poem is an open trap set to snare us unawares, even as it keeps us on guard, while we venture on our readerly way down the narrow path of its deceptively catchy rhythms:

The most obliging TrapIts tendency to snapCannot resist –

The tendency to snap under pressure is not uncommon, but the lines of a poem must configure a way to coil and recoil on themselves in an engaging manner as they move down the page, enacting a motion that is both an entrapment and a springing free. (Dickinson adds a third possibility, in this case the horror of suspension: after the couplet clamp of the rhyme, and the trochaic inversion's metrical propulsion, the dash dangles – with its foot caught in the trap.) This kind of 'serpentine' movement of the lines has been beautifully expressed by Coleridge:

The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent . . . at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again propels him forward.

(Biographia Literaria, chapter 14)

The title of David Caplan's excellent book is especially appropriate, suggesting as it does the shifting registers of Caplan's mind, his taut flexibility before the paradoxical but not unyielding rigours of poetic form: the way that poems open us to fresh possibilities of perception even as they question those perceptions by sharpening our sense of limit. Poems that take hold, as Caplan compellingly shows, are always an opening and shutting case. But never a done deal.

Though Caplan clearly prefers poetry written in, or based upon, traditional forms (his book is concerned with five types in particular: sestina, sonnet, heroic couplet, ballad, and English versions of the ghazal), he carefully maps out what he calls 'the prosody wars' between advocates of free verse and those of formal verse, experimental and traditional poetry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers and new formalists, and so forth. (He also provides plenty of detailed notes on related topics such as the influence of creative writing programmes on contemporary American poetry.) Despite the strong passions that Caplan feels are continuing to fuel the debate, to my mind this argument sounds a bit forced, and certainly less urgent today than when Pound and Williams tried to break the pentameter's steely grip (and recast the verse line by adding their own irons to the fire). That the stakes may be different in recent times is shown by the work of three of the writers Caplan studies in depth – Bishop, Gunn, and Walcott – poets who have mastered both free and formal techniques and have used them as the necessity of the poem dictates, rather than as a conscious attempt to steer American poetry in a new direction.

Caplan's discussion of the heroic couplet I found particularly moving. After a brief synopsis of the usual arguments against writing contemporary poetry in rhyming couplets (they are a symbol of colonial repression, the rhymes offend a modern ear, etc.) and the usual arguments for writing in couplets (a verse form can stand in contradiction to a society's values, popular music is filled with striking examples...