The Craft of Poetry

Two new books on poetics and the life of poetry by Robert B. Shaw and Miller Williams and three new books of verse by the English poets Dick Davis and Clive Wilmer and the American poet Richard Wakefield are welcome additions to the long tradition of understanding and practicing the craft or mystery of poetry, a craft that was no doubt already ancient when Homer sang his epics to the plucking of a lyre. The origins of poetry are lost forever in prehistory, but one can readily imagine primitive man awakening into consciousness, struck by wonder at the progress of the seasons and the stars, the rhythms of the tides and of the human heart and breath, and being thus impelled to cry out in imitation or response. Some of these early poets may have thought of the whole world as a kind of language spoken by a Maker whom they—as poets, i.e., makers—could only mimic, evoke, and praise. The first chapter of Genesis wherein God says the word light after which the thing light appears may well be a written statement of what had been passed on orally for ages.

From such obscure beginnings up to the present day both poets and the scholars of their art have speculated on the nature of poetry and the poet. Is the poet, as Plato said, like one of the frenzied Corybantes dancing madly in worship of Cybele, or, as Aristotle thought, does the poet use reason to see and present things objectively just as they are? Is a poet Wordsworth’s egotistically sublime man speaking to men, Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislator of the world,” or Keats’s thing of no character that fills what it looks upon? Is poetry Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” or Eliot’s escape from personality and emotion? Does the poet speak the elevated language of Shelley’s poet-hierophant or the impassioned common tongue of Yeats? Is poetry the dictation of Blake’s emanations, or, as J. V. Cunningham coolly put it, is poetry simply “metrical composition”?

Robert Shaw’s Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use is both an account of the practice of blank verse in English and also a handbook of usage for poets who wish to try to master this form. Chapter 1 discusses the qualities and uses of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter): these include a “commanding momentum, this sense of ongoingness,” “freedom and fixity,” and the capacity to sustain “prodigious flows of utterance.” Blank verse can accommodate many modes—epic, drama, philosophical meditation, narrative, lyric. Its employment of metrical substitutions, enjambment and end-stopped lines, caesura, complex syntactical constructions layered line by line, and different levels of speech, as well as its freedom from end rhyme and stanza give it a “flexibility and dynamism” matched by no other form, Shaw declares.

In chapters 2, 3, and 4 Shaw chronicles the remarkable history of blank verse beginning with its introduction in the sixteenth century by Surrey, in his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, as an English approximation of the classical hexameter line. Called “a Strange meter” by Surrey’s publisher William Owen, blank verse went on to accommodate such works as Marlowe’s Tamberlaine plays whose “high astounding terms” Ben Jonson called “Marlowe’s mighty line,” the great tragedies of Shakespeare, Milton’s Paradise Lost (an epic freed, Milton said, from the “modern bondage of Riming”), Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and many of Browning’s monologues. Even in the modern period, when Pound...