Good Form

Derek Attridge’s Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry begins with a fair-minded acknowledgement of one of the difficulties which the book tries to face: the fact that ‘In spite of the immense quantity of commentary that surrounds the poetic tradition, we have little sense of why it is that certain organized arrangements of words can have strong and valued effects’ (p. 7). For many authors, such an admission would be swiftly followed by an ‘until now’ and a solution. But Attridge has the decency to remain tentative until the end. His closing reading of Geoffrey Hill’s ‘September Song’, for example, opens with a recognition that his reading practices are as likely to find success ‘with the weakest as well as with the most powerful of poems’, although ‘this frequently goes unnoticed, since we use the machinery only on poems we admire’ (p. 216). There is something respectful, even courteous about the way in which Attridge owns up to his scruples here. ‘Turn with a sceptical eye to almost any account of a poem that has a powerful effect on you’, he writes in his opening pages, ‘and you will find the description of the operation of its formal qualities – if there is one – to be a description that you could imagine being applied to a poem with no evocative qualities whatsoever’ (p. 8). He explains his conundrum:

Any statement of the type ‘in this poem formal property X is valuable because it produces effect Y’ seems to imply an algorithm, valid for any poem possessing this property. This implication is usually demonstrably false, for in the next poem in which X is found it will have no such effect; and even if it were true, it would be a mechanical rule of precisely the type all accounts of literature regard as inadequate to explain the special qualities of the ‘literary’. On the other hand, if the critic insists that it is only for this poem that the statement is valid, we are left wondering what kind of explanatory power it has. We may appreciate formal criticism for its ingenuity and inventiveness, or because it appears to authorize our own enjoyment of a poem, but we’re not likely to feel that it has identified the sources of a work’s real power.

That Attridge uses Moving Words to pursue and defend formal criticism nonetheless, eyes open to its pitfalls and hats off to his critics, gives the book an admirable frankness: this is a book which is not just good on form, but also a model of good form itself.

Perhaps it attained its measuredness by dint of long maturation. Moving Words comprises nine chapters of revised and expanded talks, papers, and articles spanning the last thirty years of Attridge’s distinguished career, prefaced by an engagingly open introduction which tells the story of a lifelong interest in versification kindled by Latin lessons at school. There are chapters on phrasing, rhyme, sound, rhythm, and several particular forms, including iambic pentameter, free verse, and what Attridge calls the dolnik. Most of them either elaborate upon or offer new summaries of arguments that Attridge has advanced elsewhere, especially in his major 1982 work The Rhythms of English Poetry, published by Longman. But this is not an author for whom revision necessitates reinforcement. ‘In revising, updating, and in some cases expanding these pieces’, Attridge writes, ‘I have been struck once more by the amount we still don’t understand about the working of poetry as it moves, pleases, and changes us. Although I would like to think that these studies bring us closer to such an understanding, I am not claiming anything like an exhaustive account: part of the reward of investigating formal detail in this way is the enhanced realization of the degree to which poetry resists positivist approaches’ (p. 13). His goal, he explains, is only ‘to sharpen the questions we ask about poetry, not to solve all the puzzles it poses’; his hope simply...