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2. The Dinner Party and the Sailor at War
- University of Georgia Press
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CHAPTER TWO The DinnerParty and theSailor at War A surprising number of scholars and teachers and even poets—people who claim to "know" what poetry is—will insist that only one aspect of poetry is crucial. Insist for instance, that the essence of poetry is formal coherence (order) or that only emotion matters (disorder). Maybe this one-sided emphasis isa temperamental thing. For some people, the need for order is so pronounced and pleasurable that order seems everything to them in the project of poetry. And for others, the destabilizing claims or threats of experience are so urgent that it would be impossible for them to talk about poetry without emphasizing passion. We see a variation on this unresolvable struggle in many of the arguments about whether free verse or formal poetry is more legitimate. For free-verse adherents , rhythm is subservient to the unique expressive dictates of the individual poetic urge behind the poem; for formalist poets, rhythm is to be regularized into the structural ordering of meter , which is in turn declared to be an essential element of poetry. Both sides are committed to the overall orderings of poetry, but in their attitudes toward the element of rhythm (or meter), they reveal their temperamental bias toward disorder (free verse) or order (formalism). Finally, whether the emphasis is on poetry's order or disorder depends on the needs or desires of the particular poet (or reader). And it's possible that the same poet might feel differently at different times. Consider the following two anecdotesby the same poet about 24 Dinner Party and Sailor at War 25 how young poets first begin to write and what function it has in their lives. In the first anecdote, Richard Wilbur, one of our finest contemporary formalist poets, predictably stresses a serene initiation process by which a series of young artists is inspired to imitate older, established monuments of artistic order in their respective art forms: I remember a dinner party at a house in Cambridge, years ago. Almost everyone at the table that evening could be considered some sort of an artist, and it occurred to our host to suggest that we all testify, in turn, as to how we had first felt the call to practice one art or another. To tell the truth, I have forgotten most of the testimony, but I do recall what kind of thing was said. The novelist, let's suppose, had come across a set of Trollope in a summerhouse; the composer had heard Caruso on the gramophone, or an organist practicing Bach in an empty church; the portrait painter, perhaps, had gone with his mother to call on Mr. Sargent in his studio. It was all like that. Not one of the deponents had anything to sayabout the turmoil of first love, the song of the thrush, or the Bay of Naples. What had started them off as artists, they said, were no such approved stimuli, but the encounter with art itself. Astonished by a poem, a painting, a fugue, they had wanted to make something like that. ("Poetry's Debt to Poetry," 1972) I should confess immediately that, in order to react with interest to the above anecdote, I have to put aside my own social biases. I am almost as uncomfortable reading about this elite gathering and its smug dismissalof emotions as I would be if I were actually sitting at the table and trying to remember which fork to use with the salad course. But I want to put that prejudice of mine aside because if I yield to it, I'll miss what Wilbur is saying. I take Wilbur to mean that one way that first poems get written is through astonishment at the achieved order of someone else's poem and the sudden desire to imitate this wondrous thing, to "make something like that." And certainly, when anyone begins writing a poem, he or she has, stored away in the mental attic somewhere, a model of what a poem is. If [18.191.211.66] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 06:14 GMT) 26 THE SELF, JEOPARDY, AND SONG you are young and naive, the model is whatever you once read asa poem that mattered to you (it could be Shelley or Frost, or it could be something from a greeting card). Not all first-time artists hear Bach in a church or visitJohn Singer Sargent's studio—not all of us have our first encounter with achieved...