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When poets read their works aloud, we may not understand every word, but we immediately recognize that their intonation differs from that of everyday speech. This “unnatural” declamation often causes confusion among those who first encounter it. “Why don’t they just read it normally?” one is tempted to ask. The reason is simple: poets want to set their speech off from everyday language. Individual poets vary widely in the degree of “unnaturalness” they introduce to their readings, but in virtually all cases their goal is the same: to destabilize the familiar world of their listeners, to make them hear anew.

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All of us, poets or not, alter our tone of voice and choice of words in accordance with specific circumstances. We speak differently with our parents than with our peers, we address the auto mechanic differently than the policeman, we speak differently when giving a toast than we do when calling for an ambulance. In many life situations, what might be called the prosaic attitude toward language dominates. Our object is to relay information as quickly and unambiguously as possible. At other times, getting the point across is not enough; it is essential to do so convincingly and fervently. We select our words carefully and consciously organize them. In this case, we are not necessarily creating poetry, but it is fair to say that we are moving in the direction of poetry. It is no coincidence that most of the rhetorical terms now associated with poetry originated in the law courts of antiquity. The court is a place where eloquence matters, and the lawyers of ancient Greece and Rome were trained in the art of persuasion.

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News writing is focused almost entirely on the message, and whatever might distract from its direct and unambiguous presentation is considered inappropriate.

In poetry, on the other hand, the presentation becomes part of the mes- sage. Every aspect of the word (sound, spelling, placement on the page) is potentially meaningful. If the newspaper writer aims for immediate and unambiguous communication, the poet seeks to communicate in such a way that the audience will want to read (or hear) again, so that the individual word becomes maximally expressive and the audience maximally alert to that expression. For this reason, repeated encounters with the same poem will deepen – and at times even contradict – the first impression, while rereading a news item produces only tedium. This opposition between the newspaper (with its immediate cognitive gratification) and poetry (with its subtle interplay of sight and sound) i

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It is not the subject that makes her work poetic, but rather her approach to that subject.

The effect of poetry depends on the combination of a number of elements (concision, imagery, grammatical parallelism, sound organization). It is this constant and complex interplay that distinguishes poetry not simply from newspapers, but from virtually all prose. While a novel or short story will undoubtedly reveal more careful organization than a newspaper article, it will never achieve the concentration and variety of patterning found in poetry.

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You are right, the word ‘love’ is banal.I will think up another term.For you, if you like,I’ll rename the whole world, all the words.

Pasternak, “Without a Name”

+Sylvia Plath

According to Donald Allen, writing in the introduction to his 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, a whole generation of Americans (Plath’s generation) had been taught to read ‘conven- tional poetry’ using Brooks and Warren’s 1939 manual Understanding Poetry as their primer.5 The New Critics emphasised the special qualities of literary language. In arriving at an interpretation, they were disinclined to look beyond the poem for evidence either from the poet’s lived experience or the reader’s emotional response. They were resistant, too, to reading the text within its his- torical or cultural contexts, preferring to view it as an ‘autotelic object’.6 Their critical practice relied on the technique of ‘close reading’ or ‘making the closest possible examination of what the poem says as a poem’ in Brooks’s words.7 A single poem, studied with rigour, focus and sensitivity to the peculiarly literary quality of the language, would yield its meanings to the sufficiently trained reader. It is a critical practice which works best with a particular kind of poem, a poem of complexity, latent energy and tension (Ransom values ‘poems [that] are little dramas, exhibiting actions in complete settings’).8 Some of Plath’s early work, as Chapter 3 will show, exemplifies such a position and rewards reading in this way.

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Frost was a nature poet, but not in the naively romantic sense of a poet who celebrates the beauty or pastoral simplicity of nature. Instead, he uses the rural world as a source of emblems and symbols, creating paysages moralise ́s through the use of complex images and extended metaphors. Frost, who in later life described himself as “a confirmed symbolist,” could find in almost any natural or man-made object an apt symbol, or emblem, for a more general idea. Such emblems include the scythe in “Mowing,” the wall in “Mending Wall,” the apple tree in “After Apple-Picking,” the woodpile in “The Wood-Pile,” the burnt-down farmhouse in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” the trees in “Birches,” the pitchfork in “Putting in the Seed,” the well in “For Once, Then, Something,” and the isolated woods in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

+Eliot

Perhaps the chief lesson Eliot learned from Laforgue and other French symbolists was that poems could be made out of materials – such as the modern urban experience – that had previously been considered anathema to poetry. In giving poetic treatment to “the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis,” as he put it in an essay entitled “What Dante Means to Me” (1950), Eliot discovered that the source of new poetry might be found in what had previously been regarded as “the impossible, the sterile, the intractably unpoetic.” Eliot’s new understanding of poetry was apparent in his most important early poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which he wrote in 1910–11.

+ELiot

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One of his most concise statements appeared in the essay “The Constant Symbol,” published in The Atlantic in 1946:

. . . there are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority. Poetry is simply made of metaphor. So also is philosophy – and science, too, for that matter, if it will take the soft impeachment from a friend. Every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing. And there is a sense in which all poems are the same old metaphor always. (CP, 147)

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Frost gives summary here to many things that he had been saying for a number of years. In defining metaphor in a clear and straightforward way, “saying one thing in terms of another,” Frost also allows in qualification the possibility of irony, “saying one thing and meaning another.”

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The main point thrust is that the poem provides “the pleasure of ulteriority,” and in reading the poem it is the work of the reader to know just how ulterior things are. What, precisely, is being said in terms of something else? Can that something be stated at all in other terms? Frost once said, “I like to say, guardedly, that I could define poetry this way: It is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation” (CPPP, 856).

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Perhaps most intriguing, Frost asserts that every poem “is a new metaphor inside” and then appears, perhaps, to contradict this by saying that “all poems are the same old metaphor always.” What metaphor would that be? “The Constant Symbol” provides something of an answer, a mythos that merits consideration at least in the context of Frost’s poems. What he says is both about the making of poems and about living:

Every single poem written regular is a symbol small or great of the way the will has to pitch into commitments deep and deeper to a rounded conclusion and then be judged for whether any original intention it had has been strongly spent or weakly lost; be it in art, politics, school, church, business, love or marriage – in a piece of work or in a career. Strongly spent is synonymous with kept. (CP, 147)

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In locating himself within the context of other moderns, Frost enjoyed calling himself a “Synecdochist.” “I prefer the synecdoche in poetry – that figure of speech in which we use the part for the whole.” In the context of Pound and others he said, perhaps somewhat facetiously, “I started calling myself a Synecdochist when others called themselves Imagists or Vorticists. Always, always a larger significance. A little thing touches a larger thing.”4 The last phrase illuminates best why Frost liked the term because it reveals his interest in observing traits and in moving from the low down and the little thing to see its connectedness to, the way it “touches,” a larger thing.

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As he wrote in a short preface “The Prerequisites”: A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems

ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their place as the stars do. (CP, 174)

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Writing in the pastoral mode, authors from Theocritus and Virgil to Dante and Milton as well as Wordsworth and Thoreau have explored questions of human equality, man’s place in nature, and the nature of faith. Though focused on country life or rural life, both pastoral and georgic have long been known as modes written by and appealing to those of immense learning and sophis- tication. It should not be surprising that pastoral and georgic modes consider the country from the perspective of those who live in or at least have had some experience of the city. A tension between city and country, innocence of one kind and experience or learning and sophistication of another, has always been a part of the pastoral and georgic mode.

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The pastoral has had an important place in American ideology but by no means a singular meaning. The puritan pursuit of renewal through rebellion against ecclesiastical corruption invokes what may be called a pastoral long- ing for perfection through simplicity. Thomas Jefferson praised the way of agrarianism, echoing Greek ideals of the independent farmer. Frost’s complex version of the pastoral does not involve a complete retreat into wilderness (one version), nor a faith in pure agrarianism, nor social reform. He once said, distinguishing himself from Thoreau’s version of the pastoral: “I am not a

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‘back-to-the-lander.’ I am not interested in the Thoreau business. Only a few can do what Thoreau did. We must use the modern tools at our disposal” (I, 78). Shortly after his Collected Poems were published in 1930, Frost affirmed the relationship of his poetry to a fundamental pastoral ideal, the praise of rustic over urban life:

Poetry is more often of the country than of the city. Poetry is very, very rural – rustic . . . It might be taken as a symbol of a man, taking its rise from individuality and seclusion – written first for the person that writes and then going out into its social appeal and use. Just so the race lives best to itself – first to itself, storing strength in the more individual life of the country, of the farm – then going to market in the industrial city.

(I, 75–76) Frost saw an analogy between the development of poetry, the individual,

and the society from the nascent and isolated world of the country to the more sophisticated or adulterated, world of the city.

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