Basic Poetics - (Meter and Emphasis)

AG: "All this the world well knows; yet none knows well"  (Shakespeare) - Well they [the anthologists] have got two different ways. There's two different ways of pronouncing it. As they say (as you'll notice) - "Most practiced readers of verse will carry the first pattern in their minds, while actually reading along with and sometimes in contrast with the first" - while actually reading in contrast to the first. So.."All this/ the world/ well knows/yet none/ knows well" would be the iambic pentameter. "All this/ the world/ well knows/yet none/ knows well" would be the formal regular count. Does everybody understand that?

– Iambic pentameter, meaning five feet – Iamb – light and then heavy – the light iambic accent, a light accent, and then a heavy –“All this”, “I go”, “I deal”, “Ideal” (“Ideal" is a word with an iambic meter, right?). Is everybody... Is that clear for everybody? I mean there may be some people who have never heard of iambic and trochaic, but, starting off at that foot (starting off at our feet!), iambic feet.

So – “All this the world well knows yet none knows well" - (But) you wouldn’t really say that, you’d say,  “All this the world well knows yet none knows well.” – “All this the world well knows..” (because  you’re saying basically, “all this the world knows well”). So, if you were an actor, on stage, you’d say “All this the world well knows..” So “well” would take an accent, right?

Now. in neither of their interpretations has it occurred to them that the word “well” might take an accent there – dig? – are you following?

The classic example of that is.. (that I’ve used teaching in school here before)  - “The Ship of State..”  who wrote “The Ship of State”?  the American poem, “Thou too, sail on, O ship of state” [Editorial note - the actual title of the poem is, in fact, "The Building of the Ship"] (the poem) that Winston Churchill quoted in his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946

Peter Orlovsky: Matthew Arnold?

AG: Oliver Wendell Holmes or something? [Editorial note - it was actually Henry Wadsworth Longfellow] -  “Thou too sail on, O ship of state” – That was always used in the college high-school textbooks back in the (19)20’s as an example of -  “Thou too/, sail on/ O ship/ of state” - Iambic again. However, if you pronounce it, it's “Thou too/, sail on/ O ship/ of state” – In other words, you see,  the “O” is an exclamation.. Except, they’ve made an exclamation.. they’ve counted an exclamation, as an unaccented syllable.  So it gets really goofy  - meaning, really, the degeneration of the whole system, actually. And that’s why people abandoned the system , this kind of system of measurement around (Walt) Whitman’s time and began working on a different system of measurement, because it ran so far counter.. the actual system of measurement ran so far counter to the way American conversational vernacular rhythmic (bopping)  tripped along that it was not really a reliable guide and that it was better to listen to speech and then begin to construct your own rhythm than construct your own system of measurement (which is what William Carlos Williams did). And so, at the end of this long.. the light at the end of this long tunnel of the whole of of English Literature would be (going to a study..towards the end of this term)..will be, (at least), checking out systems of home-made Operation Bootstrap measurement of the line.

However. .. So [back to  "I Syng of A Mayden"]. I would say… “King of all Kings for her son, she chose” would be just as good as "for her son she chose" - “For my son, I’m gonna have the king of all kings! - that’s the vernacular  -“King of all Kings for her son, she chose”. So it could be – or it could be “King of all Kings for her son, she …" but that.. already that begins to get corny or rhetorical - “King of all Kings for her son, she chose” – Does that make any sense? Corny or rhetorical if I emphasize the word “son” rather than “her son”? Maybe, or either way  - “King of all Kings for her son, she chose”  

So it'd probably be (ok either) way you put it.

So, you have that much (just like a pianist interpreting a Beethoven score, or a little Chopin Nocturne, in this case), you have the possibility of interpreting it as you want, as you understand the poem, and interpreting it rhythmically, as you understand the poem, and shifting emphasis, just as a pianist does when he’s.. there are certain..when he’s interpreting a little Nocturne, or little piece of music. Depending upon what emphasis, what accent, what speed, he wants to do it, it gives it a different emotional tone, slightly different body-English. So you have the same possibility of varying the body-English in reading these poems – and that’s what makes them really interesting, I think. It gives them musical possibilities – And actually that’s what (Bob) Dylan does with his own songs, he’s constantly shifting the accents around., as you notice, from year to year, as he reinterprets how to pronounce “Just Like A Woman” or "Like A Rolling Stone” or “Idiot Wind”…   

to be continued

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at approximately ten-and-a-quarter minutes in  and continuing to approximately sixteen-and-a-half minutes in]

Expansive Poetics - 29 (Longfellow's Metrics)

["Thou too, Sail on, O ship of State.." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) autographed manuscript]



["The degredation of life in America" - William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) annotated typescript -
 c.Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale, Connecticut ]


Student: Did they [the early American modernists] manage to do it? (find a way of measuring American verse)?

AG: Yes, I think (William Carlos) Williams did. There were a number of people working on this problem at the time who were friends - William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and Marianne Moore, altogether went to the same school [editorial note - not exactly, Williams and Pound went to the University of Pennsylvania, Doolittle and Moore to near-by Bryn Mawr] and were friends and lovers, slept with each other, got drunk together, went out to dances, read poetry together. Willams [born 1883] was a little bit older than Pound, [born 1885],  Marianne Moore, I think, about the same age as Pound [1887, two years younger] and Hilda Doolittle [born 1886] maybe slightly younger. Hilda Doolittle is famous as an Imagist poet.


[H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)]

They all attempted to solve the problem of measure by different strategies. And among this group of poets - the avant-garde Imagist school, that was modernist, Imagist, Objectivist, you could call it, who received the influence of the international poets that we'll been dealing with, like the Futurists and Surrealists and Dadaists, who understood the sense of relativity of speech and morals and philosophy, and who had God swept out from under them, and all absolutes swept out from under them, and even patriotism, as you can see, after Whitman and Pound.  After World War I and the destruction of all civilized values, there was no reference point in civilization that one could count on as a permanent value. The older measures - the stress - duh-dah duh-dah duh-dah duh-dah - had fallen into disrepute because (they) had finally come to pervert speech. So, by 1860, or (18)80, there was a poem, (by) Oliver Wendell Holmes, I think [editorial note - it was in fact by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow], "The Ship of State" [from "The Building of The Ship", the final section - "The Republic"] (which was quoted, in 1945 by (England's Prime Minister) Winston Churchill, as sort of official poetic rhetoric, the kind of poetry a man could listen to).  And it was "Thou too sail on, O ship of state.." You know that poem? 

Student: Hmm

AG: Does anybody know or ever hear of that?



["Sail on Oh Ship of State.." -Franklin D Roosevelt to Winston Churchill, January 20, 1941]


Student: Yes

AG: Well, maybe I'll bring it in. It's in all the high school anthologies of the (19)20's - (And) it has the line - "Thou too sail on, O ship of state" - And it's considered to be (a perfect example of) iambic pentameter.
[Allen moves to the blackboard] - There doesn't seem to be an eraser here. Can we make sure that there are (in the future)...in case we need...

Well, it's the climactic line which Winston Churchill quoted - "Thou too sail on, O ship of state" - That's how it was measured - "Thou too sail on, O ship of state" - Right?  You can all hear that?. However, if you notice, the exclamatory "O' - Oh! - which is, if anything, an exclamation with stress, here receives no stress. So, finally, the poetic measure of America and England had become so reversed that it made absolutely no sense at all - that an exclamatory "O" was given an unstressed mark. So that can't be any kind of measure at all because it runs counter to speech. They'd finally come to the point where the formal measure had actually begun contradicting speech cadences. So there was no way of using this anymore except by putting your emotions into some kind of box that it didn't fit. Because, actually, I would say, " THOU too SAIL ON O ship of STATE", (and) if you're going to say "O", you're going to say "OH!" - "OH ship of state" - but the "OH! - " would be bigger than anything else (or "SAIL" - probably "SAIL" and "OH!" would be equal) - "Thou too SAIL ON O ship of state" (So " sail", "O", "ship" - or maybe the "state" too). But that's just exactly weirded out. I mean, that's weirding out, the way it's set up there [Allen is referring to the iambic measure that he has inscribed upon the blackboard]

Peter Orlovsky: How did (Winston) Churchill say it?

AG: "Thou TOO sail ON o SHIP of STATE"  - It's automatic... like robot cadences.
Yeah, I think in Fulton, Missouri, the "Iron Curtain" speech, I think, he did that. When he declared Cold War on Russia, he did it with that kind of cadence - in other words, a completely faked public language. [editorial note - 'the "Iron Curtain" speech" referred to here was delivered in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. - in it, Churchill declared, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."] 


They all had to deal with this problem, that is to say - Pound, Moore, Williams, H.D. 
They all solved it different ways.

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-seven-and-a-quarter minutes in, and concluding approximately forty-two-and-three-quarter minutes]