The Music of Words

...Of course, a collection of pieces that originally appeared separately and over a long period will have occasional repetitions of information or thoughts, and this one is no exception...

...One section, Rosen explains, is written on three staves instead of two...

...Sublimely high and dense syntactically...

...Similarly, he revisits Robert Frost's much-anthologized "The WoodPile" and posits a deeper meaning that could have slipped by unnoticed...

...In Elizabeth Bishop's mysterious, dreamlike "The Man-Moth" (the title was inspired by a newspaper misprint for "mammoth"), he notices a resemblance in one image to a mystical painting by Hieronymus Bosch, Ascension to the Empireum: Visions of the Afterlife...

...As Hecht argues, "It may be claimed that the music of form goes unheard [by making] itself felt subliminally, working on us in ways we are not fully aware of unless we put ourselves to the study of the work in question and examine it with care, tact and delicacy...

...In the role of critic, Hecht scrutinizes the work of others closely, revealing wonders that might easily be missed even by a reasonably diligent interpretation...

...The author of an insightful book on the work of W.H...

...a passage from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens about unplayed instruments keeping their sounds to themselves...

...Semiology" provides a witty remark on pronunciation: The frightful hard g in the word malignant's Silent in benign Elsewhere, Hollander satirizes poor writing, whose victim is "patient language, always waiting to be/ Misused, waiting for it...

...A visitor to a house in the mountains, looking out a picture window, appears to be marveling at the magnificent landscape...

...Including a poignant evocation of some of the great New York Yiddish poets, like H. Leyvick, Moishe Leib Halpern and Mani Leib, Hollander quotes Leyvick's description of their plight as foreign authors in an unreceptive world: Like careworn cats who schlep all their umpteen Kittens around on agitated feet, We go schlepping our poems by the neck, between Our teeth, through every New York City street...

...Sue You Have Seen" would serve as a fine example for one of Hecht's essays on rhyme...

...It is easy to feel a smug nostalgia for those immigrants trying to find an audience for a dying tongue in their adopted country...

...It brought despair right and left...

...each of his books gives one the feeling of having enlarged one's horizons, of having heard enchanting melodies and been lifted out of stale preoccupations to glimpse the sublime...

...Schoolchildren once learned how to scan meter and knew the names of prosodie devices...

...One fascinating essay illustrates the way shifts in pronunciation have sometimes produced dissonance for readers of a later time by destroying what the poet intended to be a perfect rhyme...

...he proves to be an equally distinguished critic...

...In his Introduction, he declares, "The critics who have meant most to me are those who have broadened my ways of seeing both individual works and whole genres and types of writing, entire regions of thinking, sources of feeling, and especially social or historical conventions and rituals that so often lie immersed and unnoticed at the bottom of some work of literature...

...Hecht has every reason to decry this turn of events...

...Standing with his back to the room, he is compared to a Rückfiguren, the small human figure admiring beautiful vistas in 19th-century German paintings—until the narrator realizes the guest is actually admiring his own reflection: Too bad, that...

...His eye is as acute as his ear...

...Hollander is consistently a delightful host...

...Many of his insights pertain to the hidden springs of an individual poet's creative impulse...

...He describes such abuse in comic book terms: The body of the letter being slugged And all the spirit twisted out of it By the marauders of the metaphor...

...Yet beyond the picture window there is a vast panorama of scenes and ideas, and many of them make their way into these inviting poems...

...The volume's title evokes a wide array of references...

...He undoubtedly performs such a role in Melodies Unheard...

...Unaware that his second book, where "The Wood-Pile" appeared, would find greater success than most poetry volumes can hope for, he was already picturing himself, Hecht suggests, as a man forced to abandon his vocation for lesser tasks...

...Hecht's perceptions extend well beyond prosody...

...If I read him correctly, Hollander appears to believe, despite Emerson, that we can, after all, consider words a kind of homestead...

...He observes that there is another way "the music of forms—its echoic effects, recapitulations, harmonies, and, above all, its melody—goes unheard: All too often, alas, it falls on deaf ears...

...On Poetry The Music of Words By Phoebe Pettingell For much of the 20th century a fierce debate raged among English-speaking poets and their readers about the value of traditional uses of rhyme and meter...

...Not content with simply producing antiformalist poems, they have been prone to attack anyone daring to hone his or her skill composing sonnets, Rime Royal, terza rima, or any of the myriad patterns that buttressed poetry for ages...

...Hecht includes as an epigraph a familiar line from Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter...

...His formal analysis of prosody illuminates the intricacies and effects of complex forms...

...One writer, he laments in the Introduction, "has recently affirmed that anyone who observes formal constraints is unambiguously a fascist...

...So we shrink the world down to background for our reflection (in both senses of the term) because nothing outside ourselves interests us in our solipsistic age...

...This book's fervent argument for attending to the sounds and rhythms of poetry is too illuminating to be left unread...

...In fact, each leads us away from the essential melody of words that lies at the heart of the craft...

...Auden, The Hidden Law (1993), he understands the difficulties of writing cogently about both the technical aspects of poetry and, more important, the music that makes it sing to us...

...Put baldly, such an interpretation might sound reductive, but the way Hecht teases the notion out of Bishop's enigmatic symbols and phrases makes it revelatory...

...Today, many seem incapable of hearing them...

...operates like those cutout shapes, fins or terminal blobs of a Calder mobile, each contributing its own carefully calculated weight, which must be reckoned in achieving the balanced yet flexible effect of the whole...

...These essays draw attention to details that might escape a more shortsighted critic...

...Those forms are now dismissed by their enemies as artifacts of the past, fit only for light verse...

...By deliberately altering the rhythm of key stanzas, he shows how the unique impact that made the original worthwhile can be lost, even if the meaning remains intact...

...Three years into the 21 st, the battle shows no signs of abating...

...Like his previous work, the latest crop allows us to revel in the pleasures of word music while savoring wise commentary on poetic art and other matters...

...Hollander is always fascinated by the implications of metaphor...

...Frost was deeply discouraged that reviewers casually belittled his first collection, after he had given up everything and transplanted his family to England to devote himself entirely to writing verse...

...The Modernist injunction to "make it new" has increasingly inspired radicals to divorce themselves from any link to tradition...

...Auden pointed out that it was characteristic of the British to speak lightly of what they took most seriously, and the tendency has been passed down to a range of English-speaking societies...

...In Byron's day, for instance, the accent in the word "balcony" fell on its second syllable rather man its first, allowing a match with the Italian name "Giorgione...

...An inventive and ingenious formalist, Hollander has just brought forth his 18th poetry collection, Picture Window (Knopf, 96 pp., $24.00...

...As if thumbing its (metaphorical) nose at the charge that many formal stanzas are now appropriate solely for light verse, Picture Window brims with fun...

...This sense of movement soon becomes ominously frenetic, however, a reminder that we are merely strangers and sojourners in this life: But with all the stuff of our lives, we have to keep Going, going, or we will all be gone...

...The author's apology for being primarily a poet is quite unnecessary...

...Poetry has indeed lost the broad audience it boasted as recently as the early 20th century...

...It plays with the girl's name throughout, using a host of clever puns and echoes: sue in its legal meaning, the old French coin sou, pursue, the locks at Sault St...

...Now in his 80s, he has been one of our supreme formalist poets for almost four decades...

...The book's title poem performs a shift in perspective from the Romantic veneration of nature to the contemporary emphasis on the self...

...In 1983 John Hollander shared the Bollingen Prize with Anthony Hecht, and the two once collaborated on a book of comic verse, Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double-Dactyls...

...The poem plays with this idea, testing its usefulness, in part through a rather comic application of the pathetic fallacy—that literary device beloved by high school English classes where human emotions are projected onto the inanimate...

...Hecht scoms the view that a poem should require no outside knowledge to be comprehensible...

...His erudite readings prove so enthralling that a simpler approach looks callow by comparison...

...He demonstrates how the subtle mathematical patterns of certain Elizabethan lyrics, such as the sestina, give rise to particular emotions in the reader...

...Nonetheless, the book is mined with stimulating theories and fresh observations...

...plus a fascinating excerpt from Charles Rosen about Robert Schumann's Humoreske for piano...

...Deducing that the passage incorporates allusions to events preceding the 1914 assassination at Sarajevo and also to mad King Ludwig of Bavaria (whose death is echoed by Eliot's drowned Phoenician sailor), the author further underlines Eliot's obsession with the decadence and decay he saw around him...

...The following stanza from Julia Moore, the "Sweet Singer of Michigan" who loved to commemorate tragedies she read about in the newspaper, especially delighted Mark Twain: Swiftly passed the engine's call, Hastening souls on to death, Warning not one of them all...

...Is language, then, essentially one huge semi, bearing us endlessly over the superhighways of existence...

...Discussing a poem by the late James Merrill, Hecht remarks that its "rhyming...

...Though attached to many of the historical trappings of his art, he has also been passionately intent on making sense of his own times, in his verse and his criticism...

...Eliot's The Waste Land...

...Hecht's exploration of the mirth provoked by the inept rhymes of novices is hilarious...

...On the contrary, he insists, "Poetry is really sturdier than that...

...So long as we can tune in to the music of words from the likes of Anthony Hecht and John Hollander, we will find poetry as vital as ever...

...and the better it is the sturdier it becomes under inspection...

...The middle stave carries the melody, but is not meant to be played, only imagined...

...Literary critics have for too long chosen to focus on content, historical context, ideas, culture, and the like...

...A well-known palindrome about Napoleon's reaction upon arriving at Elba inspires a little verse about the unfortunate Biblical figure Abel and an imagined sister called Leba—his own name spelled backwards...

...The culture has changed so dramatically that it is reasonable to ask if traditional verse has become an endangered language, inaccessible to anyone but the specialist...

...This, in turn, brings him to a trail of clues that the whole poem is an allegory about how unconscious fears—including Bishop's own anxiety that she would follow her mother into madness—make themselves evident...

...To this quotation he adds several others, each shedding light on the title: a bit from Thomas Campion's well-known Sapphic addressing the "silent musick" of "rose-cheekt" Laura's beauties...

...In Transit" takes for its epigraph a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "All symbols are fluxional...

...In his latest essay collection, Melodies Unheard (Johns Hopkins, 304 pp., $24.95), Anthony Hecht concedes unhappily that many readers, not to mention authors, consider poetry to be "the immediate and spontaneous overflow of strong emotions, that it is entirely a matter of feelings, sensations, impulses, visceral promptings and that nothing is more alien to it than mathematics and the rigidities of numerical proportions...

...Fast down to low and dirty, and then back To middle flight again—was just a dying Yiddish, and whether in its yak-yak-yak Quotidian palaver, or high-flying Lyric ironies, now already in need Of too much glossing...

...After noting that metaphomn can mean "moving van" in modern Greek, the poet writes: The dullestFebruaiy dawn gives up its first catatonic sulk and soon starts loading Up with the innermost of motions assuring that each new morning will be moving day...

...He could only toy in the worst way with That splendidmodern instrument of truth: Plateglass, which superimposes mirrored Patches of gazer's face, and bits of the Space out of which he looks, upon all that He might be seeing...

...It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss Hollander's amusing imagery and wordplay as trivial...

...Hecht's last sentence provides one more layer of meaning...

...None of these subjects helps us hear a poem...

...Or is there in fact a final destination, a "place that yet was right here all along...

...In a piece called "Uncle Tom's Shantih," Hecht does a bit of detective work to uncover the historical background behind the sledding incident in T.S...

...Yet Hollander wonders gloomily whether today's poets are in the process of suffering a similar fate: Isn't it that our English—with its deep And echoing caverns of the KJV And roller-coaster rides twisting and steep...

...He strongly disagrees with the late William Stafford's claim that analyzing verse would be "like boiling a watch to see what makes it tick...

...all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead...

...Marie, and the tea Lapsang souchong...