When Poems Mattered

...He became convinced that the poet “developed in solitude” and approvingly underlined a passage in a book by Baroness de Staël asserting that rhyme “is the image of hope and of memory...

...Throned on my seaside, like Canute, bearded Ossian smites his hoar harp, wreathed with wild-flowers, in which warble my Wallers...

...They were only identifiable as verse because they consisted of uneven lines trickling thinly down the page...

...The poet chooses an odd trimeter rhythm (three beats to a line) with a pause at the end that suggests an unheard fourth beat, making for a lopsided march...

...Not one of them suggested the influence of any actual poet...

...Not until the mid-Victorian era did prose receive the regard accorded to epics or a collection of odes...

...Though this might sound dry and academic, Vendler’s skillful unpacking of the devices Yeats employed in his masterpieces is enthralling...

...Painstakingly, he developed his own poetic philosophy by voracious reading and thinking through the ideas he had accumulated until “he had defined his own aesthetic credo...

...Vendler’s latest book, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Harvard 428 pp., $35.00), discusses how her subject’s straddling Romanticism and Modernism shaped his art...

...Not all of Melville’s reviewers appreciated his flights of poetic description...

...Those bound for college would have read Virgil and Horace, possibly Homer too, in the original, along with works by French and German writers...

...The ordinary life of sailors on a ship is sometimes described in the grandiose terms reserved for warriors in the Iliad...

...the poem asks, suggesting that the foolhardy heroism of the Irish would be invoked (as it still is) to justify more brutality...

...Yeats considered himself to be of the generation of “the last romantics” who “chose for theme/Traditional sanctity and loveliness...

...Yet even this slam is not quite as dismissive as a modern reader might assume, since a number of respected 18th- and 19th-century poets actually did write from mental hospitals...

...Furthermore, in this tribute to the martyrs of the Uprising, he betrayed his own conviction that, instead of striking a blow for freedom, his native country was caught up in the process of history...

...During the first half of the 19th century, Sir Walter Scott’s reputation, for example, was based on his poetry, while his popular novels were considered lesser works...

...The Ossian forgery, meant to demonstrate that the Celts produced their own Homer, was still considered an authentic inspiration to Melville’s contemporaries...

...Novels quoted verse extensively...

...Now, experience and old age give them much to talk about, but they cannot help but recall the passionate engagement of their youth...

...A meeting in a café with a former mistress (Olivia Shakespear, the first woman with whom he had sex) inspired his “Speech after long silence...

...young We loved each other and were ignorant...

...In the final version, the man and woman sit in dim light that barely shows the ravages of time...

...Melville’s biographer, Hershel Parker, recounts the late Alfred Kazin admonishing him in a 1997 forum, “You have to remember that poetry was just a sideline with Melville...

...MANY READERS OF Moby-Dick, or even the South Seas romances Typee and Omoo, are unaware that Herman Melville wrote poetry too...

...Kazin’s remark, and some reviews that questioned Parker’s claims of “lost” volumes by the author, inspired Melville: The Making of the Poet (Northwestern, 256 pp., $32.95...

...They have blocked the darkness outdoors because it is a reminder of their approaching death...

...Even illiterate people memorized poems and songs, and people with even a restricted education memorized long tracts of poetry, which they were often able to retrieve from memory all through their lives...

...Stanzas came to mind for our forebears as easily as the lyrics of popular songs or advertising slogans do for us...

...If these vocabularies have since slipped your mind the work of the critic Helen Vendler will, without pedantry, refresh your memory and even teach you some new devices...

...One might wonder what is left to discover...

...Throughout the ages, poets have helped us make sense of turbulent times, and now we need all the help we can get...

...Plenty, is Vendler’s answer...

...Yeats studies have burgeoned in recent years, coinciding with the release of his papers and the deaths of those mentioned in them...

...The subsequent ruthless execution of some of its ringleaders provided the momentum for the eventual Irish Free State...

...Before embarking, he left a manuscript with his family, who often found publishers for his work during his absences...

...I agree with Parker that, although Melville’s primary influences were early19th-century British writers seldom read anymore, his unusual voice was ahead of his time...

...He can thus demonstrate that for much of his life Melville analyzed the techniques of writing lyrics so that when his verse finally appeared before the public it displayed a mature style perfected over years of quiet labor...

...If close study of that relatively simple lyric reveals so much, imagine what Vendler can extract from “Easter, 1916,” Yeats’ ambivalent tribute to Ireland’s first abortive attempt to proclaim itself free from British rule...

...He saw these lyrics not only as a record of his nation’s conflict, but also as a suggestion about how it could reunite itself: “Supposing a happy issue out of present perplexities, then, in the generation next to come, Southerners there will be yielding allegiance to the Union, feeling all their interests bound up in it, and yet cherishing unrebuked that kind of feeling for the memory of the soldiers of the fallen Confederacy that [Robert] Burns, Scott, and the Ettrick Shepherd [James Hogg] felt for the memory of the gallant clansmen ruined through their fidelity to the Stuarts—a feeling whose passion was tempered by the poetry imbuing it, and which in no wise affected their loyalty to the Georges, and which, it may be added indirectly contributed excellent things to literature...

...We can now learn the details of his occult interests, his relations with other contemporary writers, his role in the founding of the Abbey Theater, his political activities, and his mistresses...

...A significant portion of this book is devoted to the role of verse throughout the 19th century...

...Thanks to her, we too can move nearer the heart of that music...

...Written when Yeats was 64, it began as a series of jottings: Your hair is white My hair is white Come let us talk of love What other [theme?] do we know When we were young W e were in love with one another And therefore ignorant...

...Just as Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel is not read much today, many of the admired poets of that era are now largely forgotten...

...As Parker explains the lyrical ideas held by early to mid19th-century readers, we begin to understand the “poetic” quality of Moby-Dick, whose characters indulge in lengthy Shakespearean soliloquies or philosophize in the rhythms of the King James Bible...

...The obsessions of Captain Ahab suggest Milton’s Satan...

...Edmund Waller and Matthew Prior, minor 17th-century poets, are scarcely remembered by modern readers...

...He was acutely aware, however, that in his own era and conflicted country “all is changed”—that ceremonies and values once celebrated by poetry had yielded to cycles of bloodshed and the shattering of icons...

...Was it needless death after all...

...Books live almost entirely because of their style,” the poet asserted...

...Vendler observes that “Yeats cherished to the end of his life the hope that some of his works might pass into the mouths of the people...

...Even then, books of verse continued to feature on best-seller lists, and schools taught a vocabulary for discussing the precise musical and metaphoric techniques used by poets...

...A number of critics who know better have nonetheless dismissed those efforts...

...It was as if teachers had said “Write about something you feel and start a new line where you would normally put a punctuation mark...

...At the time Melville was born and for as long as he lived,” Parker points out, “spoken poetry was part of people’s everyday lives...

...He periodically wrote ballads, hoping they would be sung by the folk, but his ideas were always too complex to gain popularity...

...and high over my ocean, sweet Shakespeare soars, like all the larks of the spring...

...Vendler’s opening chapter illustrates how much uncovering the proper form was part of Yeats’ discovery of what he wanted to say in a given poem...

...The consensus has long been that Melville turned to poetry late in his career, after he became discouraged with the critical rejection of his increasingly dense, metaphysical novels...

...Vendler tracks how, draft by laborious draft, the poet discovered a way of articulating his distress at seeing Olivia as an old woman without deploying the standard trope of white hair, and how he ultimately arrived at something both profound and unique...

...My point is not to rant about the current state of literary education, but merely to note that poetry was once part of the average person’s mental grooming...

...Beneath it were the works of a number of high-schoolers...

...there was no recognizable metrical structure, much less rhyme...

...Vendler’s analysis traces how, through diction and rhythm, “Easter, 1916” builds to a passionate portrait of political turmoil and wrong piled on wrong...

...If the poem works, fresh nuances and meanings will be revealed through this sort of attention...

...Many of us learned enough about meter in school to recognize an iamb from a troche or diagram the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet...

...The mnemonic properties of rhyme and meter allowed those with limited libraries to carry around favorite passages in their heads to be savored at will...

...Yet disappointments that might have blighted a less tenacious writer only made him strive harder...

...When we first encounter a poem, we usually react emotionally to its effects without full awareness of what causes them...

...Had these young authors been born in 1900, or a century earlier, each would probably have memorized a considerable body of verse by their late teens...

...it was never important to him and he was never good at it...

...These banal musings could describe any reunion between lovers where the remembrance of youth is confronted by the physical changes age brings...

...The Boston Post sniffed scornfully o f Pierre : “To save it from almost utter worthlessness, it must be called a prose poem, and even then, it might be supposed to emanate from a lunatic hospital rather than from the quiet retreats of Berkshire...

...blind Milton sings bass to my Petrarchs and Priors, and laureats crown me with bays...

...Three of its four stanzas conclude with a variation on the refrain, All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born...

...Parker quotes a passage from Melville’s Mardi (1849), where the poet Yoomey effuses: “Like a grand ground swell, Homer’s old organ rolls its vast volumes under the light frothy wavecrests of Anacreon and Hafiz...

...Speech after long silence...

...Once, in such circumstances, they would have gone to bed with each other...

...In the draft, Yeats’ sentiments are as devoid of individuality as the poems I saw in the library window...

...it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead, Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade, The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night, That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom...

...Today, we might better appreciate these highly original works...

...typically chapters began with a stanza from some wellknown poet, setting the tone for the action to come...

...THE CIVIL WAR was the catalyst for Melville’s second volume of verse, Battle-Pieces...

...In fact, Parker argues, the writer believed, in common with the literary culture of his day, that poetry was the superior art...

...Those of us who were English majors in college (or else Classicists) learned about tropes...

...The intricacies of Vendler’s book defy summary in a short review, but if you love Yeats’ writing—or merely want to delve deeper into what makes a poem powerful—Our Secret Discipline will captivate you...

...Parker’s extensive knowledge of Melville’s letters enables him to show that back in 1860, when the writer sailed to Manila on his brother’s ship, the Meteor, he looked forward to returning as an acknowledged poet...

...To know Yeats as a poet,” Vendler declares, “we must come to understand that ‘high breeding of poetical style’ which he so intently absorbed from the past, and which he regenerated, with tireless and tenacious originality, in his own 50 years of verse...

...The passage indicates much about the tastes of a time when poetry was largely divided into “epic” (Homer, Ossian and Milton) and “lyric” (Shakespeare—on the basis of his songs from the plays—Waller, Petrarch, and Prior...

...After all, the greatest writers of all time—Classical Greeks and Romans, not to mention Chaucer and Shakespeare—were poets...

...So she traces the way this consummate master of convention used historic formalist techniques to craft some of the most memorable poems of the 20th century...

...But if we care enough about it to dwell on the lines—where true reading begins—we begin to notice the structure that affected us in the first place...

...Unfortunately, Parker breaks off his book at the very moment Melville actually emerged as a full-fledged poet, without quoting his rather remarkable, if neglected lyrics...

...This time their efforts came to nothing, nor do we know if any of these poems appeared in later collections, or whether Melville destroyed them all in discouragement...

...His life’s work became the forging of verses that would mark this passing and preserve the essence of the art in an age where fewer and fewer people cherished it...

...Parker knows his subject’s papers—including a cache discovered in 1983—and he has also studied annotations in the writer’s copies of books...

...The musicality of verse was popularly associated with the sounds of nature and of birds...