poetry and science

[jack butler]

I begin this thread with the encouragement of a senior member of this forum, a member who shall go unnamed, however, in the event that anyone should wish to blame him for the results.

I feel that poetry is a little larger than fun and games, though there are certainly games in poetry and it is a lot of fun; but there were no other appropriate categories, so I put it in this one.

First, a couple of principles.

(1) This thread is not intended as argumentative, but contributive. Tastes and opinions vary, but it is not necessary to choose either poetry or science. In fact, I begin the thread precisely because I have loved both activities all my life, and believe that they each have a great deal to offer the thinking human.

(2) I suggest that none of us reproduce herein our own poetry or the poems of friends. Believe me, such restraint is as difficult for me as it is for you, since I am certain you would benefit enormously from exposure to the brilliance of my work. But since almost everyone wants an audience. that approach would lead rapidly to a disastrous cascade. In order to proceed beyond a certain elementary level in both poetry and science, one must learn to detach one’s ego from one’s work, to learn that one’s poetry is not one’s self, and is not one’s baby-child.

Nothing in this suggestion would prevent interested parties from exchanging poetry outside this discussion, of course.

Americans are the most frightened by two disciplines, mathematics and science. In a behavior that is almost certainly related, Americans also tend to think of imagination and reason as opposite qualities. I think of them as two basic abilities that help us to think, something in the way that opposable thumbs help us to grasp physical objects.

Poetry and mathematics are not opposites. To practice either at top form, one must practice. When I was an undergraduate, many years ago, I took a double major in math and English (there were no degrees in creative writing then). Punching Fortran programs into cards (it was that long ago) for those giant machines, I was beset by a dizzying double vision. The lines of code seemed to me to move in ways that were highly analogous to the lines of a poem. Even the loops seemed related, because one of the characteristics of a good poem is that every line has an effect on the others; frequently a line in a sonnet, say, will send the reader looping back to previous lines, or even previous poems.

But later, when, in a poetry workshop, I turned in a poem whose central metaphor was based on a scientific theory, I was given to understand in short order that science was cold and heartless, and art was the realm of either feeling or the irrational, depending on who was doing the talking.

I thought that was a stupid way of seeing things. I knew I wasn’t cold or heartless, and could not understand how something that seemed so beautiful to me could be considered cold and heartless.

Later I discovered that a similar if reciprocal error prevailed among many scientists. For them poetry was the realm of the fuzzy, the imprecise. It was a woo-woo enterprise for touchy-feely types who couldn’t handle facts or information.

I hate both prejudices. An appreciation of science and mathematics sharpens the poet’s talents—even his or her imagery—and an ability to read good poetry with understanding performs similar services for the scientist. Both science and poetry are human productions, after all. Is it surprising that both, at their best, have something to offer? That both are beautiful and satisfying?

I say at their best, and from now on, whenever I speak of either, that is what I will be referring to. I have had dull—yes, stupid—science and mathematics teachers, who taught mathematics as a rote performance of unexplained strictures. They nearly killed my love of the stuff. In the same way, there is plenty of bad poetry out there, even plenty of highly rewarded bad poetry. In my opinion, the last sixty years of so of poetry in America have been generally disastrous, conveying that poetry is a specialized endeavor far too snobbish and sophisticated for the general reader, even the intelligent general reader, and destroying the ears of multitudes.

Far worse, I think the last sixty years of so of poetry in America have been incredibly boring and its practitioners incredibly incompetent.

So in this thread I will not be discussing the hacks in either trade. Most of the misunderstandings between the disciplines are the result of lack of information. It is my hope this thread will help relieve that dearth of information.

Enough preface: There are countless observations to be made, countless correlations between science and poetry, there are countless ways in which one may yield insight into the other.

I will begin the thread by addressing the misconception I described above. It is the general uninformed opinion that science is the realm of the exact, and poetry is the realm of the fuzzy, the imprecise. Feelings, you know.

I contend that both disciplines (at their best, remember) depend on precision, but they achieve that precision in disparate ways.

Science attempts to be precise by reducing the ambiguity of its terms, which increases their abstractness. One arrives at the precision of poetry by means of the relationships of all the parts. Take for example the word “vanity.” It has not always meant, as it does for most people now, conceit (a word which also has not always meant self-congratulation, but once was simply a variant spelling of "concept"). It meant, in the KJV version of Ecclesiastes, and therefore in Elizabethan times, and in most writing until recently, a foolish endeavor, certain to come to nothing. Of course, that is the nature of self-congratulation, so one sees the derivation.

Suppose one has studied the language for many years, and having become aware of this root for the word, can no longer hear it in its merely contemporary sense. Such a writer could attempt to redefine it for everyone, insisting we all agree on a common meaning (as in science). In poetry, that approach is not likely to be effective. Instead, the poet will use the word in the sense that he or she undertands it, and trust that its context, the way that it interacts with all the other elements of the poem, will recreate the fuller force of the original. The usage is very precise, but it is not predefined. The intelligent and responsive reader will be able to sense the older and more profound meaning from the way the word is used.

I think of the metaphor of the hologram as opposed to the digital bit. The hologram depends on global storage, on relationships. The bit depends on unambiguity.

The precision of poetry (by which, I repeat, I always mean good poetry, not necessarily famous poetry) is a precision that arises from the whole. Good poets are not attempting to be fuzzy and imprecise. Exactly the opposite.

No doubt this summation is oversimplified, but as a wise person whose name I cannot remember once said, every model must be simpler than the thing it models, or it has no utility.

[Ken G]

But later, when, in a poetry workshop, I turned in a poem whose central metaphor was based on a scientific theory, I was given to understand in short order that science was cold and heartless, and art was the realm of either feeling or the irrational, depending on who was doing the talking.
That's an interesting point-- I think this error is so often made on "both sides" of the science fence. Scientists often see their own art as exalted by its objectivity, seemingly placing it on the opposite end of the "subjective feeling" spectrum, despite the fact that almost all scientists do science because of the "charge" they get out of it. Similarly, poets often see science as debased by the coldness and heartlessness that is associated with this very same objectivity, yet they maintain that it is possible to tell good poetry from bad poetry, which would seem to require an almost scientifically objective metric. So we have scientists exalting their metrics and poets exulting in their meters, all the while seeing so much difference in form and missing so much similarity in substance. It seems a shame that your poem was passed over as an opportunity to expose this mistake.

Suppose one has studied the language for many years, and having become aware of this root for the word, can no longer hear it in its merely contemporary sense. Such a writer could attempt to redefine it for everyone, insisting we all agree on a common meaning (as in science). In poetry, that approach is not likely to be effective. Instead, the poet will use the word in the sense that he or she undertands it, and trust that its context, the way that it interacts with all the other elements of the poem, will recreate the fuller force of the original. The usage is very precise, but it is not predefined. The intelligent and responsive reader will be able to sense the older and more profound meaning from the way the word is used.This differing approach may stem from the fact that science is above all a search for unification, and poetry, it might be said, values diversification. Although it is also true that poets may be seeking a kind of unified response to certain verbal cues, to elicit a certain emotion, but they are not trying to reduce poetry but rather to expand it. That seems to motivate a different way of using words, to get more mileage out of the same alphabet used in science.


I think of the metaphor of the hologram as opposed to the digital bit. The hologram depends on global storage, on relationships. The bit depends on unambiguity.That seems to be thinking along similar lines, with greater imagery.

No doubt this summation is oversimplified, but as a wise person whose name I cannot remember once said, every model must be simpler than the thing it models, or it has no utility.
That's Occam's Razor in a nutshell, a key principle in science-- so it is interesting to reflect on how it is also applied in poetry.

[Peter Wilson]

Me searched & searched until I was dead
But found no poetry in this thread



LIGO and LISA went up the hill,
They each had mirrors and a laser.
LISA came down with gravity waves,
So LIGO cut his throat with a razor.



Ryhme doesn't count as poetry.
:doh:

[Eric Vaxxine]

I too was one, who failed to find a decent pun.

(assonance is fair...I hope?)

[please]

the poet will use the word in the sense that he or she undertands it, and trust that its context, the way that it interacts with all the other elements of the poem, will recreate the fuller force of the original.That's what scientists do all the time. It goes like:
- What's that word, "mass"?
- It's that number you need to make up momentum out of velocity.
- Momentum?
- Momentum. It is almost like velocity, but unlike velocity, it is conserved. And you can't really calculate anything without something that is conserved.
- Ok, ok, but what "mass" is?
- I told you the way it interacts with velocity. It should be enough.

[jack butler]

That's what scientists do all the time. It goes like:
- What's that word, "mass"?
- It's that number you need to make up momentum out of velocity.
- Momentum?
- Momentum. It is almost like velocity, but unlike velocity, it is conserved. And you can't really calculate anything without something that is conserved.
- Ok, ok, but what "mass" is?
- I told you the way it interacts with velocity. It should be enough.

Posted by me, actually. And what you are referring to is an interconnected set of specifically defined meanings. What I am referring to is something much more open-ended. In physics, to take your example, all have agreed to use the word mass (or the symbol m) in the same way. In poetry, there is no such agreement, and the reader is required to use inference. When you come to an equation in physics, you rightfully expect m to be used the same way by all physicists. There is no such certainty in poetry.

[jack butler]

That's an interesting point-- I think this error is so often made on "both sides" of the science fence. Scientists often see their own art as exalted by its objectivity, seemingly placing it on the opposite end of the "subjective feeling" spectrum, despite the fact that almost all scientists do science because of the "charge" they get out of it. Similarly, poets often see science as debased by the coldness and heartlessness that is associated with this very same objectivity, yet they maintain that it is possible to tell good poetry from bad poetry, which would seem to require an almost scientifically objective metric. So we have scientists exalting their metrics and poets exulting in their meters, all the while seeing so much difference in form and missing so much similarity in substance. It seems a shame that your poem was passed over as an opportunity to expose this mistake.
This differing approach may stem from the fact that science is above all a search for unification, and poetry, it might be said, values diversification. Although it is also true that poets may be seeking a kind of unified response to certain verbal cues, to elicit a certain emotion, but they are not trying to reduce poetry but rather to expand it. That seems to motivate a different way of using words, to get more mileage out of the same alphabet used in science.
That seems to be thinking along similar lines, with greater imagery.

That's Occam's Razor in a nutshell, a key principle in science-- so it is interesting to reflect on how it is also applied in poetry.

Dear Ken--

Thank you.

There is the fact that it is hard to get two poets to agree on what is good poetry and bad poetry, though each individual poet is very certain. Actually, I am making fun. There's quite a group of us who have fairly common judgments of most of the celebrated (and unread) contemporary poetry. In brief, we feel that poets have, in an attempt to become avant-garde, surrendered the things that matter most to readers, that is, as I put it, story and music. I suspect (and many of my compadres) that another powerful motive in this abandonment is the desire to get rid of any standards. If a poem depends on rhyme and meter, or indeed music of any sort, then it is fairly easy to tell how skillful the writer is. If it does not, if there is no way of gauging excellence of handling, then the claim can be made that poetry is "just" a matter of taste, and no one can really criticize anyone else.

I suspect a lot of lame writers are hiding behind that fogscreen.

My poem in that workshop I mentioned was not so much passed over as ridiculed as being wholly wrong in conception. It wasn't that great a poem, just a tossed-off rhyming simile. If it had been criticized for what it failed to do poetically, that would have been uncomfortable perhaps but justified. But what happened was that an entire subject was branded off-limits, and I have never been able to accept that attitude.

I like what you have to say about poetry seeking diversification and science seeking unification. Perhaps a thought I have often had about poetry applies: I like to say that the essence of language is naming. All our first words are concrete nouns. From there we progress to verbs and to semantical tags and to abstract concepts. (And if you have ever closely observed children coming into language, you may have noticed they show an overwhelming need to learn the names of things). Love exists, and we name it, but it cannot be measured, so it is an uncomfortable concept for some scientists. For some scientists, naming means measuring. For poets, it doesn't necessarily. There are for example some states of mind that we may experience only once in our entire lives. They cannot be compared, since they are unique. One may pretend that they did not happen, but they did. One may refuse to think about them or build a model which excludes them, but they happened. There is also the fact that some phenomena are too complex for a one-word name, but are real. Sometimes I think of a good poem--say Dylan Thomas's Fern Hill--as being the name of an experience. The experience cannot be summarized or shortened. Only the entire poem is sufficient to name it.

In my view, poetry is a way of celebrating existence, and science and scientific thought is a part of existence. Why shouldn't it be celebrated?

Incidentally, I think you are right about this thread. It probably belongs in another topic. I think it is fun, and poetry definitely involves games, but perhaps it is too strenuous for people who primarily want amusement. In a similar way, I love long-distance swimming, but many people think of it as boring and requiring too much effort.

[hhEb09'1]

I hate both prejudices.Yep. Here's my take on it, from my letter to an editorial page:
Science and Art are sometimes considered worlds apart, and I am happy to see an article which shows that they are not. The article makes a big mistake in characterizing the way many people view the two worlds, however. Positive descriptions are used for Art ("visual, musical, dramatic--the ultimate expression of the human creative spirit") and negative ones for Science ("drier, duller image of facts, equations and rules").

There are just as many negative and unfounded opinions of Art ("frivolous, unproductive, incomprehensible") as there are for Science, and positive ones abound for Science ("useful, powerful, fascinating"). It is ironic that an article that supports the merging of the two worlds should show such a bias against Science. In my experience, most people have positive opinions about both Art and Science.
.

[jack butler]

Yep. Here's my take on it, from my letter to an editorial page:.

Couldn't agree more. What is it about humans that makes us feel we have to divide into "us" and "them," with them always being worse? Is this a holdover from whatever inherited activity it is that makes crows peck a white crow to death? Some driver for speciation? I've noticed that when any tribe's name for itself is translated into English, it turns out usually to mean something like "the people." Implication: Those others aren't real people.

In an age of specialists, the wise generalist is more valuable than ever--which is not to say accorded more money or acclaim.

[Ken G]

I agree with both of you. It seems to all stem from a kind of "lifeboat" mentality-- we have to throw overboard everything but the bare essentials, for they are what we need to survive. Trouble is, people don't agree what the bare essentials are, and furthermore, should we not be striving to do more than survive anyway? It seems to me a workable definition of "civilization" could be all the things you can do when you care about more than just personal survival. So tossing out art on the grounds that it is not objectively verifiable, or tossing out science because it is so objective that is has no soul, is not only missing the whole point of both endeavors, it is missing the whole point of what civilization is all about. That is what motivated that science vs. religion thread, and look how hard it was for the rationalists to see that fairly straightforward point. What is so wrong with an embracing approach to human endeavor-- it's hard enough to get beyond just living out our lives with a minimum of personal tragedy and a maximum of pleasurable experiences, why do we have to make it even harder to explore that which is truly uplifting, in our zeal to clean out the lifeboat so completely?

[dhd40]

Couldn't agree more.

Me too! It´s very obvious to me that science and art (poetry, music, painting, sculpture, etc) go back to the same roots.

[satori]

vanity, vanity, every thing is vanity...
this poem (as quoted from the "supervillain" thread) is my little offering to the discussion
if you are expert on the multi facet word vanity you might object that only the misspelling is originally mine.......and you are right
now, i don't cite myself purely out of, well........vanity
but to show to you that you have been read and given a thought or two
also would i like to confirm you in your assertion that words must certainly matter in poetry
i would think that my personal understanding of poetry is limited to a sense for the magic of words and melody
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Qui ne voit pas la vanité du monde est bien vain lui-même. ((blaise pascal))

[satori]

ehm, yes.......
you will have remarked how much the beauty of the little Pascal phrase hinges on the semanticaly quit empty "bien"
-----------------------------------------------
Le superflu, chose si nécessaire

[satori]

holy sister!
must it not read "... been read and given a thought or two to" ?
(((i think i have inadvertantly managed to expose the limitations of your idiom.....
should English be........unfit for the Poetic Endevour?
maybe the French have an edge on you and are just right with their exception culturelle)))
-------------------------------------------------
Vive la République, vive la France!

[hhEb09'1]

should English be........unfit for the Poetic Endevour?not endevours, Poetry Slams, baby! :)

[peteshimmon]

Let me chime in. It seems poetry is about
expressing feelings as perfectly as possible
with the clumsy words we have. And it takes a
while to learn this. All the old jokes about if
it does not rhyme it is weird stuff and I always
wanted to write prose one day apply here. At the
end of the film Walkabout, Roeg used some
famous Houseman lines. Bit of a cheek really
as they were certainly not inspired by the
Australian landscape. It was the first time I
had heard then so here they are (with some
qudos by association perhaps:))...

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows
What are those blue remembered hills
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

[satori]

Poetry Slams, baby!

thanks hhE (i may call you like this ?) !
your little bite is epitome of the urban American stile...
i have a hard time not to morph into this thing whenever i do
some English writing

[satori]

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows
What are those blue remembered hills
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

you too, jack butler, won't be able on the long to escape giving us some concrete examples of what you consider good poetry
i am looking forward to it
-------------------------------------------------
Ten Thousand Light Years from Home

[please]

Posted by me, actually. And what you are referring to is an interconnected set of specifically defined meanings. What I am referring to is something much more open-ended. In physics, to take your example, all have agreed to use the word mass (or the symbol m) in the same way. In poetry, there is no such agreement, and the reader is required to use inference. When you come to an equation in physics, you rightfully expect m to be used the same way by all physicists. There is no such certainty in poetry.so the difference is that of scope? in physics, the scope is a theory, in poetry the scope is a poem. not much of a difference, if you'd ask me.

[jack butler]

you too, jack butler, won't be able on the long to escape giving us some concrete examples of what you consider good poetry
i am looking forward to it
-------------------------------------------------
Ten Thousand Light Years from Home

I'm fascinated by all facets of poetry, but in here primarily exploring the relationships between poetry and science. Nevertheless, among the hundreds of poems I consider really good, excluding Shakespeare, who is a country unto himself: To His Coy Mistress, half a dozen by Donne, a dozen or more by Dickinson--I'll just name poets, there are too many poems--Hopkins, Houseman, Hardy, Robinson, Robinson Jeffers, Frost, Wilbur, Dylan Thomas, and on and on. Yeats is one of my favorites. I offer here from memory (so some of the punctuation may be wrong) the masterful Sailing to Byzantium:

That is no country for old men: the young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
(Those dying generations) at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas--
Fish, flesh, and fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music, all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A
tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress--
Nor is there singing-school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence:
And therefore have I sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

Sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul:
Consume my heart away; sick with desire,
And fastened to a dying animal,
It knows not what it is; and gather me
into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make,
Of hammered gold and gold enameling,
To keep a drowsy emperor awake,
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

It is my feeling you don't have a poem unless you carry it in memory. Otherwise, all you can do is refer to it.

Someone previous said they felt poetry was the use of words to express feelings powerfully or well--don't remember the exact phrasing. I agree, except that I do not feel poetry is limited to feelings, by which most people mean the non-intellectual side of life. I find that the most vigorous and memorable discussions occur in poetry, and that they are not limited to feelings. In the poem I just quoted by Yeats, there is an intense condensation of vision, a whole philosophical structure implied, the relationship of the physical to the intellectual. His identification of the eternal with the made, his complex use of Byzantium--these are an incrediby compressed statement of a whole outlook, and an example of what I mean by the information contained in context. With faithful attention to the poem, perhaps over years, it is possible to know exactly what he intends by the use of that city, an understanding which cannot be gotten from textbooks.

Incidentally, one of the things I love about poetry is how its force can translate across our usual divisions. So that it does not seem strange to me to find Housman in a movie about going walkabout, but instead appropriate.

One way I have put it is that in the very best poetry, a voice is heard.

[peteshimmon]

A high school in Hull is named after the famous
Andrew Marvell who lived in those parts. Makes
me wonder if the young ladies get fed up hearing
the lines when fending off the young men. "Got
the £30,000 then...well go away!" It was used
at the beginning of the film "A Matter of Life
and Death" with David Niven and Kim Hunter. For
years I thought Andy Marvell was a modern Poet.

[satori]

wwoww, that's still way beyond me.....and probably always will
it is sadly said that your mother tongue is your home land
it's a tight cage to escape.....even if you will it hard
also my mostly visual brain is only good for a
few memorable lines at best
so my natural role on this
thread is that of a....
...silent lurker




.

[jack butler]

A high school in Hull is named after the famous
Andrew Marvell who lived in those parts. Makes
me wonder if the young ladies get fed up hearing
the lines when fending off the young men. "Got
the £30,000 then...well go away!" It was used
at the beginning of the film "A Matter of Life
and Death" with David Niven and Kim Hunter. For
years I thought Andy Marvell was a modern Poet.

I take the poem as a parody of the usual line that young men hand out to young ladies--more or less the supreme example of that sort of bull, and witty and amusing as a result. There's a great poem by Archibald McLeish which you are probably familiar with called And You, Andrew Marvell. Haven't seen the film, but now I will look for it.

[jack butler]

wwoww, that's still way beyond me.....and probably always will
it is sadly said that your mother tongue is your home land
it's a tight cage to escape.....even if you will it hard
also my mostly visual brain is only good for a
few memorable lines at best
so my natural role on this
thread is that of a....
...silent lurker




.

Dear SL--

Everybody gotta have a home though (yours appears to be in a very interesting place). If it wasn't for native language, none of us would have no language at all. I just love it that humans have language. I love mine because I know it, but there's others for sure.

For me, language is a freedom, not a cage. Never have imagined perceiving naked truth. Consider senses the way into the universe, not a barrier to the truth. Same way for me with language. Opens out. Can't cover infinity, but what can? Besides, I wouldn't live long enough to see it all.

[satori]

i have been thoroughly misunderstood in two points ":"
concerning the cage thing it is entirely my fault
i should have been aware
thatwhithwhat little
you know of me
you couldn't do
the decoding
properly
..........

that you seem to be a-lienated by my
calling my mother tongue my home land
is utterly and outright astounding me



but coming back to my first point
let's suppose you had got me right
((what you did not and it is my fault))
and i had actually intended to state
that your mother tongue is a cage
would that be wrong altogether then?

i come from a thread where you demanded courtesy
as the first of the basic requirements for discussion
but did you really mean courtesy (?) think about its
conotational field or better roooooooooooooooots
by the standards of sycophantic courtlike behavior
your reply to me was roooooooooooot (or is it rude!)
and i should feel offended now................( what i don't)
polite would have doubtless been the better choice
of wording ((but it would be silly of course to hold you
to such a high standard all the time.....and it is clear to
me as a foreigner that your usage of your mother tongue
is quite impeccccable (have i been saying right now that i
could not peck at you even if i wanted to ?)))

Now.......i am going at the words for a reason
there is sooooooooo much
in those little shiny casings
stinking explosive pouder
on occasion............or even
foul ideology and stufff

as a german i know what i am talking about
and you will certainly have heard
about one Mr. Orwell once

yes the language can be a cage
and all the more tighter
the more you don't see
the wire and the barbs

but you have learned to fligh in your dreams
and may have learend to soar up high into the skigh
on your paper Wings of Words as Well
leaving us mere earthlings
waaaaaaaaaaay
doooooown
doooown
doown
down






beloow
tethered, shackeld and bound to the
.................................................. .......................................GROUND
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thelettterkilleth, but the spirit giveth............................................ .............................LIFE

[satori]

excluding Shakespeare, who is a country unto himself
also an interesting home land that!
but here to honour the man and his country a courtesy quote:
"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

[jack butler]

also an interesting home land that!
but here to honour the man and his country a courtesy quote:
"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

Meant respect and courtesy and statement of how I see things, not characterization of you. Was not offended by anything you said, nor alienated, merely responding. Said I thought it was a good thing that humans had language, without saying that one language was better than another or freer than another. Made no assumption about whether your thoughts "flew up to heaven," nor do I think you can make accurate assumptions about mine. My intention in this thread is not adversarial, as I said at the outset.

[satori]

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwufff
total meltdown of communication
and that whithout adversariality
on both sides of the fence hence
a perfect and ready example of
what can happen if one of the
parties involved is linguistically
stunted in the idiom of parlance
referring to me ((without saying))
so i better keep to the under woods
as i wisely had suggested from the get go
and that is precisely......................where i will get/ go
---------------------------------------------------------------
"poetry slams, baby" (and sometimes the door) hhEb09'1

[peteshimmon]

I can put a few words together but I know I am
not a good speaker generally. It takes training
to be good and I often think about the voice-over
industry and the few names who rake it in doing
such work. And other languages have their experts
no doubt. Which brings me to something. As an
ordinary guy with just English at my command, how
do other languages sound and what impression of
the people is given to me. As heard through
television (and a very few real encounters)
here are my feelings. 1) French sounds elegant
and musical. 2) German..no nonsense. 3) Italian..
fussy. 4) Russian..warm and human. 5) Oriental
languages..in a hurry. Very shallow impressions
I admit. But what impression is given by
English? I think someone tried to say it sounded
detailed but I may be mistaken. Hope no
international incident is caused here:)

[satori]

(((i must keep true to my word, pete)))

[jack butler]

But what impression is given by
English?

My hunch is that the way all languages sound to their native speakers is natural--to any native speaker, that's just the way people talk. Some fascinating recent studies indicate by the way that babies can distinguish their native language from others well before they learn to talk, by the age of 4 or 5 months--and can even do so by lipreading silent moving images.

The human capacity for language interests me deeply. Most people assume poetry is a late development, sort of ultra-refined language. I think it is the essence of language. Our first words are astonishing, creating in our brains the sensations (not just visual) of objects which are not there. My feeling is that with use we become numb to this quality, and that the effort of poetry is to attain that original level of intensity and awareness.

Have studied Latin, French, German and (informally) Spanish. My son-in-law is from El Salvador. My daughter, a linguist, is fluent in Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, as well as her native language. I have spent quite a bit of time in Japan and am not unfamiliar with that tongue. Would not however describe myself as fluent by a long shot in any of these. Just a fair exposure.

I like your characterizations of the languages, but don't know how they may sound to others or to native speakers. As far as the impression English gives, I can only report on how I feel about it.

I love English and to me it seems capable of great variety and music. It was originally a Germanic variant (which you can see quite clearly in Early English), onto which were grafted quite a few strains of Romance languages, most notably the protoFrench of the Normans, who conquered England in 1066 (they were the invading armies that Anglo-Saxon guerilla Robin Hood fought against while King Richard the Blonde-Headed was off on the ill-advised Crusades). You can see the gradually assimilated influence of the Normans in the transformation of Early English into Middle English (which I can read, and in which the Canterbury Tales are written) and then into Elizabethan English, which is essentially identical to modern English, except for perhaps some pronunciations and a half-dozen syntactical variations.

As a result, English has qualities of all the languages it has borrowed from. It can be frank and guttural like German, exquisite like French, flowing and melodious like Spanish, urgent like Italian, warm, cartoonish, clinical, and a thousand other things. As a poet, I love this variety. It's like having a musical instrument which can sound like all sorts of instruments. So for me it does not create one impression, but can create many different ones.

I also think of it as a sort of universal solvent of language. It can accept words and phrases from any other language. I suspect this is so because of its syntactical and grammatical structure. English is like mathematics in that its notation is positional. It is also recursive.

Here's what I mean by those two terms. By positional, I mean that we can tell the functions of words in a sentence by their location. The indirect object comes immediately after the verb phrase and before the direct object for example--She told me the news. There are of course variations and exceptions, but these exceptions encode further meaning. They are not random, but occur in specific situations.

By recursive, I mean that every syntactical structure in English can be embedded in any other syntactical structure, to an impressive degree of complexity. Here is an example sentence:

The woman who owns the cat who's eating grass in the yard of the house three streets over told me she prefers dogs.

The information content of that sentence is immediately clear to a native speaker, but the structure is fantastically complex and recursive. The basic sentence is Woman told "something." The "something" is the direct object of the verb phrase "told," but in this case the direct object is not a word, but a whole sentence, which has been changed into a noun clause so it can be inserted in the direct object slot. There is an indirect object, "me." Woman is modified by an article, "the"--and articles always come before the noun phrases they modify--which tells us it is not just any woman but a particular woman. Which particular woman? The woman who owns the cat. Here a sentence is transformed into an adjective clause so it can go in the slot after the noun phrase and modify it (in English, one of those variations I mentioned, one-word adjectives usually come immediately before the noun phrase, and phrasal or clausal modifiers usually come immediately after.

Okay, the woman who owns the cat, but which cat? That one, the one who's chewing grass. In this case, another complete sentence has been changed into another adjective clause to modify cat--so here we have an adjective clause inside an adjective clause. But just in case you are in doubt about which grass-chewing cat we mean, we are told where the grass is, in a series of three prepositional phrases, each imbedded in the previous one (and the last one with its preposition at the end, "over"). It is the grass in the yard of the house (over) three streets.

Because I have studied my native language lovingly for many years, all this is available to my conscious analysis. But it is obvious that on some level every fluent speaker of English understands all that, because if he or she did not, the sentence would make no sense.

So one of my basic tenets is that grammar is a set of meaningful signals. Every grammatical structure conveys definite information. If it does not, or if the structure is confusing, the grammar is nonfunctional, broken, or garbled. The signals can be meaningful only if its users agree on the meanings, of course, so language is cooperative, not contentious. I stress this because in some quarters it is fashionable to think that grammar is just a bunch of silly rules. Not at all. That is the impression created by bad teachers who didn't know how to explain what was going on.

Every language has grammar. If it did not, its statements would not make sense to its speakers. The grammar of different languages is different, naturally. I am describing only English, which seems to me to have a much higher degree of positional notation and recursion than most, and a lesser degree of inflectional notation (telling us what functions words serve by attaching specific sounds to a base or root).

All of this comes back to the way a language sounds. I would define syntax as the typical way grammatical structures are strung together in a given language (hasten to say I am not a professional grammarian, and they may use different definitions). At any rate, a confusion arises between the spoken language and the written language. In written language, we have a bunch of marks (punctuation, mostly) to indicate the syntactical structure. In spoken language, we cannot use marks, so we must use sounds. For this reason I say that every syntactical structure has a unique tune--we recognize it by how it sounds. Many people get confused because they want there to be a one-to-one correlation between the written marks and the spoken sounds, but there is not. As I like to say, every comma implies a spoken pause, but not every spoken pause implies a comma.

Again, every native speaker immediately recognizes and decodes the tune of syntactical structures, without having to be conscious of doing so, any more than we have to solve differential equations to toss a rock at a can.

So to my view, there are levels of expertise with the music of a tongue. Any native speaker knows how to make a question sound like a question and a declaration sound like a declaration. Some people, orators and poets and a few others, become skilled in stitching these separate syntactical tunes together in a way that makes a very nice overall tune but does not violate the tunes of the individual pieces, so that you have both meaning and music.

In my opinion, music depends to a strong degree on rhythm, and in English we tend to generate rhythm (and recognize it) chiefly by means of relative stresses. This is not so in other languages, or not so to the extent it is in English. Chinese and Japanese use levels of pitch to encode meaning differences, for example. We do, but to a much lesser extent. The classical Greeks used the duration (or length of time) a syllable took. In English, both pitch and duration add color but do not create rhythm.

My English is U. S. English, by the way, and I was raised in the South, so I have a tendency toward longer vowels and resonant consonants.

[satori]

the beast has broken its chains
eaten its words and
raises its ugly head again

your English ears, Simon Petrus (?),
are hearing the same as mine
exeptions: Russian was hard for me to like
like all the Slavic tongues
sounded long to me like those colours they used
for the National Geographic maps of the Soviet Empire of Evil to convey
the feel of rust, bitterness and Fear: brown and red
and dirty greyish green...overdose of consonants

Italian, you perceive compleately differently than i !
doesn't fuzzziness come from a lack of vowels?
Italiano is rich in them and is really wysiwyg!
you can take any letter at face value!
phonem palette sparse!
all that a gift from Rom
the one dominant culture!

English is a patch work idiom
woven from most different strands
you are using in the range of five times
as many (wild guess! (could easily be much more!!))
phonetic building blocks than the Italians
and over 1000 different letter combinations
to denote them!
For a dyslexic like me that spelled hell!

Now how sounds English to a foreigner?
Short answer: depends!
Long answer: depends depends depends depends
depends depends depends depends depends ........
Most notable observations: many many many many
short words......one sylable words! And no flections needed (mostly) that is very very special......almost like Chinese!
Yes from the quite Latin Old English
you are since long on a voyage to an isolating language
...that's unlike any other European language i know!
From hence the wonderful ability to suck up, digest and incorporate foreign words...
that's btw the ONE property of English that makes it a happy choice for the de facto lingua franca of the world
("to down load" (or something ) in german is an
A B H O R R E N C E
it simply does not fit)
Curio: changing your language brings about a change in personality!!!!!
that is another notable aspect of the corrupting powers of words
in German i would feel an adversion to even repeat for fun a phrase like "poetry slams, baby" (i mean a german counter piece of it)
If i change to English those things come naturaly and so i think it must be near to the very soul of it
(and see here: a full string of mon(o) syl(able) words (a)gain !) That's when it feels most Eng Lish, babe!!!!
the dark side of this is the need for strict word Or Der (as in Chinese!)
But that's a Mi Nus Jack in deed !!!!
Think of La tin where you're free to group your Litt Le Pearl Y words at will...

that is another cagy thing about languages
in Latin you would not ryhme
you use rhythm there
Its Structuralism
there is a genetic code somewhere in the basic patterns
of a language and that can be a silent ruler....
brings me back to one of your initial posts of this thread, Jack Butler, where you remarked that it is a common trait of ethnic groups and their respective idioms that they call themselves humans (or so) and the others by rather disparaging terms.....so there are normative forces at the basic level (the words for example) at play which dictate a lot.
Or you have genderism in the indogermanic languages (special to them!)...what contortions can you witness on a daily basis to circumvent those inbuild biases!
So you must have the powers of a poet to slip those surly bonds and soar free (on occasion)

Or it can hap-pen, that you let the words do the think-ing for you (as exemplified in my last long post) It is a good tech-nique to enter and learn a language ((see: one wants to say tongue just for its beeing a one syl(able) word!!!!) it is a good tech-nique to listen to the words wispering in your head vying for attention .....down side: this can create unintended results!

In other words: The Shakespeare quote was done to my own shame.

Into French i ventured for vanity and for the Voltaire Quote which is the perfect shorthand for Ken's stand for the Art's as an enriching human undertaking.....Period

[jack butler]

English is a patch work idiom
woven from most different strands
you are using in the range of five times
as many (wild guess! (could easily be much more!!))
phonetic building blocks than the Italians
and over 1000 different letter combinations
to denote them!
For a dyslexic like me that spelled hell!

Now how sounds English to a foreigner?
Short answer: depends!
Long answer: depends depends depends depends
depends depends depends depends depends ........
Most notable observations: many many many many
short words......one sylable words! And no flections needed (mostly) that is very very special......almost like Chinese!
Yes from the quite Latin Old English
you are since long on a voyage to an isolating language
...that's unlike any other European language i know!
From hence the wonderful ability to suck up, digest and incorporate foreign words...
that's btw the ONE property of English that makes it a happy choice for the de facto lingua franca of the world
("to down load" (or something ) in german is an
A B H O R R E N C E
it simply does not fit)
Curio: changing your language brings about a change in personality!!!!!
that is another notable aspect of the corrupting powers of words
in German i would feel an adversion to even repeat for fun a phrase like "poetry slams, baby" (i mean a german counter piece of it)
If i change to English those things come naturaly and so i think it must be near to the very soul of it
(and see here: a full string of mon(o) syl(able) words (a)gain !) That's when it feels most Eng Lish, babe!!!!
the dark side of this is the need for strict word Or Der (as in Chinese!)
But that's a Mi Nus Jack in deed !!!!
Think of La tin where you're free to group your Litt Le Pearl Y words at will...

that is another cagy thing about languages
in Latin you would not ryhme
you use rhythm there
Its Structuralism
there is a genetic code somewhere in the basic patterns
of a language and that can be a silent ruler....
brings me back to one of your initial posts of this thread, Jack Butler, where you remarked that it is a common trait of ethnic groups and their respective idioms that they call themselves humans (or so) and the others by rather disparaging terms.....so there are normative forces at the basic level (the words for example) at play which dictate a lot.
Or you have genderism in the indogermanic languages (special to them!)...what contortions can you witness on a daily basis to circumvent those inbuild biases!
So you must have the powers of a poet to slip those surly bonds and soar free (on occasion)

Or it can hap-pen, that you let the words do the think-ing for you (as exemplified in my last long post) It is a good tech-nique to enter and learn a language ((see: one wants to say tongue just for its beeing a one syl(able) word!!!!) it is a good tech-nique to listen to the words wispering in your head vying for attention .....down side: this can create unintended results!

In other words: The Shakespeare quote was done to my own shame.

Into French i ventured for vanity and for the Voltaire Quote which is the perfect shorthand for Ken's stand for the Art's as an enriching human undertaking.....Period

Dear Satori--

I am at some loss as to whether or how to respond. I feel there are many assertions slipping around in what you write, but they are difficult to distinguish, and if I attempt to do so I risk misunderstanding your intent.

The best I can do is state clearly what I think, always understanding that others are free to disagree. That is all I have done, and all I ever attempt. Not only do I have no right to legislate the thinking of others, nor any ability to do so, I have no interest in doing so.

I find that the art of making sense is interesting enough for me, in any language.

Your short answer/long answer response was clever and made me laugh with pleasure.

I will address a few things you have said with which I disagree, not attempting to persuade you, but stating what I think.

First, English is at root a Germanic language, not a Romance language. That was the point of my reference to Early English, in which the resemblance to German is unmistakable. The only direct influence Latin had on early English was through the church, and it was limited primarily to the few who received a formal education. The early translations of the Bible were into Latin, for example. Gentlemen were taught Latin and Greek (Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare that he had little Latin and less Greek, which to my mind is an example of how scholars can misjudge talent).

The primary Latinate influence on English was, as I said, Norman protoFrench. The Romance, or Roman languages were primarily French, Latin, and Italian. French had the greatest effect on English, but was not the only influence by any means.

English is indeed a patchwork, although in English the word "patchwork" has derogatory connotations which you may or may not have intended. It is, to my mind, a thing of splendor, not rags.

Most if not all languages have biases built into them. This was the point of what I said about the word many tribes use for themselves meaning "people." However I do not consider the biases the fault of the languages, but of the people who installed them. In my view, all tribes in all times in all places have visited cruelty and unfairness on other tribes. There is no excusing cruelty and unfairness, but I feel it is a human quality, and no group of humans is morally superior to any other group.

The Japanese, for example, do not have the sort of gender restrictions built into their language that we do, but socially they offer even less equality to women than we do.

For this reason, although I do not like the biases of English, which mostly have to do with pronouns, and which, by the way, are rapidly changing, I do not blame the language itself.

Similarly I do not believe that language changes personality. Here perhaps we have a fundamental disagreement. Nevertheless. I observe that multilingual people display the same personality in all their languages. I have met jerks whose native language is Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, English, German, and on and on. I do not believe they would be anything but jerks if they had another language for a native tongue. Similarly, the saintly people I have met would, I think, be saintly no matter what their language. These are qualities of character, not language, in my opinion. If one wishes to treat others fairly, one seeks ways to do so in any language which one has competence in. If not, not. If one is witty and amusing in one language, one is likely to be witty and amusing in another. If one is miserly in one language, one is miserly in another.

You raised the subject of the relative number of sound-units in various languages. Perhaps I am misunderstanding again, but it sounded to me as if you felt that fewer units were better. I don't think that is so. I think that all languages are caught in a crossways pull between multiplicity of signifiers and efficiency. If you have to remember a lot of sounds (or characters) you can be more precise more quickly, but at the cost of having to carry around all those sounds (or characters). If you have a few, it is easier to remember the units, but more difficult to deliver shades of meaning.

I don't doubt that English, with its crazy-quilt of spelling rules, is very difficult for anyone with dyslexia. It is difficult for anyone who has not grown up speaking English, for that matter. It is difficult for many who have grown up speaking it.

There is also the inherent sophistication of any language, the things that native speakers "just know," but which require a great deal of explanation to an outsider. Japanese has many levels of appropriate diction. No matter how long I studied Japanese, I could never learn them all. Whenever I spoke the tongue I would risk being inappropriate to a native speaker. Similarly, English has a vast and sophisticated and complex set of shadings and interrelated meanings, which are impossible to explain fully to an outsider. My son-in-law has difficulty understanding why it is better to say to his boss, If it is convenient for you, we can meet tomorrow at nine o'clock, than Meet me tomorrow at nine o'clock. The same explicit meaning is conveyed, but the shading is very different. To a native speaker, the first construction conveys respect and deference, and the second abruptness and inappropriate giving of orders.

I could resent Japanese because I will never understand all its subtleties, but that seems pointless. It seems much saner to enjoy the subtleties I am familiar with, and understand that all languages have them.

The assertion that language changes personality strikes me (again, I am not sure whether this is your intent) as resembling certain sorts of philosophy and literary criticism from recent years, which I will loosely refer to as deconstructionism. These ideas always struck me as wrong, and I have always said that I thought they were. Perhaps I am wrong. Nevertheless, no sound evidence has ever been presented for the assertions of these ideas, and they are no longer fashionable (not that that proves anything). Proponents of these ideas tended to assert that language itself was inherently imperialistic, which I do not think is so. Such views make it all too easy to blame groups of people, not individuals, and thus further the separation of humans into squabbling packs. It is always those evil others who are responsible for one's own lack of satisfaction.

On the mono- or polysyllabic nature of languages: I think that depends on the speaker and the level of discourse. You will observe that there are many fewer monosyllables in this response than in what might loosely be referred to as street English, for example. And yet it is all English.

On the restrictions of word-order: No doubt there is something to that, although any system of generating meaning must necessarily have restrictions--that is, forms which are not allowed. Latin is handier for some sorts of things, no doubt. It is unwieldy for others. The inflexibility of German is a problem at times, as you yourself observe, although in the appropriate circumstances it provides an admirable clarity.

I do want to be clear: The way I have described English grammar as working is not a statement regarding how grammar should work. I am being descriptive, not setting forth commandments. Further, I tried to make it clear that there is immense variety within the word-order, many situations in which the order is changed in inventive and delightful ways. One may also deliberately use sequences which are not grammatical in order for the contrast between the actual order and the expected order to produce insight, recognition, delight. Consider this from e. e. cummings, for example:

Anyone lived in a pretty how town
with up so floating many bells down.

A normal grammatical sequence in English would read, Someone (who was so ordinary he could have been anyone at all) lived in the kind of town that makes you exclaim "How pretty." In that town the bells floated up and down.

Cummings violated the normal sequence, trusting his readers to restore it and derive meaning from the contrast. (And also, I would say, to generate a more beautiful music). In one of my novels, in order to emphasize the atemporal nature of some awareness, I created the sentence, "It don't order what difference you make it in: Read any." Most native speakers can readily descramble this to arrive at a more sensible sentence, "It don't [doesn't] make any difference what order you read this in." By scrambling the expected sequence, I can deliver to my reader both the original sentence and the additional meaning that sequence is not all there is to meaning.

So for playful users of English, word-order is not so deterministic as a brief statement of the methods of its grammar may make it seem.

I do not think there is a distinguishable genetic code in languages, any more than I think there is a good genetic way to tell the difference between people of different "races." I think that all languages are strategies for communication, and there are many strategies, that we concentrate our energies on learning the language that we are most frequently and strongly exposed to, and that one's native language is not the language of one's physical ancestors, but the language one grew up with. I do not think that any language is superior to any other language, just as I do not feel that any group of humans is morally superior to any other.

James Baldwin was black, but his native language was English, and he used it with great eloquence to decry the injustices whites perpetrated against blacks. I think, by the way, that those in the U. S. who attempt to legislate the usage of English only are fools. Language doesn't work that way. You cannot force it to behave the way you want it to.

As for letting the words do the thinking for you: I suppose some people attempt this, but it can't work. Minds are what think, not words. Words are part of the way minds think. I agree that listening to words can be a fine practice. I have said that if you listen to any word closely enough you will hear a choir, the choir of all those who have said the word before you. It is their saying which has brought the word down to you, after all.

And of course, words constantly change. If they did not, we would not have divergent languages.

I think it is natural to love one's native language as it is natural to love one's native land or one's family. I think one may do so without denigrating others--in fact, if one has any empathy at all, loving one's own tongue can teach how deeply others may love theirs.

I say "tongue," by the way, not merely because it is monosyllabic, but because it uses a physical metaphor, making the subject seem more immediate and vigorous--although, as you surely know, since you used the phrase lingua franca, the word "language" itself derives from the Latin for "tongue." Also, as a single ringing cadence, "tongue" is more musically elegant than the muddy and tonally descending conglomeration of vowels and consonants in "language."

By the way, as far as I am concerned you have as much right to quote Shakespeare as I do, and you quoted him most eloquently.

[satori]

dear Jack ,
let me firstly observe that i am feeling greatly honoured that you deem me worthy now to enter into an intelligent conversation.
Please don't you never give me somethin' of that all to native southern thing no more.....other than for fun.
It was in your response to me that for the first time (on this board) you lapsed into this kind of restricted code...and it seemed to insinuate somethin' i didn' like.
Yes your style and manners so far have caused you the burden of beeing held to a high standard......
whereas i have choosen a borderline personality for my little show in this sand box.
So don't expect me to mi-mi-c your clarity and well orderdness of thought (i could not if i tried bytheway...and much less so ex patria) rather expect me to go DADA .......at enny taim of me choooosin'!
(your bad to start this thread in the "fun-n-games" section, baby !!!!!!)

only a few anecdotal annotations (which is meant to imply that i largely approve of your writing)

my claim that the Old English was quite Latin must be seen in contrast to the latter part of the sentence where i stated that the Modern English is (pretty much) isolating......all those flection paradigms (think of Latin) have been largely shut down to nothingness
(this was the litttttttle ".")

now the One Big Point of divergence
change of language Does "Absolutely :lol:" change your personality
not when i make a dry technical use of it as here and now
but i am not IN your idiom right now
i am using English like a tool
not as an Instrument !
go ask a musician whether she looks upon his instrument as tool...

change of theme
we have a (quite prominent) journalist here in germany (or is he in America right now).......Joseph Joffe (that's beautious in Hebrew) by his name (writes in Die Zeit and also in Time (german edition?) occasionaly.....teaches also in America (somewhere)) who is of course much exposed to American and has so much morphed into this thing and is so little shy about adopting the American way that he is the perfect subject of study to me what really makes the difference of American as opposed to German...........as he is linguisicaly very skilled and talented (as you would expect) he has done the trick to import the American (journalistic) parlance with astonishing faithfulness into German and it is suchly that you can totaly unbiased contrast the germans german with a (proto) american german.....and Boy, What A Diffffference!
American is (rather comes!) really so much more militaristic, jingoistic, grand standing, punchy, slammy,........fullll to the brim of little capitalistics like i don't buy that.....don't try to sell me that **....
for not to anger you too much i will concede that perhaps punchy summs it up best what i tried to convey...........Hey you angel-saxons are a breed of sportsmen!
Ever seen in your quarters somebody shoot to stardom on a high brow 1000 (+)pages tome of literary artistry for a ticket. All wrapped in a shabby cover of unimbellished cartboard to wet the appetite of the multitudes...
No wonder you guys must all hate this arrogant and airy French aristrocrat Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin........and what he stands for!...touched GROUND now!



eagle has landed/roger
(((ehm yes had to bite tongue (or was it langue?) not to go into the easy easy japanesy and all the constrains imposed on you there....how the cultural Code is mimiced an mirrored in the linguistic Code there would have given me the final edge on you :lol: )))

[hhEb09'1]

whereas i have choosen a borderline personality for my little show in this sand box. ai si

[jack butler]

dear Jack ,
let me firstly observe that i am feeling greatly honoured that you deem me worthy now to enter into an intelligent conversation.
Please don't you never give me somethin' of that all to native southern thing no more.....other than for fun.
It was in your response to me that for the first time (on this board) you lapsed into this kind of restricted code...and it seemed to insinuate somethin' i didn' like.
Yes your style and manners so far have caused you the burden of beeing held to a high standard......
whereas i have choosen a borderline personality for my little show in this sand box.
So don't expect me to mi-mi-c your clarity and well orderdness of thought (i could not if i tried bytheway...and much less so ex patria) rather expect me to go DADA .......at enny taim of me choooosin'!
(your bad to start this thread in the "fun-n-games" section, baby !!!!!!)

only a few anecdotal annotations (which is meant to imply that i largely approve of your writing)

my claim that the Old English was quite Latin must be seen in contrast to the latter part of the sentence where i stated that the Modern English is (pretty much) isolating......all those flection paradigms (think of Latin) have been largely shut down to nothingness
(this was the litttttttle ".")

now the One Big Point of divergence
change of language Does "Absolutely :lol:" change your personality
not when i make a dry technical use of it as here and now
but i am not IN your idiom right now
i am using English like a tool
not as an Instrument !
go ask a musician whether she looks upon his instrument as tool...

change of theme
we have a (quite prominent) journalist here in germany (or is he in America right now).......Joseph Joffe (that's beautious in Hebrew) by his name (writes in Die Zeit and also in Time (german edition?) occasionaly.....teaches also in America (somewhere)) who is of course much exposed to American and has so much morphed into this thing and is so little shy about adopting the American way that he is the perfect subject of study to me what really makes the difference of American as opposed to German...........as he is linguisicaly very skilled and talented (as you would expect) he has done the trick to import the American (journalistic) parlance with astonishing faithfulness into German and it is suchly that you can totaly unbiased contrast the germans german with a (proto) american german.....and Boy, What A Diffffference!
American is (rather comes!) really so much more militaristic, jingoistic, grand standing, punchy, slammy,........fullll to the brim of little capitalistics like i don't buy that.....don't try to sell me that **....
for not to anger you too much i will concede that perhaps punchy summs it up best what i tried to convey...........Hey you angel-saxons are a breed of sportsmen!
Ever seen in your quarters somebody shoot to stardom on a high brow 1000 (+)pages tome of literary artistry for a ticket. All wrapped in a shabby cover of unimbellished cartboard to wet the appetite of the multitudes...
No wonder you guys must all hate this arrogant and airy French aristrocrat Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin........and what he stands for!...touched GROUND now!



eagle has landed/roger
(((ehm yes had to bite tongue (or was it langue?) not to go into the easy easy japanesy and all the constrains imposed on you there....how the cultural Code is mimiced an mirrored in the linguistic Code there would have given me the final edge on you :lol: )))

Dear Satori--

Let me get this straight: You have chosen a borderline personality for this thread, and you are free to lapse in Dada-ism at any moment, but I am not to revert to my native idiom because you think I am insulting you? How do you construe that as fair?

Further, by your argument, since I have evinced a high standard and you have not, you can do anything you want and I am not to be trusted? By what manner of reason do you think that makes sense?

Of course I use Southern dialect for fun and contrast, to relieve the perhaps too formal general run of this discussion. It has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with me kicking up my heels. If you wish to take it as insult, you may, but you are taking offense where none was offered.

Whatever you may think, I have never tried to talk to you in any fashion but a respectful and intelligent fashion. The highest compliment I can pay another thinker is to assume that he or she can follow a clearly expressed thought without the need for condescending explanation.

I disagree with you totally and firmly about personality varying with language. I would be very surprised if more than a small percentage of thinkers agreed with you. We are not likely to make progress toward agreement on this, so I will refrain from further comment. I am not interested in persuasion, even if it were possible.

I also disagree with you strongly about any one language bearing any sort of moral superiority to another. It seems to me that you declare more openly what I suspected you felt all along when you describe "American" English as jingoistic and whatever other derogatory terms you used. You explicitly compare "American" English to German and insist that German is more enlightened. Perhaps many citizens of the U. S. are jingoistic and provincial--I have argued this many times myself. I am quite certain however that there are comparable citizens in Germany, and that the percentages run about the same. I do not blame German for the misuses it has been put to by Goebbels and others (such as, in my opinion, Nietzsche), and I do not blame English for the misuses it has been put to. Rather I celebrate German for Goethe and Rilke and others, and I celebrate English for the beauties it has given me--among which is the desire to value other humans in the way I value myself. I received this message completely in English and was convinced by it and attempt to follow it.

Your supposedly probatory example was a native speaker of German who came to the U. S., immersed himself in what he felt was the essence of the language, went back to Germany, reproduced in his and your opinion the essence of U. S. English in German, and thereby demonstrated that American English is more narrow-minded and less moral.

If you wish to examine exactly how little this proves, simply reverse the situation. If a native speaker of U. S. English went to Germany, immersed himself or herself in German, came back to the U. S., produced in English what he or she considered the essence of German, and concluded therefore that German was more intransigent and stubborn and less moral than English, would you accept those conclusions as proven?

In brief, I do not feel it is possible to allocate moral superiority to oneself or one's fellows based on language differences; in my opinion, such an attitude is itself xenophobic. It is to assign guilt or credit by association, and not according to the individual's behavior.

Do you not see that you are attempting to tell a native speaker--someone who by definition has more familiarity with the language and in this case by your own admission greater competence in it--how he should feel about his own tongue? Do you not think this is presumption?

In discussion, one may assert whatever one wishes. If you wish to assert that you could have, by means of some demonstration of superior acumen which you mercifully refrained from employing, gotten the final edge on me, I shall not contradict you.

My intention is this thread was to explore the relations between poetry and science, not to engage in "gotcha" debates over linguistic values. Henceforward I return to my original intent.

[peteshimmon]

My speculation on the sound of other languages
has brought fascinating replies I cannot begin
to do justice to. Sadly Satori has shown
misjudgement on another thread. But his
thoughts are very interesting and I am sure
no real upset was intended here. I think it was
unfair to describe Italian as fussy (not fuzzy:))
and I would agree with urgent. Perhaps it is
ameanable to measurement in measuring the
number of words per minute in relaxed
conversation. I am lucky that the World is
using English more but like many I know that
diversity is life and all languages should be
cherished. Meeting someone who does not speak
English is uncomfortable though.

Coming back to poetry I would like to make a
few points. When someone reads it out it usually
seems high minded and the words drone. Something
that can be rattled out yet still impress
listeners with the meaning in the words would
improve the image I think. And why does verse
not indicate where to stress and pause? Is it
the free choice of the reader? And why books of
verse page after page? How about illustration
to sweeten the pill. Say Housemans work set to
full colourful pages of Shropshire countryside.
And there is video. It seems to me the whole of
classical music will be set to images before
long. And Poetry.

Meantime I am trying to remember a joke poem
about a barber I heard on tape a few years ago.
Must book it out again.

[jack butler]

My speculation on the sound of other languages
has brought fascinating replies I cannot begin
to do justice to. Sadly Satori has shown
misjudgement on another thread. But his
thoughts are very interesting and I am sure
no real upset was intended here. I think it was
unfair to describe Italian as fussy (not fuzzy:))
and I would agree with urgent. Perhaps it is
ameanable to measurement in measuring the
number of words per minute in relaxed
conversation. I am lucky that the World is
using English more but like many I know that
diversity is life and all languages should be
cherished. Meeting someone who does not speak
English is uncomfortable though.

Coming back to poetry I would like to make a
few points. When someone reads it out it usually
seems high minded and the words drone. Something
that can be rattled out yet still impress
listeners with the meaning in the words would
improve the image I think. And why does verse
not indicate where to stress and pause? Is it
the free choice of the reader? And why books of
verse page after page? How about illustration
to sweeten the pill. Say Housemans work set to
full colourful pages of Shropshire countryside.
And there is video. It seems to me the whole of
classical music will be set to images before
long. And Poetry.

Meantime I am trying to remember a joke poem
about a barber I heard on tape a few years ago.
Must book it out again.

What you say of poetry--that it sounds high and is droning--is precisely the impression that I fault most contemporary poetry for giving. By definition for me, poetry is music, not drone, and intensely important in a direct and physical way, not high-minded (in the usual sense of nattering on about preposterous and unreal but somehow "noble" things). If poetry were not vital to me I would not care about it.

I suspect that you have been subjected to the worst sorts of poets and worst sorts of readers of poetry. I was lucky, in that I somehow found my way to the best stuff. I can't imagine living without it. Hope that you will stick with it and give it a chance. In the meantime, I commend such pieces as Emily Dickinson's "Tell All the Truth," Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill," and Yeats's "The Song of Wandering Aengus." If they in your reading sound droning, which I cannot imagine, get in touch with me and I will read such poetry to you as will melt your ears and heart with astonishment and joy.

Actually verse does indicate where to stress and pause, good verse, but it does so by means of syntax, not musical notation.

The argument for pictures and music with poetry is not one I oppose. Let anyone have any collateral pleasures they wish. The point of page after page of verse, however, is that in the mind of one who knows how to read, the words are transformed into music and images and many other sensations. Most people think this is a weaker stimulus, but it is not. It is a more participatory one. Unlike movies, words cannot force you to see a certain image. You have to join the words and make the image yourself. Once you do, the whole is immensely powerful.

I agree that reading is a real problem. Not for me, luckily for me, but for many. Reading is a difficult act. It is, as I see it, the conversion of abstract symbols in print to sound in the head. The best poets do all they can to help you with this. The thing is, sound itself is a set of abstract symbols. So in order to get to the core, you have to do a double decoding. There are few who can do this with consummate skill.

I think this is an artifact of printing, however. In the past, poetry was not written on pages, but carried in the minds of the poets. In order to become a bard, you had to learn many thousands of lines of your tradition by heart. It has been said that Homer's Odyssey and Iliad were probably first performed to harps in the equivalent of local saloons.

So for me, a true poet does not exist on the page, but merely uses the page as a device to store and record patterns of sound. There are those who disagree, but this is how I see it.

I do hope you stay with the stuff.

[Ken G]

Most people assume poetry is a late development, sort of ultra-refined language. I think it is the essence of language. Our first words are astonishing, creating in our brains the sensations (not just visual) of objects which are not there. My feeling is that with use we become numb to this quality, and that the effort of poetry is to attain that original level of intensity and awareness.Now there's an "aha" moment for me. Great insight that one.

And on the subject of positional and recursive grammar, here are two humorous sentences to consider by way of example:

"Announcement: dog available, free to a good home, eats everything, loves children."

How's that for the importance of positional grammar?
And as for recursiveness, what does this sentence mean:

"The mailman the dog the boy the mother held liked bit grimaced."

See if you can find the recursive pausing that actually makes that sentence work.

[jack butler]

Now there's an "aha" moment for me. Great insight that one.

And on the subject of positional and recursive grammar, here are two humorous sentences to consider by way of example:

"Announcement: dog available, free to a good home, eats everything, loves children."

How's that for the importance of positional grammar?
And as for recursiveness, what does this sentence mean:

"The mailman the dog the boy the mother held liked bit grimaced."

See if you can find the recursive pausing that actually makes that sentence work.

Dear Ken--


Thanks. I would say the core sentence is "The mailman the dog bit grimaced," and that the dog is held by the boy whom the mother likes. This seems to be what is implied by the sequence. It is difficult because of the tendency in English to repress the relative pronoun "that" at the beginning of some adjectival phrases if the "that" is clearly enough understood. In normal sentences, the "that" more or less reiterates the information given by position and so is redundant. However, in sentences this complex it would probably be clearer if at least some of them were expressed.

Recursion is fun. How about these, of my own invention?

Ths sntnc hs n vwls.

i eee a o ooa.

The second sentence is comprehensible only because of the first. It is fascinating to me to consider the sorts of inference our minds are able to make that allow us to decode such things.

Hofstadter (Goedel, Escher, Bach and Metamagical Themas), from whom I took the idea of recursive sentences, seeks to explain consciousness in terms of recursion. For me, recursion is more nearly one of the capabilities of consciousness than its originating principle.

He has, incidentally (Hofstadter) the most lucid explanation of chaos math I have ever seen, in chapter I believe 16 of Metamagical Themas.

I plan next on this thread to post a discussion of a sonnet by Robert Frost, one called Design, because I think it owes powerfully to quantum mechanics.

[hhEb09'1]

Thanks. I would say the core sentence is "The mailman the dog bit grimaced," and that the dog is held by the boy whom the mother likes. If the boy is holding the dog, how does the dog bite the mailman then? :)

My reading of it was that the mother was holding the boy, and the boy liked the dog. And the dog bit the mailman.

Like this: "The mailman, the dog, the boy, the mother held, liked, bit, grimaced."

[Ken G]

Yes, that was my intention, although jack may have another reading of it. If one was to map the pauses, I would imagine saying the sentence like
The mailman.....the dog...the boy the mother held liked...bit.....grimaced.

[jack butler]

Yes, that was my intention, although jack may have another reading of it. If one was to map the pauses, I would imagine saying the sentence like
The mailman.....the dog...the boy the mother held liked...bit.....grimaced.

Yeah, you guys are right. I read and responded in haste. In English, adjective clauses are embedded in the noun phrase--that is, you consider the noun and its adjective clause modifier all one thing--

and not to get too technical, but linguists call ALL noun-functioning units noun phrases, even if they are just one word, so that you have noun phrases inside noun phrases--

and that being the case, you have a set of nested phrases. The verb for each adjective clause comes immediately after the noun phrase in that adjective clause. One should start with the inmost clause, "the mother held." That verb comes after the noun phrase "the mother." The next verb in succession, "liked," comes after the noun phrase "the boy the mother held," and so on out.

I scanned carelessly and switched the order of "liked" and "held" in my mind.
The interesting thing, and a point I love to make, is that grammar is a set of logical switches. The logic has not been created by a rule-making organization, but by people needing a reliable way to be understood.

Mostly we avoid sentences that are quite so nested--you almost never hear anybody say anything like that--for obvious reasons, but the sentence makes the excellent point that grammar is not whimsical or impenetrable, but perfectly sensible. A moment's thought shows that it has to be. If it isn't, we can't communicate with each other.

Ken raised another interesting point, referring to the "pauses."

Pauses are one of the ways we signal syntactical units in speech. There are a lot of others--intonation, pitch, stress, and for that matter, a number of visual cues we give talking face to face that do not translate to the page.

On the page, we do not have an exact system for indicating these speech signals, so resort to punctuation and other marks. One of my contentions is that skilled writers are very good at correlating the marks on the page to the necessary signals in speech, so that when we read their writing, we have a much better idea how to say it aloud. Unskilled writers tend to create disparities and confusions, and some people take these disparities and confusions to be the fault of language itself. I don't think it is. I think it is the result of the necessity for two different systems to indicate syntactical units, and thereby meaning.

These skills are an art really, but so is the ability to do good science. There is always much more to skill than can be put in textbooks.

One way of putting it is that a good reader can understand the intent of bad writing much more easily than a bad reader can understand the intent of good writing.

A corollary is that a good poet need not be a writer. As I have pointed out in this thread, most poets in human history were not primarily writers, but incanters. Most poets are writers, necessarily, in the age of print, but an unfortunate consequence is that many so-called poets have become lost in words on the page and can no longer hear their language adequately, and the sound of the human voice is lost. I maintain, though there are quite a few contemporaries who disagree with me, that the essence of poetry is in this giving voice, not in the manufacture of print symbols, that the print is merely a code for the incantation.

My concern is that poetry generally is misconceived in our culture, mostly as a result of the things I describe as fallacies above. A good deal of material is presented as poetry which has nothing to do with poetry, and the audience dwindles, since this stuff has no force or importance.

One of the things I hope this thread can accomplish is to show that language has observable and describable behaviors and patterns--that, in other words, not only can poetry deal with the subject matter of science, but that science, in the form of reason and logic, has a great deal to say about poetry.

As with the universe, I do not think that observing the complexity of its patterns takes away from majesty and mystery. I would say instead that those who insist that poetry is the realm of feeling only do it a great injustice, and weaken it, as do the fundamentalists who insist that science is a threat to the sense of wonder at the universe.

I think perhaps, instead of the Frost poem, which I do plan to treat with soon, my next post will have to do with what I call (somewhat synesthetically) the auditory imagination.

[peteshimmon]

I suspect some people are able to instantly
recall a greater range of words to mind than
most of us who know the words but have them
stored deeper than our everyday vocabulary.
I envied the lyrics of Bob Dylan when younger
as they indicated a better imagination than
mine. However, many of these people make great
crossword solvers which seems a waste:) Off topic
a little, the technology of artificial voice
synthesisers is interesting here as I wonder if
they have started doing artificial intakes of
breath yet? It would help stop the feeling of
wanting to take a deep breath when hearing them!

[jack butler]

I suspect some people are able to instantly
recall a greater range of words to mind than
most of us who know the words but have them
stored deeper than our everyday vocabulary.
I envied the lyrics of Bob Dylan when younger
as they indicated a better imagination than
mine. However, many of these people make great
crossword solvers which seems a waste:) Off topic
a little, the technology of artificial voice
synthesisers is interesting here as I wonder if
they have started doing artificial intakes of
breath yet? It would help stop the feeling of
wanting to take a deep breath when hearing them!
Have heard that there is a passive vocabulary and an active vocabulary, the difference being that we recognize words in the passive vocabulary but cannot necessarily use them at will, and words in the active vocabulary we can use at will. Shakespeare is reputed to have had a vocabulary of some 500,000 words, and I have read calculations of his IQ as a result of that vocabulary as being something like 192. Wouldn't be surprised.

[jack butler]

Have heard that there is a passive vocabulary and an active vocabulary, the difference being that we recognize words in the passive vocabulary but cannot necessarily use them at will, and words in the active vocabulary we can use at will. Shakespeare is reputed to have had a vocabulary of some 500,000 words, and I have read calculations of his IQ as a result of that vocabulary as being something like 192. Wouldn't be surprised.
Incidentally, although I have known some very intelligent people who liked crossword puzzles, such things seem to me to appeal more to puzzle-solving abilities than creative abilities. (There is a huge difference in the abilities in my opinion). So Shakespeare might have made, if they had had them, not a very good crossword-puzzle-solver. One thing about crossword puzzles is that they are, like mystery novels, puzzles created by other humans. They are unlikely to be ultimately satisfying if the intelligence of the puzzle creator is less than one's own. Plus which, the constraints in any puzzle are from the psyche of the creator, which may not be satisfying to one's own psyche.

[hhEb09'1]

Have heard that there is a passive vocabulary and an active vocabulary, the difference being that we recognize words in the passive vocabulary but cannot necessarily use them at will, and words in the active vocabulary we can use at will. Shakespeare is reputed to have had a vocabulary of some 500,000 words, and I have read calculations of his IQ as a result of that vocabulary as being something like 192. Wouldn't be surprised.500,000 words? Does that include spelling variants? :)

[jack butler]

500,000 words? Does that include spelling variants? :)
Have no idea. Something I read somewhere. But I would doubt it. By me, spelling variants don't count as separate words. Incidentally, as I'm sure has occurred to you, there were no spelling books in Elizabethan times. Spelling was a matter for the ear and of custom, so varied more. Nor were there any dictionaries. First dictionary was Samuel Johnson's in the 18th century. Shakespeare WAS a dictionary.

What is your member name, by the way, if you don't mind me asking? A compilation of physical constants?

[hhEb09'1]

It's a tribute to our finely regarded poster HUb'. And it's also a physical constant, a single one :)

It's the exact number of kilometers in a mile, upside down, so it represents a mile, mille passus, or milia passuum

PS: I did a quick web search, and it looks like you may be off by a magnitude. The things I found say that there were only 29000 different words in all of his plays (a lot of them "new" words). I could see extrapolating that to 50,000, but not 500,000. Most dictionaries don't have that many words in them.

[jack butler]

It's a tribute to our finely regarded poster HUb'. And it's also a physical constant, a single one :)

It's the exact number of kilometers in a mile, upside down, so it represents a mile, mille passus, or milia passuum

PS: I did a quick web search, and it looks like you may be off by a magnitude. The things I found say that there were only 29000 different words in all of his plays (a lot of them "new" words). I could see extrapolating that to 50,000, but not 500,000. Most dictionaries don't have that many words in them.
Like I say, it's something I read, and a long time ago at that. However, that said, 50,000 is a very small vocabulary in my view. I have published 8 books, and am quite certain I used a good deal less than half of my active vocabulary in them. Shakespeare wrote 32 plays that we know of, I believe, but plays are generally much shorter in word-length than books. As for the number of words in the dictionary--again, I point out, Shakespeare WAS the dictionary in his day, since there were no official compendiums. Dictionaries can be handy, but to my mind--and I don't pretend that most agree--have all the limits of any other official compendium. I don't look for synonyms in thesauri, rhymes in rhyming dictionaries, or meanings in standard dictionaries. I read Shakespeare, but find most books about Shakespeare unrewarding, since they have inevitably been written by people with intellects inferior to his, vocabularies inferior to his, and fluency much less than his.

To my way of thinking, the best source for understanding words and their superior usage is the work of the masters. Words in action, as it were. The only dictionaries I have much use for are etmymological. I get most of my sense of what words are from usage, primarily in reading. In any case, if 500,000 is high, and you are probably right that it is, since you have performed calculations, and I have not, there is little doubt that his vocabulary exceeded that of any of his cohorts, and in my opinion again, any English speaker's since.

Upsidedown and right to left as well? Doing that I get 1.609 if I take the apostrophe as an upsidedown decimal, but what does hhE convert to upsidedown? The "h" symbols become "y" symbols, but E is symmetrical to the horizontal axis. I think I'm missing something.

[Ken G]

I'm gonna say it's 1,609344 without Googling. There's some poetic license in the shape of the numbers there.

And on the vocabulary issue, I think a point jack was making above, if I understood correctly, is that the context of words gives them a more "alive" meaning than their definitions, like the way Jimi Hendrix plays notes-- "bending" them. If we allow that Shakespeare was not content with formal definitions of words, but instead used them as a kind of guideline from which to depart, "bending" them with their context as he saw fit, it might be virtually impossible to even use the word "vocabulary" in a meaningful way-- it just doesn't characterize his power of language.

[jack butler]

I'm gonna say it's 1,609344 without Googling. There's some poetic license in the shape of the numbers there.

And on the vocabulary issue, I think a point jack was making above, if I understood correctly, is that the context of words gives them a more "alive" meaning than their definitions, like the way Jimi Hendrix plays notes-- "bending" them. If we allow that Shakespeare was not content with formal definitions of words, but instead used them as a kind of guideline from which to depart, "bending" them with their context as he saw fit, it might be virtually impossible to even use the word "vocabulary" in a meaningful way-- it just doesn't characterize his power of language.

Well, if we can "bend" words--I love the analogy, maybe because I love the good old Delta blues so much--I don't see why he shouldn't be allowed to "bend" the shapes of letters. I should check my physical constants, but I'm sure you're right.

Re "bending": Linguists tell us what should be no surprise to any observer of language, that the concept of "words" is very elastic. In our analysis, we sometimes imply sentences are made of words, but in a very real sense every sentence is a fluid run which is a sort of new word in its own right. An example my daughter has given me is the many ways we can verbalize "I don't know," from something equivalent to what I just wrote, to "I dunno," to "Dunno," to a sort of triple grunt which reproduces the pitch sequence of "I don't know"--you'd represent it maybe as "Uh-uh-uh," with the first grunt at a high pitch, the next at a lower, and the third at a higher pitch but lower than the first--to a single grunt with shoulders lifted in a shrug.

How we as children distill the patterns of language out of such variety is absolutely incredible to me. Clearly, language is not a simple matter of one-to-one decoding, although it just as clearly has form. I am fascinated by the complexities of the smallest ordinary feats.

I think poetry gets its power from a whole-hearted immersion in that complexity, a sort of dynamic understanding that can never be completely phrased because it involves a good deal more than phrasing.

[Ken G]

An example my daughter has given me is the many ways we can verbalize "I don't know," from something equivalent to what I just wrote, to "I dunno," to "Dunno," to a sort of triple grunt which reproduces the pitch sequence of "I don't know"

I know just what you mean, we've all said "Ow-oo-oh" as kids! Always with the pitch sequence you mention, which has a kind of apologetic flavor. It might tend to happen much more when the statement is not quite accurate-- like if you don't enunciate, you aren't really lying! If you accentuate the "I", you're saying "how should I know", or if the "know", you are fascinated to know the answer. But if you lightly accentuate the "don't", you're saying "I'm just a kid, give me a pass even if I do know". This all says you can include the way intonation interplays with vocabulary to generate new meaning-- something Shakespeare would need to have relied on the actors to provide (or the poem reader). So now meaning has a participatory element-- also crucial for the poet to understand. What will a given reader add to the poem, and should that be part of the poet's plan?



I think poetry gets its power from a whole-hearted immersion in that complexity, a sort of dynamic understanding that can never be completely phrased because it involves a good deal more than phrasing.


Interesting-- poetry as more than language, not a way to use language but rather a way to make language. If we are content with the language we already have to make a point, we are doing prose, but if we aspire to extend the language to encompass the new point, we are doing poetry. Combinations of the two merge into a grayness, or course, but is this basically a workable distinction?

[hhEb09'1]

Like I say, it's something I read, and a long time ago at that. However, that said, 50,000 is a very small vocabulary in my view.Yahbut, you don't like to look things up :)

Shakespeare Database Project (http://www.shkspr.uni-muenster.de/intro.php) says "The popular BBC television-series The Story of English reinforced a cliché by stating 'Shakespeare had one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, some 30,000 words.' (McCrumm, R. (1986) 102. London: Faber)." They go on to assert that Shakespeare's vocabulary in his work, as far as actual lexical entries, was much smaller.

I have published 8 books, and am quite certain I used a good deal less than half of my active vocabulary in them.A book might be 100,000 words, 8 books 800,000 say. That's comparable to the total number of words in Shakespeare's work. Still, there'd be a lot of duplicates. I'd wager that the total number of distinct (depending upon what is meant by distinct) words in them is around 15,000 or less, based on your posts.
Upsidedown and right to left as well?Yes, just like you read the 1.609
Doing that I get 1.609 if I take the apostrophe as an upsidedown decimal, but what does hhE convert to upsidedown? The "h" symbols become "y" symbols, but E is symmetrical to the horizontal axis. I think I'm missing something.I dunno, but ∃ looks a lot like a three, to me. :)

[jack butler]

I know just what you mean, we've all said "Ow-oo-oh" as kids! Always with the pitch sequence you mention, which has a kind of apologetic flavor. It might tend to happen much more when the statement is not quite accurate-- like if you don't enunciate, you aren't really lying! If you accentuate the "I", you're saying "how should I know", or if the "know", you are fascinated to know the answer. But if you lightly accentuate the "don't", you're saying "I'm just a kid, give me a pass even if I do know". This all says you can include the way intonation interplays with vocabulary to generate new meaning-- something Shakespeare would need to have relied on the actors to provide (or the poem reader). So now meaning has a participatory element-- also crucial for the poet to understand. What will a given reader add to the poem, and should that be part of the poet's plan?


Interesting-- poetry as more than language, not a way to use language but rather a way to make language. If we are content with the language we already have to make a point, we are doing prose, but if we aspire to extend the language to encompass the new point, we are doing poetry. Combinations of the two merge into a grayness, or course, but is this basically a workable distinction?

I'm going to use your comments, if you will pardon me, as a way to launch into some preliminary observations about music in poetry.

First to respond directly: Yes, I think the prose/poetry distinction is meaningful. There are, as you say, some considerable overlaps. What of musical prose, prose that aspires to the intensity of poetry?

But basically, yes, yes, I think that poetry is the generator of language, not the result of language. I think that in poetry (again, and I hope for the last time, I will say that by "poetry" I mean the real stuff, not the garbage that frequently gets called poetry) we experience language at its most powerful and vital and refreshing performance. To attempt language that is less than this is to say the same old things. For me there is a huge difference between the merely new or novel and the fresh, and I prefer freshness.

In my opinion, a good poet understands the probable reactions of his or her readers, and takes them into account--there is a good deal more involved than words. Of course, a good poet does not particularly wish to write for dullards, so will expect some acuteness, some awareness, some readiness to respond. Therefore a good poet will not be attempting to account for all the possible reactions of all possible readers--that cannot be done. But if a good mind enters a poem willingly, not with hostility, trusting the poet to deliver, then the poet is well aware of the reader's probable reactions, and is playing off of those reactions. It is altogether too simple to suppose that the job of the poet is to frustrate the reader's expectations, as many moderns do (they do this in other arts too). In my opinion, that sort of behavior quickly degenerates into a game of I-know-more-than-you. I am on record as having said, frequently, that I prefer the stance of the entertainer to the stance of the guru. The guru presumes to instruct the audience. The entertainer wishes to entertain the audience. I don't deny that poetry is a complex pleasure, not for everyone. But in my opinion, it is a pleasure, and all the moral force it has comes as a result of that stimulation to pleasure.

Part of the intense pleasure that poetry can offer lies in its music, so now I will proceed to explore the nature of that music. It is a music that takes some training, but so does the thinking of science. Why has training become a bad word? It is a misconception of the value of democracy to think that everything should be reduced to the least common denominator. Some of my students used to exclaim, when they came across a poem that was too much for them, This is stupid! I thought, but never said, No, them poem is intelligent. You're the stupid one. And invariably these students were the ones who were least interested in thinking or learning how to think.

A principle I live by: It is better to trust the person who says This is beautiful and worth your time and study than to trust your own rebellious and unlearned assessment. Especially if many others also say it is beautiful. If people say Shakespeare is great, it is probably because he is, not because there is a conspiracy of English teachers to hide how dull he is.

That said, I will proceed from overview (subjective, but you may of course test my assertions against your sense of things) to detail.

Language is an art that always has at least two dimensions. One is its physicality, its music. The other is its meaning. Music per se, by contrast, is almost entirely abstract. Sometimes we see resemblances in music to sounds whose origins we understand, and sometimes we feel we can loosely attach stories to the music. But on the whole, the pleasure that music generates is almost entirely physical (and yet abstract).

With poetry, you can never completely escape the fact that you deal with both. Some so-called poets, most recently the Concrete Poets, attempt to expunge meaning, but they are not entirely successful. Other poets, like Ashbery, hover on the edge of meaning, wishing to suggest without actually committing a visualizable scene or a parsable statement. I have had practicing poets praise what they described as "interesting language" although there was no coherence (and frequently no grammar) in the phrasing. I find both approaches unsatisfactory. It seems to me there are a limited number of effects you can generate this way, and eventually the mind becomes bored.

At the other extreme, there are poets who attempt to approach poetry primarily through content, who pay little if any attention to the sound of their words. Since no poet can officially admit he or she has a tin ear, these types tend to describe their music as "subtle," but I have a subtle ear, and am convinced that the music is actually nonexistent.

But in combination, music and meaning can produce almost infinite ranges of awareness and emotion.

It seems to me that mathematics almost completely ignores music in favor of meaning (though, as I have pointed out, E = MC squared is an elegant if accidental alliterative trimeter line). This is as it should be.

But ordinary language offers music to the ear. At a basic level, again as I have pointed out, without being able to distinguish the music of pieces of syntax, we would not be able to understand their meanings.

Where mathematics abjures music, some language embraces it. For a mind that is not afraid to experience music, the sound of words deepens their meaning enormously. It is true the element of subjectivity enters. This isn't bad. The point is a disciplined subjectivity in order to get the stronger effects. Judgment is required. To argue that poetry is deceptive because people can be swayed by music is akin to arguing that no one should be allowed to jog for their health because some people abuse the activity and ruin their knees.

In fact this is my problem with a lot of modern language. It has no music. I am like a trained pianist forced to listen to a baby clattering on a piano. It can be amusing for a little while, but a continual barrage of such noise is maddening. Even more maddening is when the baby insists that the baby is really playing the piano and the pianist is "stupid." For quite a few years now it has been the fashion in teaching reading to teach that one may read without hearing the sounds in one's head. I think this is a disastrous mistake. There is no such thing as speed-reading. If you do not hear the sounds of words, you lose purchase on them. You are reduced to dealing with mere definitions. I think this is why so many textbooks are unreadable. They are butchered language, written without an ear.

It is impossible for someone who has a trained ear to endure the horrible screechings and squawkings perpetrated in such books. One does not ask poetry of all writers, but it would be pleasant to hear at least well-modulated sentences, constructions that are not actually painful.

I speak of the ear. Here's what I mean, and finally, the core of this posting.
Actually, it occurs to me there's an upper length, so I will close this and continue in another one.

[hhEb09'1]

There is no such thing as speed-reading.Of course there is, but you mean, you can't savor the words by speed reading? Like wolfing down a gourmet dinner, and chugging wine :)
It is impossible for someone who has a trained ear to endure the horrible screechings and squawkings perpetrated in such books.So, it's a lucky thing you don't like to look things up. :)
One does not ask poetry of all writers, but it would be pleasant to hear at least well-modulated sentences, constructions that are not actually painful.My advisor once asked me to review and comment on one of his papers, and I made some suggestions. He liked them and incorporated them. Later, I noticed that the final version had reverted back. I asked why, and he said it just didn't sound like a technical paper anymore. :)

I've pondered on that--I guess it's like different people like different types of music.

[jack butler]

To continue: We learn language by sound first, and some of us learn the further symbology of letters and writing. In learning language by sound, I think we create, in our brains, a virtual map of the universe of symbolic sounds (which we distinguish from other sounds). I'm not attempting to say how this map is stored or maintained, what location it has if it has any specific location, or any such thing. But it seems clear to me that in order to recognize specific sounds, we have to match them against an inventory of sounds. Almost everyone has noticed, I think, that it is easier to recall the appearance of a flower if one has learned the flower's name. I think this is because the sound triggers the rest of the associations. And this is where the power of sound lies, in this ability to trigger strong associations.

So we create a virtual map. This map is what I refer to as the auditory imagination. Those people with an active auditory imagination "hear" in their minds as they read. Each word stimulates something in the auditory imagination that is parallel to the sound of the word.

There are variations of course. If I were to read that fine British poet Philip Larkin aloud, I am sure I would not pronounce the words exactly as he does, but more in accordance with my upbringing in the southern U.S. (although I will point out that a lot of southern dialect preserves Elizabethan intonations better than almost any other dialect except perhaps Appalachian).

I will come back to this.

The auditory imagination is trained by feedback. One hears the sounds, learns them, learns to reproduce them. Inevitably, in some people, the auditory imagination begins to be able to produce sounds not produced by the original learning process--new sounds and effects. It is not really a map, after all, but a simulation, a dynamic entity. Actually, everybody can do this, because otherwise we could only speak sentences that we have heard. But in people with a good mental ear, this faculty is acute, and they can try complex variations and combinations extremely rapidly, and, to outside observers, entirely silently.

The sound may be virtual, but it is intensely sensual. Who has not waked up in the night with the notes of a never-before-heard symphony ringing and fading in his or her ears?

This is what poets do as writers: They actually hear the sounds. They know how to combine and control the things they say so that the music adds a level of power and conviction not available to mere meaning.

Two things I want to observe here: Precisely because poetry can be so powerful, can enhance meaning so deeply, it is important to practice honesty and discretion. There are poets who do not. There are certainly orators and rhetoriticians and politicians who do not. But to abjure music is not to be sincere. It is merely to abjure music. Sooner or later a liar's music will be at odds with his or her sense. Only those who have not trained their mental ears are really vulnerable to this sort of persuasion. This ability has a lot of practical uses. The first time I ever heard Nixon talk, for example, I thought, This guy's a crook. It wasn't so much what he said as the way he was talking. I didn't need to wait five years and have the evidence of Watergate. He was transparent.

In a very similar way, even though I thought I hated T. S. Eliot as a high school senior, and did not understand him, I heard something in the music that made me want to hang around till I did understand. So with Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, and many others. It is important to trust the music of a poem, to be able to tell from its motion that there is sense there, value there, even though one cannot immediately penetrate it.

Peculiar beings that we are, we do not expect to understand QED without long and careful study, but we are dismayed and give up if we do not immediately understand a great poem like Fern Hill.

The second observation is that this process works with music and meaning simulataneously. One does not begin with the meaning, and add music to it. That's a naive understanding of how it works. It is almost more accurate to say that one searches, at extremely rapid rates, for suitable music. That is, meaning is approached through music, not in spite of it.

Any poet of any ability whatsoever will tell you that he or she hears the line first. Frequently poems begin with lines that have a musical logic and then and only then proceed to transform themselves into meanings. This is not a capricious thing--the meanings are not random, but are meanings that one holds within oneself. You don't, for sake of the music, say a thing that you don't think. It is just that your method of getting to the meaning is through the music.

Now to return to the subject of individual variation. It is true that the individual reader must hear a poem according to his or her own auditory imagination, and not according to the auditory imagination of the poet. This is not a barrier to understanding though. The difficulties are not so great as we imagine, and within a given language, the commonalities are dominant. I am quite certain I perceive and can reproduce the essence of Larkin's music, even if my accent is somewhat different.

Again, this is not such a strange notion. No orchestra ever plays say Beethoven's 9th or Mozart's 41st in exactly the same way as any other orchestra, and few musicians would contend they are reproducing the music exactly as the composers heard it when they composed it.

Nevertheless, there is something there. There is a music in which we can all share, and interpretation enriches that music. It doesn't defeat it.

The same is true of poetry. The good poets know how to create a sort of over-music, a cadence in the way the words flow together, which can be heard in spite of minor variations. In formal poetry, the devices of meter and rhyme (and other devices as well) help this music to be heard even more clearly (which is why I like formal poetry). One knows, to a large extent, how this arrangement of words will sound in the reader's mind.


Okay. I suppose that is enough for now.

[Ken G]

I asked why, and he said it just didn't sound like a technical paper anymore.

The salient question is, why on Earth would he want it to sound like a technical paper?! It reminds me of my main issue with PowerPoint presentations, for all their advantages-- they make it a little too easy to mistake form for substance.

[Ken G]

The good poets know how to create a sort of over-music, a cadence in the way the words flow together, which can be heard in spite of minor variations.

It would be fun to put well-known poems into translators, then bring them back to the same language. Not only would the substitutions be awkward in terms of meaning and context, but the music would almost certainly be lost. Which would do the greater damage to the poem?

[hhEb09'1]

The salient question is, why on Earth would he want it to sound like a technical paper?! Because it was a technical paper :)

The main element that he and I discussed was the passive voice constructions. Such give the papers their ponderousness--my Ame.Her.Dic. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ponderous) defines ponderous as both "Having great weight" and "Lacking grace or fluency; labored and dull". The former is what my advisor was shooting for, the latter is probably part of what jack butler objects to.

We don't want our technical papers to be light and lyrical, we want them to be solid and steady. Nevermind that it is the content that determines its worth. :)

[Ken G]

Because it was a technical paper :)
I gathered that, my question was, why would he want it to sound like one! That's like wanting a jackhammer to sound like a jackhammer just because it is one.



The main element that he and I discussed was the passive voice constructions. Exactly why technical sounding papers are so awful. No clarity is gained by passive voice, and it is way awkward. There really isn't any more weight gained-- it's all smoke. The weight of obfuscation-- bad science.


We don't want our technical papers to be light and lyrical, we want them to be solid and steady. Nevermind that it is the content that determines its worth. Precisely. We want them to be clear, so the content emerges faithfully.

[hhEb09'1]

I gathered that, my question was, why would he want it to sound like one! That's like wanting a jackhammer to sound like a jackhammer just because it is one.First, let me make it clear that I was on the side advocating for a lighter touch--I'm just trying to explain.

What if you were selling jackhammers, and you showed up with something that did not sound like a jackhammer? It's hard to imagine a jackhammer not sounding like one, and still being able to do the job. Once you turned it on, you'd be spending all your time explaining how you got it to be so quiet, rather than showing your customers how good a job of hammering it does.

But you and I agree about technical papers--it's on the content not the presentation that they should be judged.
Exactly why technical sounding papers are so awful. No clarity is gained by passive voice, and it is way awkward. There really isn't any more weight gained-- it's all smoke. The weight of obfuscation-- bad science.I think you're being a little harsh there. As near as I can tell, the main intent of it is to change the focus. "The data was analyzed," instead of "We analyzed the data." The first brings the data to the front, and removes "us". That is the essence of science, in a sense.

It's one of the reasons that technical papers can be seen as dull--the emotion and personal involvement have been excised. For the good of the science.

But I'm still of the opinion that good science results can be written like jack wants them to be written. I'm probably in the minority--I know plenty of people who just eat that other stuff up. I'm one of them, weirdly.


Precisely. We want them to be clear, so the content emerges faithfully.Agreed. :)

[Ken G]

What if you were selling jackhammers, and you showed up with something that did not sound like a jackhammer? It's hard to imagine a jackhammer not sounding like one, and still being able to do the job. I see your point, and I understand that you are not necessarily arguing that is how things should be, but if I were in the business of making jackhammers and someone showed me a model that costs the same, works, the same, and is ten times quieter, I would not say "too bad no one will buy this", I'd say "alert the media, we're going to revolutionize jackhammering and make a killing!"

I think you're being a little harsh there. Me, harsh?
As near as I can tell, the main intent of it is to change the focus. "The data was analyzed," instead of "We analyzed the data." The first brings the data to the front, and removes "us". That is the essence of science, in a sense.That is the essence of bad science-- good science does not relieve the experimenters of their responsibility and agency. To say "the data was analyzed" almost suggests it analyzed itself! Instead, various choices were made by the authors, and they should stand ready to defend and explain those choices.


It's one of the reasons that technical papers can be seen as dull--the emotion and personal involvement have been excised. For the good of the science. It's a shame a lot of people think that, but it's not just "emotion" that is excised-- it's truthfulness. Also, interest. One of the worst talks I ever saw was a major talk at a major meeting, in which the speaker almost seemed to think it would be a disservice to science to let his voice show any excitement, or even inflection for that matter. He just droned on and on, thinking that the science spoke for itself. That it did not was made evident by the fact that literally 2/3 of the audience actually left the talk before it was done! Now, was the "good of science" done there?



But I'm still of the opinion that good science results can be written like jack wants them to be written. I'm probably in the minority--I know plenty of people who just eat that other stuff up. I'm one of them, weirdly.

What I hate is sentence structure that is intentionally complex, when a much simpler structure would make the same point far clearer. You see that a lot-- it's as though people think that if what they are saying is hard to understand, it must be more profound. I catch myself doing it too-- and I just back off and say, "what am I really trying to say here?" Then I say, "oh yeah, I'm just saying this, so why don't I just say it that way?"

[hhEb09'1]

That is the essence of bad science-- good science does not relieve the experimenters of their responsibility and agency. To say "the data was analyzed" almost suggests it analyzed itself! Instead, various choices were made by the authors, and they should stand ready to defend and explain those choices.No, it is not bad science, the experimenters are not giving up their responsibility. "The data was analyzed" does not suggest that it analyzed itself. They do stand ready to defend and explain their choices.

It's a shame a lot of people think that, but it's not just "emotion" that is excised-- it's truthfulness. The passive voice is untruthful? :)

I've seen the emotional rabblerouser types, they can get caught up in the crusade, if you know what I mean. I'll take the "passive" scientists, all else being equal, if I have to choose. :)

[Ken G]

The passive voice is untruthful? What we are talking about is nuances of implication, not the basic points themselves. Obviously Einstein could have described relativity from the perspective of an adventure of Alice through the Looking Glass and it would still have revolutionized modern physics. But what is untruthful is hiding behind the false facade of impartiality. When "the data was analyzed", I'll bet the scientists had a reason for doing so, likely even a passion behind it, possibly an axe to grind, maybe even a ware to sell. All that should be up front in the writing style, not swept under the rug and pretended it doesn't exist, because it is all relevant to the process that actually happened in creating that paper. To conceal all that is the dishonest part-- impartiality is pretense. Not that people should be downright hotheaded-- we can certainly see where that leads from this forum itself.



I've seen the emotional rabblerouser types, they can get caught up in the crusade, if you know what I mean. I'll take the "passive" scientists, all else being equal, if I have to choose.And I'll take the honesty of a Galileo. Albeit a lot more diplomatic...

(Added: we both agree on various advantages and disadvantages of style choices, and we both agree on the importance of impartiality in science. My point is that impartiality is imperfect and must be addressed head-on, whereas passive voice makes it all too easy to hide behind a false veneer of impartiality that may not actually exist. Active voice forces the researcher to tackle partiality problems head-on, to embrace and deal with them, consciously creating as much impartiality as possible because they know whey will be held to that standard. Passive voice is form but not substance of impartiality-- impartiality is never a passive thing.)

[Cougar]

There are countless observations to be made, countless correlations between science and poetry, there are countless ways in which one may yield insight into the other....
I thought this was kind of catchy:



In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. - Paul Dirac

[jack butler]

It would be fun to put well-known poems into translators, then bring them back to the same language. Not only would the substitutions be awkward in terms of meaning and context, but the music would almost certainly be lost. Which would do the greater damage to the poem?

Are you familiar with the quote (cannot remember who wrote it, probably Valery, that fine French poet, but maybe Baudelaire), "Poetry is what gets lost in translation?" Makes one laugh, but has the sting of truth. I am deeply grateful to translations--I have friends who can read Homer in the Greek, but I can't--but almost never meet a translation that works for me with the force of original poetry. Richard Wilbur does a beautiful job of translating French, very convincing. Robert Bly, by my lights, butchers the poems he translates.

Obviously, then, I think the loss of the music is the supreme loss. It is almost as hard to write a good translation as it is to write a good original poem. Poetry lives in a language.

It is not an ur-system, a system of connotation only. Such systems, like math, are extremely valuable. But like the flowers that heal a certain condition but only grow in one valley, poetry is essentially native.
It gets its power and vitality precisely from this limitation.

There are so many associations that native speakers have available that a life of study cannot provide. I have always thought of Chinese and Japanese as very subtle languages, with levels of discourse for thousands of different social situations. It dawned on me only recently that English is just as subtle. My El Salvadoran son-in-law, for example, has great difficulty seeing why one would not write a letter to a boss that says Meet me tomorrow at ten instead of a letter that says, Ten o'clock tomorrow would be a good time for me if it is convenient for you. The information is the same, but there are hosts of social expectations. This is one of the reasons I love language, because it complex beyond all our maps. It cannot be exhausted. It is almost as complex as humans themselves, and for me is a definite window on human complexity.

With regard to music, again: For me poetry is essentially a physical art, like dancing, because of its music. I hear the music whether I hear it in only in my head or outwardly and in my head. My body reacts to what I hear, and so there is the definite sense of music entering the body and transforming it.

[jack butler]

I thought this was kind of catchy:



In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. - Paul Dirac


The exact opposite would be, "In poetry one tries to tell people, in such a way that no one understands, something that everybody already knows."

As humor, it is funny and I like it. There are definitely (bad) poets who perform in that fashion.

As a serious description of poetry, though, it has all the accuracy I would expect from such an accomplished poet as Paul Dirac.

[jack butler]

One of the worst talks I ever saw was a major talk at a major meeting, in which the speaker almost seemed to think it would be a disservice to science to let his voice show any excitement, or even inflection for that matter. He just droned on and on, thinking that the science spoke for itself. That it did not was made evident by the fact that literally 2/3 of the audience actually left the talk before it was done! Now, was the "good of science" done there?

This is a fascinating anecdote to me because there are poets who behave in exactly the same way, reading their poems in a monotone, as if the "art" were too noble to be sullied by mere inflection. I would group that scientist and those poets together. I think they are joined by an unfortunate attitude and not distinguished by subject matter.

Incidentally, your point on passive voice would be exactly mine. It has its uses--one would preferentially say, for example, The data were examined for signal error, rather than citing each scientist if there were many involved, and if the examination for signal error were not essential to the report. But on the whole, passive voice is weaker. It does not create objectivity or impartiality (How could a grammatical structure do that? If it could, then every villain who could master the structure could be impartial and objective.) It omits the actor, and is therefore frequently used to create the appearance of impartiality.

Is it more honest to say, It is thought or I think?

[Ken G]

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation?"

I like that definition far better than Dirac's! We'll allow that Dirac is poking fun, but I think a more serious comparison would admit that both science and poetry are attempting to enrich our conscious minds with an appreciation for a dance the universe has known forever, they just choose very different methods to achieve that appreciation. Again, it is the person who finds the benefit who is the better judge than the one who does not, an error we've encountered on other threads as well!

[Ken G]

Is it more honest to say, It is thought or I think?
And should Percival Lowell, when sketching the surface of Mars as he saw it through the world's best telescope, have said "one sees long straight lines that appear to be canals", or should he have said "I see patterns at the edge of my perception that I find consistent with the possibility of long straight canals"? Which is the impartial science, and which is the "emotional" interpretation?

[Cougar]

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

The exact opposite would be, "In poetry one tries to tell people, in such a way that no one understands, something that everybody already knows."
Yes, I agree that it doesn't quite ring true. But I think the "something that everybody already knows" is pretty accurate. Maybe I'm being too limiting, but doesn't most good poetry shed light on some common aspect of the human condition? Obviously that would be something everybody "knows" (although often it is enlightening to learn that everyone has the same fears, joys, whetever).

As to "no one understands" or alternatively "not everyone understands," well, there may be a plausible explanation there, too. Is poetry so much about rational understanding, or does it give its reader more an "emotional feeling" about the matter, more like music in a sense? Poetry is clearly a very subjective discipline, and different readers are apt, almost encouraged, to take from a poem whatever they will. Isn't it common for poets to refuse to offer any definitive interpretation of some particular imagery within their work? (Maybe I'm wrong, but) it's like poetry is not supposed to have any set meaning or global understanding. However it affects a reader is just fine with the poet, as long as there's some effect.

[jack butler]

Yes, I agree that it doesn't quite ring true. But I think the "something that everybody already knows" is pretty accurate. Maybe I'm being too limiting, but doesn't most good poetry shed light on some common aspect of the human condition? Obviously that would be something everybody "knows" (although often it is enlightening to learn that everyone has the same fears, joys, whetever).

As to "no one understands" or alternatively "not everyone understands," well, there may be a plausible explanation there, too. Is poetry so much about rational understanding, or does it give its reader more an "emotional feeling" about the matter, more like music in a sense? Poetry is clearly a very subjective discipline, and different readers are apt, almost encouraged, to take from a poem whatever they will. Isn't it common for poets to refuse to offer any definitive interpretation of some particular imagery within their work? (Maybe I'm wrong, but) it's like poetry is not supposed to have any set meaning or global understanding. However it affects a reader is just fine with the poet, as long as there's some effect.

In the broad sense that you describe, poetry is about what "everybody already knows." As Pope put it, "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." However, in my opinion (and Pope is far from my favorite poet), in that broad a sense, this is also what science does. Was talking just today with a highly intelligent physicist about quantum mechanics. We agreed that we saw the so-called "wave/particle duality" not as a duality, but as a result of our attempts to perceive a phenomon. The perception depends upon the choice of method. Because we think in terms of waves and particles, we attempt to define the phenomenon is those terms. In this way, I feel, quantum mechanics tells us that the information we can extract from reality is fundamentally limited. This is not news to anyone who has done even a little thinking, but its formulation is remarkable and insightful.

As for the point about each reader taking whatever he or she wishes from a poem, and poems being about feelings: I respectfully disagree. My students often said in class, A poem is just what you want to make it. Just as often, I said No. It isn't. That is the escape hatch used by poets of inferior talent, and by aestheticians of small understanding. If each poem's intent is to be determined by the individual reader, then one cannot compare poems and say that one is more effective than another, or shows more talent than another--and I think it is just this vagueness that has caused the strategy to be so prevalent today. It affords a great hiding-place for the mediocre.

It is a notion of poetic meaning that would have been foreign to every poet in every culture previous, and is still foreign to most poets in most cultures. It was developed in the 20th century primarily in the U. S., and now is voiced everywhere, but that does not make it so. In my view, all good poets know exactly what they are saying, and exactly what they mean, even poets commonly thought difficult to understand, like Wallace Stevens. Every one of his poems is a specific and intelligible communication, not a blank slate.

The notion that poems mean just what you want them to mean is what I call
"the hidden meaning theory of poetry." This approach has been put forward for years by incompetent teachers who do not understand the very poems they teach. It is also a reaction, I think, to the famous "difficulty" of contemporary poetry. Not all poetry is difficult, although some is. But again--would we fault contemporary mathematics for being more "difficult" than previous mathematics? I think that so-called difficult poems--the good ones, again, not the pretenders--are difficult in exact proportion to their necessary music. The thing has to be said in this way, and in order to understand the saying, we must grow, learn. We cannot demand that the poem descend to our level. We must rise to its level. That's the point. We do not find such a requirement strange when it is attached to physics--you cannot claim to truly understand relativity unless you can do the math--and yet we protest that it cannot be true in poetry. Why not?

The hidden meaning theory of poetry is a superficial gesture in the direction of democracy, but it requires neither study nor understanding, and it reduces poetry to nothingness.

I would apologize for my volubility here--I really do not intend criticism of your thinking--but I am filled with dismay when I come across this hydra-like idea yet again. I think it has gutted the value of poetry for most people. It damages clear thought--in fact, if you follow its logic all the way out, it implies that thinking about poetry is useless.

I agree that poetry is subjective. That, however, is not a bad word. What it means with regard to poetry is that poetry works on parts of the human awareness that are not easily measured. It does not mean that the whole activity is merely a matter of opinion. Subjectivity is one thing. Absence of criteria is another. Does anyone seriously maintain that Francis Scott Key is the equal of Mozart? And yet music has as great a subjective effect as poetry. We find it easy to say that one dancer is better than another.

So long as we insist that poetry is merely feelings, and that sloppy thinking is to be permitted where poetry is concerned, we make it easy to dismiss poetry as relevant in a "scientific" age. The definition is circular: Poetry is not important because it doesn't demand clear thinking, and since poetry doesn't demand clear thinking it is (although vaguely good for us, somehow thought to be dimly ennobling) not important.

[hhEb09'1]

In the broad sense that you describe, poetry is about what "everybody already knows." As Pope put it, "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." However, in my opinion (and Pope is far from my favorite poet), in that broad a sense, this is also what science does. Was talking just today with a highly intelligent physicist about quantum mechanics. We agreed that we saw the so-called "wave/particle duality" not as a duality, but as a result of our attempts to perceive a phenomon. The perception depends upon the choice of method. Because we think in terms of waves and particles, we attempt to define the phenomenon is those terms. In this way, I feel, quantum mechanics tells us that the information we can extract from reality is fundamentally limited. This is not news to anyone who has done even a little thinking, but its formulation is remarkable and insightful.Yahbut, the good news is that that is not all of what quantum mechanics tells us. There is much more to it than that. It's message, in fact most of its message, is not what "everybody already knows." So, I tend to disagree that "this is also what science does."

[Ken G]

I think if one looks for differences between poetry and science, one will find them-- all too easily. More interesting is to look for similarities. I think this is Jack's point-- not that they are the same, but that they are more the same than most people realize. Indeed, most people think they are as diametrically opposed as different halves of the brain (another highly oversold distinction). Yes, quantum mechanics does tell us more than that information is limited, it tells us how it is limited. But to understand that message, we must access something very central to learning. If I explain the uncertainty principle to someone with no math skills at all, it will sound a bit different than if I explain it to a mathematician. The kernel will be there either way, but the specifics must be tailored to the experiences and skills of the listener. Perhaps this is another similarity of poetry-- if we say one has to "already know" the subject of a poem to understand it, then is the same not true of physics too? Do we not have to "already know" the meaning of the mathematical concepts, and to know those, we must somehow connect to our own experience with mathematics. Even the level of abstraction is not necessarily different-- poetry can involve very abstract images and perceptions, not necessarily the "least common denominator" types of emotions. In short, one must in either case elevate one's brain to a level where the poem, or the physical principle, will make sense.

[hhEb09'1]

Do we not have to "already know" the meaning of the mathematical concepts, and to know those, we must somehow connect to our own experience with mathematics.Bringing our own experience to bear on the "content" of a poem, and thereby rearranging it and personalizing it, is an important and to me crucial part of the process--but it's also one of those things that can get taken too far and abused. I think that's what Jack is railing against, imposing our personal view on a poem to the extent that the poet is lost, or marginalized. Kinda like when quantum mechanics is taken to an extreme and becomes the basis for a new type of religious fervor, or something. :)

BTW, I found an interesting quote from Francis Crick when I was posting to a different BAUT thread (http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php?p=1006717#post1006717):
The film gets over the obvious fact that scientific research is performed by human beings with no trace of the stereotyped emotionless scientist...By "gets over" I think he means "communicates" :)

[worzel]

So tossing out art on the grounds that it is not objectively verifiable, or tossing out science because it is so objective that is has no soul, is not only missing the whole point of both endeavors, it is missing the whole point of what civilization is all about. That is what motivated that science vs. religion thread, and look how hard it was for the rationalists to see that fairly straightforward point.
As far as I remember, no one in that thread suggested throwing out art. An appreciation of the message does not require a belief in the literal truth of the message's medium.

[Ken G]

As far as I remember, no one in that thread suggested throwing out art. An appreciation of the message does not require a belief in the literal truth of the message's medium.Not to rekindle that debate, but it is you who are imposing the need to find "literal truth", not I. I don't think that phrase has anything remotely close to any meaning. Indeed, "literal truth" is probably an oxymoron-- to be literal is to accept extreme limitations that preclude any claim to truth, other than whatever is the limited concept of truth that survives the yoke of literalness. So again, this is indeed why I created that thread, not because people were throwing out art exactly (though religion, yes), but because they were seeing it purely as a kind of recreation, not a valid approach to knowing one's universe. Jack's point, and I believe a valid one, is that art (and poetry) can actually achieve some of the very same objectives as science, just on a deeper level of generalizing what we mean by "objectives". Literal truth is simply not one of them-- the purpose of science is to achieve edification via the creation of effective models, often mathematically so. End of story. It might be said that the purpose of poetry is to achieve edification via the creation of language. To the extent that language is indeed a model of something, there is a deep similarity there, sometimes even to the verge of mathematics.

[Ken G]

Bringing our own experience to bear on the "content" of a poem, and thereby rearranging it and personalizing it, is an important and to me crucial part of the process--but it's also one of those things that can get taken too far and abused.

I agree, it's a fine line there and perhaps Jack would comment on where he thinks it is best drawn. A poem has to speak to us, and that means we have to be able to connect to our own experience somehow. It reminds me of what a dictionary is-- many people think a dictionary tells us what words mean, but it doesn't-- it only provides a mapping between words we don't know and words that we do. We still have to know what some words mean, and that requires experience of something. Yet a dictionary can also alert us to the existence of things we have not ourselves experienced, like a person who's never loved looking up the definition of that word and connecting it to experiences he/she has had. Perhaps a good poem does some of that-- even as it connects us to our own experiences, which is the part we bring to the table, it also awakens us to things we have not experienced-- what the poet is bringing. That may also be part of the music-- for we need experience with music to appreciate music, but good music still takes us somewhere we have not been.

[worzel]

Not to rekindle that debate
Absolutely, which is why I would appreciate you not firing off cross thread pot shots with gross misrepresentations of what people actually said. You do that a lot and it is very hard to resist the temptation to pollute the thread furher.

[Ken G]

I agree that I should not have specifically mentioned the other thread, that was a bit of a pot shot. What I meant was simply that we are seeing many of the same biases on this thread-- the bias that science is about truth (or your "literal truth", so now you have ownership over what is literal despite the connection with language there), and poetry is about emotion or recreation. This is precisely what this thread is about-- the fascinating observation that many of the techniques of poetry are as precise and carefully mastered as those in science. That is the connection that I am sure will be a tough sell, for many of the same reasons, hence my inappropriate reference. That is why it is not a "pollution" of this thread, it is central to it, but the comment was unnecessarily snide. The snide part isn't what makes it true.

[worzel]

Having read through this thread I find little to disagree with and am at a loss as to why you think Jack's central theme would be a tough sell to the likes of me. Perhaps you've mischaracterized us for so long you're starting to believe in your strawmen :)

[hhEb09'1]

What I meant was simply that we are seeing many of the same biases on this thread-- You're seeing examples of that bias on this thread? I'm also not sure which you mean.

[Cougar]

The notion that poems mean just what you want them to mean is what I call "the hidden meaning theory of poetry." This approach has been put forward for years by incompetent teachers who do not understand the very poems they teach.
Well, I'm glad I asked since this position didn't really ring true to me in the first place, and I am more than happy to defer to your obviously greater understanding of poetry.

So "the hidden meaning theory of poetry" seems to have a counterpart in the the hidden variable theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variables) of quantum mechanics. :)

[Ken G]

Having read through this thread I find little to disagree with and am at a loss as to why you think Jack's central theme would be a tough sell to the likes of me.


You're seeing examples of that bias on this thread? I'm also not sure which you mean.

You're both right-- I'm on so many interweaving threads at the moment I have them rather confused. This thread has been refreshingly devoid of any "scientific thinking is so much better than any other type" kind of reasoning (beyond a dabblance in humorous digs about science being the only access to things that not everyone knows and claims that it is the only type of truth that is "literal"). Perhaps that's because this thread is framed in terms of similarities, rather than fully appropriate differences, between the disciplines. But in any event, my complaint was indeed a bit of a strawman here! In fact I think poetry may be viewed as a kind of "end run" approach at exposing the limitations in the "science is all things to all people" kind of mentality about human intellectual forays into the realm of understanding our condition. The fact that it has not been a "hard sell" exposes the effectiveness of the strategem.

(edited to draw more useful connections.)

[jack butler]

. . . perhaps Jack would comment on where he thinks it is best drawn. A poem has to speak to us, and that means we have to be able to connect to our own experience somehow. It reminds me of what a dictionary is-- many people think a dictionary tells us what words mean, but it doesn't-- it only provides a mapping between words we don't know and words that we do. We still have to know what some words mean, and that requires experience of something. Yet a dictionary can also alert us to the existence of things we have not ourselves experienced, like a person who's never loved looking up the definition of that word and connecting it to experiences he/she has had. Perhaps a good poem does some of that-- even as it connects us to our own experiences, which is the part we bring to the table, it also awakens us to things we have not experienced-- what the poet is bringing. That may also be part of the music-- for we need experience with music to appreciate music, but good music still takes us somewhere we have not been.

Actually, I can't say how I perceive the relation between poet and reader any better than you have. The dictionary analogy is excellent.

So what follows is perhaps mere reiteration. I will speak only for my own approach to poetry. I go to poetry (as indeed I go to physics) to have experiences I could not have on my own (there are many other motivations, but this one seems the most relevant to the topic at the moment). I go to poetry to grow, to expand, to learn, to be transformed. This being the case, I defer to the poem and the poet. I assume the mastery of the poet (and of course by now I have learned enough to decide pretty quickly whether the poet is really a master or is full of it). So I cooperate with the poem instead of dictating to it. If I treat the poem as if it is no more than what I want to make of it, I can't have any new experiences, in much the same way that adherence to a preconceived notion blinds one to contrary evidence. I get only what I came with, the same old thing.

Of course there's room for individual response. What lights me up about a Shakespearean sonnet may not be exactly the same thing that lights you up (if anything in it does). "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action," seems wonderful to me not only because it is still, after more than four hundred years, a good description of aspects of what is sometimes called the dating game, but because of its sheer rhetorical surge. Poetry has value because we come to it as individuals. Yet that value depends on shared experience, just as words themselves do. We have to test the effects of a poem against our own sense of things, but I take the poet as the master, the guide, the one who knows the way.

I find this natural and not paradoxical. It's the way I respond to painting, music, dance, mathematics. I do not want to tell the work what it means to me--I want instead to understand more deeply.

So for me there is a there there, a core of experience, somehow compressed and coded into powerful exactly right language, which, once you know how to release its energy, can not merely show you new things but change perception itself.

As an example, the poem I have been referring to by Robert Frost, which I feel has strong connections to quantum mechanics: First the poem, then a few background comments, then a take on the poem.

DESIGN

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
on a white heal-all, holding up a moth
like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
assorted characters of death and blight
mixed ready to begin the morning right,
like the ingredients of a witch's broth--
a snowdrop spider, a flower like froth,
and dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
the wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What steered the white moth thither in the night,
or brought the kindred spider to that height?
What but design of darkness to appall?
--If design govern in a thing so small.

I don't have my book with me here, so am quoting from memory. Please forgive any punctuation errors. I should also say that I owe parts of this explication to the perceptions of others.

Frost was well-known for his sympathy for science, by the way, and his understanding of it, in an age in which few other poets shared his outlook. This poem was written when quantum mechanics was quite a new discipline, but he seems to have absorbed the implications.

This is a sonnet. Basically a sonnet is fourteen lines of rhyming iambic pentameter (five-beat lines: Frost is famous for saying there are only two rhythms in English, regular iambic and loose iambic). In English there are two basic sonnet forms, the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean (though there have been many experiments and blends). The Shakespearean consists of three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef and a concluding couplet gg. The Petrarchan rhymes abba abba for the first eight lines, and then may adopt any of several schemes for the last six. In this poem, Frost continues one of his rhymes into the sestet, and introduces only one new rhyme, so one might say the degree of difficulty is a lot higher.

Frost's locution is sometimes a bit archaic. Remember he was born just after the Civil War and was in his eighties when he quoted a poem of his at JFK's inauguration. Frost was a strict formalist, but he liked to roughen up the sound of his meter. Some people mistake this roughness for clumsiness, but it is extreme sophistication (he said once that he loved "breaking the speaking voice across" the regularities of the rhythm). Instead of the monotonous duh DAH duh DAH of forced iambics, he substituted frequently. You will notice DAH duh duh DAH and duh duh DAH DAH as two-beat substitutions among others. He also counts syllables: To my ear, the 7th line has four beats, but it does have ten syllables, so I suspect that to his ear it fit the old form of a pentameter line.

The poem is a counter to the old familiar argument from design. If you take the argument from design literally, he says, then what about this? We are used to assuming white is the color of good and black the color of evil. But here is a spider, which we might expect to be black, but which is instead white. It is on a white heal-all, which is a mutation from the usual color of the flower (heal-all is prunella vulgaris and grows over most of the U. S., blooming usually in May--it has a square stem and opposite leaves, so is in the mint family--I would describe the blossoms as reddish-violet, but blue is close enough for me and fits the meter better). Along the way, in his argument, Frost provides a lot of delight for the reader with a good ear. The dimple of the spider is like a baby's dimple, all the more frightening for being in a place we didn't expect it. There is unusual force on the word "rigid"--satin shouldn't be rigid--it drives home the deadness of the moth, and perhaps we hear echoes of "rigor mortis."

By "characters" he means something we might call images or symbols. Suddenly in the 5th line he drops into the false bright cheeriness of a radio cooking show, horrifying by contrast, considering the subject.

Then he begins to question the idea of design. If there is design in all things, why is the spider the color we associate with goodness? Why is the heal-all a mutation? Why, for that matter, a heal-all, a plant with curative properties, for the stage of this mini-drama of death and predation? The moth is presented again, and the stress levels of the syllables rise in "dead wings carried." Could you put two more contrary words together than "dead" and "wings?" And they are carried "like a paper kite." The image is of play, of happiness--the image is physically exact, suggesting the movement of the wings precisely, but also extremely dark in its association of a playful moment with this scene of death. By analogy, all our light moments, all our games are prey to the same whims of nature.

He sums up the argument so far. If this is design, he says, what kind of design is it? If you argue from design, he says, you would have to conclude that evil (darkness) has created this design to dismay us. Notice, incidentally, the exactly right word choice--to "appall" means to dismay, but it comes from words which literally mean to cover with darkness.

So far a familiar argument. Here is where I think something extraordinary happens. He has apparently concluded his argument in thirteen lines. But there are fourteen lines in a sonnet. I know before I read the last line that he must finish out the form. This knowing creates a sort of expectation or tension in me. How is he going to get out of this corner?

He does it by apparently throwing in a tossed-off line. "If design govern in a thing so small." But all of a sudden this line is the whole point of the poem. It changes everything. Isn't this the very question posed by quantum mechanics? Isn't this the difference between the questioning of the philosophers of the past and the scientists and philosophers of the present--entertaining the notion that design may not govern at all? If it doesn't govern in "a thing so small," how can it govern in anything? And besides, by now, we have imaginatively identified ourselves with the event he describes. WE are "a thing so small."

It is the brio, the genius of that quiet little apparent toss-off, the way it fulfills so effortlessly the form of the piece while taking the whole debate into a brand-new dimension, that is so powerful for me.

I have written enough poetry to know, by the way it moves, that it is a genuine discussion, too. Frost did not design the poem to click on that last line--he found the last line by moving through the other stages of the poem. (It is impossible to control a poem to that extent, and that is why truly fine poetry is, for me, discovery--you cannot predict where the form will lead you. You have to be willing to go there). So the effect, for me, is to follow a powerful mind on an actual journey of discovery.

That's why I describe him as a master.

You notice how many words it took me to suggest the effects in this poem (and believe me, I could have gone into far more detail). Yet all these effects happen in the trained reader in a matter of moments. This ability to compress not merely thought but experience, to give me layers of simultaneous impression, yields startling power, like releasing all the energy in a few grams of apparently innocuous mass.

I don't feel like I have done justice to this poem, incidentally, so I hope that no one will blame it for my shortcomings. (It's hard to "do justice" to poems--that's why I keep going back to the poems themselves.)

[Ken G]

That post is exactly why we are fortunate Jack decided to start a thread on poetry! In science, the maximum energy from a gram is E=mc^2. I wonder what is the maximum potency of 14 lines of iambic pentameter?

[hhEb09'1]

This being the case, I defer to the poem and the poet. I assume the mastery of the poet (and of course by now I have learned enough to decide pretty quickly whether the poet is really a master or is full of it).Still, that's the same place that a lot of people make their error--they pre-judge the work rather than submitting to it, and trying to extract meaning from the poet.
So I cooperate with the poem instead of dictating to it. If I treat the poem as if it is no more than what I want to make of it, I can't have any new experiences, in much the same way that adherence to a preconceived notion blinds one to contrary evidence. I get only what I came with, the same old thing.Exactly.
As an example, the poem I have been referring to by Robert Frost, which I feel has strong connections to quantum mechanics: Frost is my best example of exegesis gone rampant--I was surprised to find essay after essay that claimed it was common knowledge that a particular poem of his had a particular undercurrent. Later, I re-read a well-known essay by John Ciardi from a long time ago that seemed to be the source of the "common knowledge"--and in it Ciardi proposed the possibility as a straw man and knocked it down, to illustrate a point. Sometimes, "alternate meanings" gain a life of their own, without real merit. Which is probably the same as your objection to the reader-as-creator point of view.

a snowdrop spider, a flower like froth,
He also counts syllables: To my ear, the 7th line has four beats, but it does have ten syllables, so I suspect that to his ear it fit the old form of a pentameter line.IMO the line reads best with a terminal spondee, five beats. To make it four beats, I have to read the last phrase as "a flower-like froth" which doesn't seem to be the intent--the subject is the flower not froth. I see it as an anchor on the speaker, forcing a pause just before running out the concluding line.

[Ken G]

To make it four beats, I have to read the last phrase as "a flower-like froth" which doesn't seem to be the intent--the subject is the flower not froth. I see it as an anchor on the speaker, forcing a pause just before running out the concluding line.
I see it as setting up an echo with line 8. To my ear, putting 1's for stressed syllables, 0s for unstressed, and # for pauses, lines 7 and 8 read to me like
a snowdrop spider, a flower like froth,
0 1 # 1 # 1 0 # 0 1 0 0 # 1
and dead wings carried like a paper kite.
0 1 # 1 # 1 0 0 01 0 # 1
If read that way, the two lines have a closely resonant pattern that would seem overkill if they rhymed. Line 7 has only 4 stressed syllables this way if we read snowdrop in the natural way like 10, but that gives less of a play on the prospect of snow that drops. Overall, the resonance of these two lines seems important, it seems like an alternate way to achieve an intermediate couplet in the poem, with rhythm instead of rhyme, to be eclipsed by the rhyme of the final couplet. To have 4 beats, to me line 7 has "snowdrop spider" read as 01_01, which is a little too repetitive with the "flower like froth" read as flowerlike. But I see that hh's idea is also interesting, to read it like
a snowdrop spider, a flower like froth,
0 1 0 # 1 0 # 0 1 0 # 1 1
and dead wings carried like a paper kite.
0 1 0 # 1 0 # 0 01 #1 # 1
which also achieves a closely resonant form, and the 2-3 stressing is more end-loaded than my 3-2 suggestion above, which creates drama and is truer to Frost's preference of "flower like froth" over "flowerlike froth". Still, I can't condone stressing the "per" in "paper kite", so line 8 would need to be read 01#1#100010#1, which mixes the two possible readings of lines 7 and 8 but loses that echoing resonance that I find important to set up for the final stanza. So either we read flower like as flowerlike, or we lose our resonance, or slaughter paper kite. Would it be exegesis gone rampant to suggest that Frost split flowerlike into flower like expressly to force this "design" conundrum?

It's interesting how much the rhythm can be played with by the reader, like a great actor doing Shakespeare-- no doubt the same kinds of poet vs. reader issues apply to rhythm as to interpretation of meaning.

[hhEb09'1]

Would it be exegesis gone rampant to suggest that Frost split flowerlike into flower like expressly to force this "design" conundrum?I would say so :)

I don't see any possibility that he meant "flowerlike". If it were flowerlike froth, where does the froth come from? It doesn't appear anywhere else--and without it, the lines 7 and 8 have the list "spider, flower, wings" which exactly duplicates the list "spider, heal-all, moth" from lines 1 and 2.

No froth in Frost, just like froth. :)

[jack butler]

I would say so :)

I don't see any possibility that he meant "flowerlike". If it were flowerlike froth, where does the froth come from? It doesn't appear anywhere else--and without it, the lines 7 and 8 have the list "spider, flower, wings" which exactly duplicates the list "spider, heal-all, moth" from lines 1 and 2.

No froth in Frost, just like froth. :)

Glad to see you guys tackling the old man. I hear the line in question as two iambic beats and two anapestic beats--duh DAH duh DAH duh duh DAH duh duh DAH. I don't think Frost split the word "flowerlike" either. Pretty sure he meant a flower which resembles froth. The image is not that farfetched when you consider the ranked blossoms of the heal-all--it is not one blossom, but rows of small blossoms on the head of a single stalk. Closely-packed and white, they would indeed resemble froth. Besides, whether the flower is like froth, as in my reading, or the froth is like a flower, as in yours, we still have the froth you don't like to deal with. And as Ken points out, in your explication, we have the question of where the froth came from.

As for the spondee at the end, my notion of a spondee is that the foot contains two relatively equal stresses, and no matter how I read the line, I cannot give "like" anything near the stress of "froth." In general, I feel a stress in English meter is something that has more force than syllables on either side of it--thus, the "grace" stress on the word "to" in line five, a frequent move in accentual-syllabic poetry, what is sometimes called "rhetorical stress." The line clearly reads like pentameter, and "to" is clearly intended as a stress, in order to fill out the five-beat line.

I mention accentual-syllabic, and will talk about it later. It is more complex than mere stress-count, though it can be heard easily enough.

Incidentally, just registering my reasons for my opinion here. My idea of the way one makes sense of a poem is when all one's interpretations of various lines converge on a sensible discourse. The trouble I find with what I call "the hidden meaning theory" is that any little correlation a reader can think of is given equal weight, regardless of whether that correlation fits together with other notions to form a complete discourse. I used to say that bad teachers pretended the point of poetry was to hide the meanings and the point of reading them was to dig them out, and the more "meanings" you could come up with, however, preposterous, the better your grade. Have seriously known some teachers who operated that way.

Given my view above, I feel that anything I say about a poem must stand or fall on how strongly it appeals to the good sense of other intelligent readers. Am well aware I cannot legislate an interpretation of a line or a poem.

John Ciardi (whom I met a few times) is, to my mind, a greatly underappreciated poet. I love lines of his like "Who would believe an ant in theory, a giraffe in blueprint?" or "The health of captains is the sex of war" (pentameter, incidentally), or, referring to a bug that survives by imitating the white spot at the center of a bird's dropping, "Life will do anything for a living." He has been omitted entirely from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and many far more incompetent poets have been included. In my opinion, though I have no proof, the omission is political.

[jack butler]

Well, I'm glad I asked since this position didn't really ring true to me in the first place, and I am more than happy to defer to your obviously greater understanding of poetry.

So "the hidden meaning theory of poetry" seems to have a counterpart in the the hidden variable theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variables) of quantum mechanics. :)

Again, I apologize if I am too emphatic. I'm delighted at your interest. Definitely do not feel that poetry is about being "right," or that the point is a competition of perceptions. I just get carried away because I love the stuff so much and want to transmit to a few others the pleasure I have had. I've been at it nearly fifty years, reading, studying, writing, publishing, memorizing, loving it. It would be a miracle if I had not learned a little.

But even so, I know poetry cannot appeal to everyone. It has to be voluntary. You come to it for love of it or not at all. There is no sense of "should" about it for me. It's like dancing: If you dance to impress people, instead of for delight, you miss the point.

One of the reasons I find myself talking about poetry with physicists is I have become impatient with the intelligence of the dominant theorists in the literary field--among physicists, one hopes, at least training in how to think is more common. Not universal, but more common.

My irritation is not at people who don't respond to poetry, but at those poetasters (from the French word for wannabes, peut-etres) who, in my opinion, turn people away from the good stuff by putting forth cockamamie ideas and pretentious aesthetic jargon.

I laughed aloud at your comparison of "hidden meaning" to "hidden variables." Indeed. Something that exists even though no reasonable approach can demonstrate its existence.

[hhEb09'1]

I don't have my book with me here, so am quoting from memory. I don't know! :)

When I went to look it up I found this page (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/design.htm) that appears to be a compilation of interpretations of the poem--the first one is by Randall Jarrell who was aghast that a student would associate the froth with fudge--but it goes on with copies of the earlier Frost poem In White which has the phrase "flower like a froth" and some of the versions of Design have the "a" too, some don't. :)

That clears up whether or not it's flowerlike or not (it's not, but you confused mine and Ken's posts, jack) but it messes with the scan :)

And while I'm going back in posts, I meant to comment on this earlier:
(It is impossible to control a poem to that extent, and that is why truly fine poetry is, for me, discovery--you cannot predict where the form will lead you. You have to be willing to go there). So the effect, for me, is to follow a powerful mind on an actual journey of discovery.Maybe, maybe Frost, but I'm pretty certain that it would not be impossible for Richard Wilbur. :)

[Ken G]

I would say so :)

I don't see any possibility that he meant "flowerlike". If it were flowerlike froth, where does the froth come from? Well, it would come from the witch's broth. I imagine that as being a bit frothy-- you know, boil and bubble and all that. I don't know why he split the words if this is the case, but I'm reading it that the heal-all has lost its identity completely, it is now the froth on the broth, and is only like a flower now. That would seem to be the key issue-- which word connects directly to "like", so which word is now the simile-- is the flower real and the broth is imagined, or is the broth real and the flower has been absorbed into it?

An alternative exegesis which seems tantalizing even if admittedly rampant is that Frost was intending this ambiguity. Are the mix of these "ingredients" just happenstance, or are they are recipe, like witch's would follow-- and if the latter, then the combination becomes the real thing, subsuming the ingredients. The flower is now broth.

[jack butler]

I don't know! :)

When I went to look it up I found this page (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/design.htm) that appears to be a compilation of interpretations of the poem--the first one is by Randall Jarrell who was aghast that a student would associate the froth with fudge--but it goes on with copies of the earlier Frost poem In White which has the phrase "flower like a froth" and some of the versions of Design have the "a" too, some don't. :)

That clears up whether or not it's flowerlike or not (it's not, but you confused mine and Ken's posts, jack) but it messes with the scan :)

And while I'm going back in posts, I meant to comment on this earlier:Maybe, maybe Frost, but I'm pretty certain that it would not be impossible for Richard Wilbur. :)

You're right--I was taking your statement that it wasn't a version of "flowerlike froth" as Ken's. Think I got the sources of the metric comments right, though. My reading of the 7th line, as two iambs followed by two anapests, is very close to Ken's as it turns out. I do not feel the "-drop" in "snowdrop spider" is stressed so strongly as the two words around it, which is our major difference there, but if one wished to read it as iamb-spondee-anapest-anapest I wouldn't object.

As far as the reader playing around with rhythm: I love it, and feel it is one of the freedoms poems offer--but within limits. As with the general intent of a poem, I feel that an expert poet knows enough about how we will be forced to read the lines if we understand them to make his or her rhythm pretty clear. As I said with regard to Larkin, I would no doubt pronounce his words with longer vowels and more slurred consonants than he would--but I am quite certain than he and I would agree on the intended forms and meters. So for me it is variation within parameters, more or less like nurture playing within genetic parameters. I love it when a good actor can bring life to the Shakespearean line, making it sound like a natural speaking voice--but I hate it when a mediocre actor butchers the meter in order to produce what he or she thinks is that same effect. Pacino, for example, in Looking for Richard. He's the perfect type of the actor Hamlet castigates (speaking to the first player) for chewing the scenery. All bombast, thinks he's superior to the material. There's some poor woman, awed by the great actor, who says that although he butchers the lines, he understands--I am not making this up--"the pentameter of the heart." Give me a break. The rhythm of the heart, maybe.

But the pentameter of the heart?

Okay, impossible is hyperbole. I can plan my effects, any sufficiently accomplished poet can, but why bother? There's too much delight in coming across them, in the breakthrough moment. The more a poem is planned in that way, the more like a puzzle it is and the less like art. I do think poets are aware of their effects, but I do not think they calculate them, if the distinction makes sense to you. I think Wilbur discovers his results. He's certainly one of the more intelligent poets who has ever lived, with a precision of word use that is sometimes stunning--I plan to talk about one of my favorites of his soon--but whether or not he could plan out all his best effects, I don't really think he does. Where would be the sport?

He's my nomination for one of the American greats. I think he's as good as Yeats or Frost. Happen to have met him and corresponded with him, too, as a matter of fact. One way and another, you meet them all over time, if you are in the trade.

I think it is probably the White explication I am remembering, although Randall Jarrell often makes good sense. In the academic literary world, one is rewarded not so much for deepening comprehension, as for inventing notions to spout--I'm sure that type of academic will be unfamiliar to physics professors--so professors who actually make sense are immensely valuable. One gets sick of the iteration of explications, and sometimes the good gets tossed out with the bad. Glad you don't do that.

[Ken G]

goes on with copies of the earlier Frost poem In White which has the phrase "flower like a froth" and some of the versions of Design have the "a" too, some don't.I would have to admit that if there is a "a" in there, then the flower is real and the froth is the simile. But why would it ever be there, the syllable count would be wrong. I still like reading lines 7 and 8 with echoing stresses, in which case one has "like a paper kite" with the same stresses as "a flower like froth". That would require stressing "a" in line 7, which seems awkward. Or go with Jack's reading, but then it's not strictly pentameter and doesn't echo line 8 (maybe neither of those are any big deal, but it may be worth pursuing a different solution to the "equation"). Perhaps I was premature in ruling out "pa-per-kite" with long stresses on each. That seemed like a mangling of paper, but it does bring out the alliteration, and also conjures the child "paying per" kite adventure-- paying with precious time. But it also requires stressing "like" equally with "flower" and "froth", which Jack didn't like and I would tend to agree. So either we take a more standard-sounding approach like Jack described, and accept 4 stresses in line 7 and no resonance with 8, or we take the plunge and accept the "flowerlike" approach that elevates the froth to what is real and the flower has been absorbed into the simile. The words are written flower like, but if the pronunciation is flowerlike, the simile is inverted in the reading. If someone was trying to draw analogies with quantum mechanics, it would be hard to do better than a 'truth' in the writing this is 'inverted' in the reading, much like a particle "written" in a momentum state being "measured" in a position state. How's that for rampant exegesis?

[peteshimmon]

It seems some popular lines get changed slightly
in going round. I have just turned up a
newspaper cutting from 30 years ago of a verse
that is carved on stone alongside a lane in
Sussex. It goes;

I can't forget that lane
that goes from Steyning to the ring
In summertime and on the Downs,
How larks and linnets sing
high in the sun.
The wind comes off the sea
and oh! the air
I never knew till now that
those days were so fair.
But now I know it in this filthy, rat
infested ditch
Where every shell must kill or spare
And God alone knows which
And I am made a beast of prey
this trench is my lair.
We attack in half an hour and
it's a silly thing
I can't forget that lane
that goes from Steyning to the ring.

The ring is a clump of trees atop a hill.
The cutting says "lane that runs" instead of
goes and changes to "life in old days was so
fair" Looking on the net last night finds other
slight changes. I think I have the authors
original words.

The lines come across with crystal clarity
as a cry of anguish.

[jack butler]

It seems some popular lines get changed slightly
in going round. I have just turned up a
newspaper cutting from 30 years ago of a verse
that is carved on stone alongside a lane in
Sussex. It goes;

I can't forget that lane
that goes from Steyning to the ring
In summertime and on the Downs,
How larks and linnets sing
high in the sun.
The wind comes off the sea
and oh! the air
I never knew till now that
those days were so fair.
But now I know it in this filthy, rat
infested ditch
Where every shell must kill or spare
And God alone knows which
And I am made a beast of prey
this trench is my lair.
We attack in half an hour and
it's a silly thing
I can't forget that lane
that goes from Steyning to the ring.

The ring is a clump of trees atop a hill.
The cutting says "lane that runs" instead of
goes and changes to "life in old days was so
fair" Looking on the net last night finds other
slight changes. I think I have the authors
original words.

The lines come across with crystal clarity
as a cry of anguish.

Dear Pete--

I've never come across this piece before. It's one of the better folk poems I have ever seen (defining a "folk" poem as one written by an unheralded and generally unpublished "ordinary" person who didn't claim to be a poet--some folk poems are anonymous, some not).

On the whole, folk poems get changed more frequently than "literary" poems (in spite of the existence of drafts and revisions and alternate versions of famous literary poems)--perhaps because people feel that such poems belong to them more nearly, and they are therefore justified in changing them.

The lines are crystal clear, and speak of the anguish of war in much the way that more well-known literary poems such as "Naming of the Parts" or "Pro Patria Mori" speak of it. A beautiful piece.

You can distinguish the folk origins in the metrical uncertainties, by the way. Most of the lines move confidently, but I hear awkwardness in lines 8 and 9 (as written), the stumble occurring because of the word "that." There is also a lapse into banality of statement in the lines about life in those days being so fair, in either version, and a curious fused sentence in the lines "I am made a beast of prey/ this trench is my lair," (as written) although that may be a typo.

Don't mean to be snide in pointing out these things, by the way. The accomplishment of the poem is remarkable, especially since it was written by something who probably wasn't a talented poet. One of the most amazing poems in English, and the only poem of his that is remembered, is a poem written by Chiddiock Tichbourne on the eve of his execution, usually called "Tichbourne's Elegy." Sometimes the major force of a poem comes from truthfully rendered intensity of experience. The mistake many current literary types make is to assume that such intensity is the only source of power in poetry. Not everyone who faced death in a trench wrote a great poem, but this fellow wrote a very good one.

What I would say is not that the great poets conquer insincerity with talent, which is the usual (dismissive) assumption, but that at their best, the talent is ready when the moments occur, and they can give voice to things that most people cannot render so well. For that reason, a great poet may write a great poem about something as trivial as his or her pet cat, while it takes something as intense as facing death to bring out great poetry in those who are not poets by practice and love.

This is why, in my opinion, the angst-ridden poetry of most teen-agers is so awful. The angst is real, but the ability is lacking.

Thank you for this piece. You are right. The anguish is as clear as it was for that fellow in the trench. This is something I hope we will discuss in here, which is time in poetry. There are many things to think about--I have the conviction, for example, that truly fine poetry somehow is not one-way (against all the assumed probabilities), that there is commerce between the poet and the readers in the future, or the readers and the poet in the past. There is also the way that a poem loops back on itself temporally, so that, as in the Robert Frost poem above, the last line completely redefines the whole effort of the piece from the beginning. Then there is, as in the poem you brought us, the astonishing living quality of the voice, as fresh as it was when it was first said. How does a poem do that? How does it somehow carry the imprint and character of a living personality?

This is one of the most valuable things poetry does for me, this last. "Compatriots of such affinity/ not all were born in the same century."

Are there connections to the notions of time in physics? And so on.

Many thanks for this fine piece.

[jack butler]

I would have to admit that if there is a "a" in there, then the flower is real and the froth is the simile. But why would it ever be there, the syllable count would be wrong. I still like reading lines 7 and 8 with echoing stresses, in which case one has "like a paper kite" with the same stresses as "a flower like froth". That would require stressing "a" in line 7, which seems awkward. Or go with Jack's reading, but then it's not strictly pentameter and doesn't echo line 8 (maybe neither of those are any big deal, but it may be worth pursuing a different solution to the "equation"). Perhaps I was premature in ruling out "pa-per-kite" with long stresses on each. That seemed like a mangling of paper, but it does bring out the alliteration, and also conjures the child "paying per" kite adventure-- paying with precious time. But it also requires stressing "like" equally with "flower" and "froth", which Jack didn't like and I would tend to agree. So either we take a more standard-sounding approach like Jack described, and accept 4 stresses in line 7 and no resonance with 8, or we take the plunge and accept the "flowerlike" approach that elevates the froth to what is real and the flower has been absorbed into the simile. The words are written flower like, but if the pronunciation is flowerlike, the simile is inverted in the reading. If someone was trying to draw analogies with quantum mechanics, it would be hard to do better than a 'truth' in the writing this is 'inverted' in the reading, much like a particle "written" in a momentum state being "measured" in a position state. How's that for rampant exegesis?

Actually I base my assumption that the froth is the simile on my standard assumption reading a poem by someone I consider a master: The poet knew what he or she was doing, and wrote the words intending them to be understood as they were written. For me the "a" in another draft is supportive, but not necessary. The existence of varying versions is somewhat problematical, but on the whole the current of the poem is clear. While Frost likes to rough up his language, he doesn't commit clumsiness, doesn't make accidental mistakes in meter. That's why there's no "a" in what I consider the finished version--as hhE609'1 says (may I shorten your name in subsequent reference, by the way, to something like hhE? Won't do it if you say no), it would screw up the meter.

Interestingly, in accentual-syllabic verse, a rule seems to be (although it is never put this way) that there cannot occur 3 unstressed syllables in a row. We experience that as an awkwardness, a clumsiness. Inevitably, one of the interior syllables will be granted a grace or rhetorical stress. You see what I mean in the previously-mentioned line, "mixed ready to begin the morning right." The line reads smoothly as perfect pentameter, five iambs. But the third iamb has a weaker stress, on the word "to." If our ears did not supply that grace stress, we would have 3 unaccented syllables in a row. In lines like this, it makes sense to speak of a background or understood rhythm--the poem as a whole is obviously intended as pentameter, and that understanding conditions how we hear each line. So pentamenter itself is not an imposed monotonous pulse, but an emergent phenomenon. In almost any good standard accentual-syllabic poem, it is possible to pick many of the lines apart as not being "true" pentameter--but taken together as a rhythmic whole, a pattern emerges, and this pattern reflexively tells us how to hear the "variations."

Because the 7th line reads more naturally as a ten-syllable line with only four stresses than any other way, I assume that Frost was using syllable count to justify his pentameter. In other words, I prefer the natural reading to any construction I might retroactively make to "fit" it into my notion of pentameter. To my ear, the syllabic version of the pentameter line doesn't work as pentameter, but I am aware that many earlier poets heard them as acceptable variations, however many or few stresses they had.

Speaking of stresses: What is stress exactly? I hope to address that soon. For now, I will mention Gerard Manley Hopkins's use of what he called "sprung rhythm," by which he apparently meant the raising of the stress levels of many syllables of lines with otherwise standard accentual-syllabic meter.

I think a there is a tiny difference in enunciation between flower like and flowerlike, a very brief hesitation after flower in the first not present in the second. "A flower" (halfbeat) "like froth."

Your comments on "paper" are intelligent--I wouldn't go so far as to say exegesis run wild--but they run contrary to my auditory experience of the poem--I find it very hard to stress the second syllable of "paper"--for me the pathos of the contrast of the child's play and the death scene is in association more than the music here. You have pointed out to me that there is a resonance between lines 7 and 8, and I enjoy hearing that a lot. However, to me it occurs more nearly because of the echoes of the p and d sounds between "spider," "dead," and "paper," as well as the exactly similar rhythms of "spider" and "paper." There is also a musical move from the hisses and plosives of line 7 to the final full stop at the end of line 8.

Also important to me as music are the echoes in the initial and terminal syllables of "dead," the "d" at the end of "carried," and the "t" sound at the end of "kite," as well as the alliteration of "carried" and "kite." Notice how "dead wings" thuds and drags, notice the clipped qualities of the k-sounds, the p-sounds, and the t-sound. This sort of music is tricky to convert directly into meaning (mistaken attempts to do so are called "the pathetic fallacy," with the root meaning of "pathetic" intended, not the modern one), but it has a definite emotional and tonal effect. Among other things, such weaving-together makes connected musical entities of the lines.

One may perform this sort of observation on almost any line in the poem, and on almost any line of any good poem. Critics (bordering perhaps on the pathetic fallacy) have pointed out how the s-sounds and f-sounds in the 7th line force us to hiss and spit as we say them, for example.

Again: I am convinced this sort of density and coherence of musical effect is conscious but much too rapid for linear directed thought. It occurs because there are faculties in the human mind that operate much faster than such thought, and part of the discipline of poetry is to learn how to use those faculties. However I do not agree with Plato and Aristotle, those dismissive philosophers, that poets are mad, that the gods deliberately drive them mad. They were too hepped on the authority of their own methods. This is the ancient and mistaken opposition of reason and imagination. I think it is rather more difficult to keep one's sanity if all one's peers annoyingly assume one is mad, and I think that since creativity has healing effects, those with disturbances will naturally be drawn to creativity, but I do not think the connection is causal in the way those two noble bozos assumed it was.

[hhEb09'1]

Okay, impossible is hyperbole. I can plan my effects, any sufficiently accomplished poet can, but why bother? There's too much delight in coming across them, in the breakthrough moment. The more a poem is planned in that way, the more like a puzzle it is and the less like art. I do think poets are aware of their effects, but I do not think they calculate them, if the distinction makes sense to you. I think Wilbur discovers his results. He's certainly one of the more intelligent poets who has ever lived, with a precision of word use that is sometimes stunning--I plan to talk about one of my favorites of his soon--but whether or not he could plan out all his best effects, I don't really think he does. Where would be the sport?Just to be clear, I wasn't accusing Wilbur of being constantly calculating, just that the example on the table wasn't beyond his ability as a craftsman--the example was written by Frost anyway, so I was just talking in theory. My favorite is A Simplification (naturally, and it should be Ken's too :) ) which if I remember right has the line "these foetal-voiced people couldn't blow a sick maggot off a dead beetle". It's much too short though.
as hhE609'1 says (may I shorten your name in subsequent reference, by the way, to something like hhE? Won't do it if you say noThat's fine, or Grapes (http://www.bautforum.com/member.php?u=55) or Pace like Grey (http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php?p=867911#post867911)

[Ken G]

Because the 7th line reads more naturally as a ten-syllable line with only four stresses than any other way, I assume that Frost was using syllable count to justify his pentameter. In other words, I prefer the natural reading to any construction I might retroactively make to "fit" it into my notion of pentameter.
That seems quite reasonable, and I'm inclined anyway to defer to your poetic knowledge, as well as your knowledge of poetry. So then we have for line 7:
a snowdrop spider, a flower like froth
0 1 0 1 0 # 0 1 0 0 1
That seems fine to me, but I still find something interesting in regard to flower like vs. flowerlike. The flower is real, as it appeared already, and the broth is the image, clearly. But I claim that if you say aloud "flower like froth" ten times in a row with the stress DAH duh duh DAH, at some point along the way you will no longer have a flower with the elements of a froth, you'll have a froth with the elements of a flower.

My point is that to me, the flower is becoming froth in the poem, it is part of the entire transformation that is happening to this scene-- Frost is not using "froth" to describe the flower, because the extent to which heal-all always looks frothy is not what is important, what is important is that it is now an accomplice in a witch's brew in which the flower takes the part of the froth. The distinction between flower like and flowerlike might not seem all that essential, but isn't the point of the poem that you can take seemingly innocuously designed elements, like flowers and moths and even spiders, and combine them by action in a way that transforms the scene into something appalling, seemingly transcendant of the design of the parts? Simply writing "flower like", but knowing it will be read with the same pronunciation as flowerlike, is one way to accomplish the transformation of the flower into something shocking, an accomplice in an awful crime, losing its innocence by the association with froth. Can you ever again look at heal-all, and think, "yes it is a bit frothy" without conjuring the rest of the scene?


I think a there is a tiny difference in enunciation between flower like and flowerlike, a very brief hesitation after flower in the first not present in the second. "A flower" (halfbeat) "like froth."True, and it may be argued that if Frost intended the second he could have just written flowerlike. Unless... he knew that the reader would easily lapse into the second pronunciation, allowing his written word about a flower to become a spoken word about a froth. A stretch? Possibly. But this is just what happens in quantum mechanics-- the reality of the "written word" is transformed in the act of actualizing it for the human observer. Had he written flowerlike froth, the transformation is done in the writing, and the reader says "hey there wasn't any froth here a minute ago". But the reader is in a sense tricked into creating the froth if they read the words without that pause between flower and like. Still, the fact that a version exists with the "a" suggests this was not a conscious intention, unless he recognized it after the fact and that explains dropping it later.

However I do not agree with Plato and Aristotle, those dismissive philosophers, that poets are mad, that the gods deliberately drive them mad. They were too hepped on the authority of their own methods.Again the "hard sell" I referred to that did not really exist in this thread.

[jack butler]

That seems quite reasonable, and I'm inclined anyway to defer to your poetic knowledge, as well as your knowledge of poetry. So then we have for line 7:
a snowdrop spider, a flower like froth
0 1 0 1 0 # 0 1 0 0 1
That seems fine to me, but I still find something interesting in regard to flower like vs. flowerlike. The flower is real, as it appeared already, and the broth is the image, clearly. But I claim that if you say aloud "flower like froth" ten times in a row with the stress DAH duh duh DAH, at some point along the way you will no longer have a flower with the elements of a froth, you'll have a froth with the elements of a flower.

My point is that to me, the flower is becoming froth in the poem, it is part of the entire transformation that is happening to this scene-- Frost is not using "froth" to describe the flower, because the extent to which heal-all always looks frothy is not what is important, what is important is that it is now an accomplice in a witch's brew in which the flower takes the part of the froth. The distinction between flower like and flowerlike might not seem all that essential, but isn't the point of the poem that you can take seemingly innocuously designed elements, like flowers and moths and even spiders, and combine them by action in a way that transforms the scene into something appalling, seemingly transcendant of the design of the parts? Simply writing "flower like", but knowing it will be read with the same pronunciation as flowerlike, is one way to accomplish the transformation of the flower into something shocking, an accomplice in an awful crime, losing its innocence by the association with froth. Can you ever again look at heal-all, and think, "yes it is a bit frothy" without conjuring the rest of the scene?

True, and it may be argued that if Frost intended the second he could have just written flowerlike. Unless... he knew that the reader would easily lapse into the second pronunciation, allowing his written word about a flower to become a spoken word about a froth. A stretch? Possibly. But this is just what happens in quantum mechanics-- the reality of the "written word" is transformed in the act of actualizing it for the human observer. Had he written flowerlike froth, the transformation is done in the writing, and the reader says "hey there wasn't any froth here a minute ago". But the reader is in a sense tricked into creating the froth if they read the words without that pause between flower and like. Still, the fact that a version exists with the "a" suggests this was not a conscious intention, unless he recognized it after the fact and that explains dropping it later.
Again the "hard sell" I referred to that did not really exist in this thread.

I think you're right about the intended imagistic transformation, and the reasons for it. Just trying to be clear about how I arrive at my assumptions. The magical thing is how he gets the reader to come up with the image.

We haven't talked much about imagery, but I hope we will. It overlaps with metaphor (I include simile with metaphor, not bothering with the usual merely grammatical distinction (the use of "like") since I think it is trivial). Just one observation for now. In movies, photos, paintings, the image is physically present, and stays in the visual field as long as we look. In poetry, the image is instead triggered. It fades almost in the same moment you have it. In order to experience it again, it must be triggered again (of course the triggering may simply be recall.)

I like to think of poetry, although it is linear in form, as somehow nonlinear in experience. The music, the images, the textures, the meanings, the associations, and many more effects, all these work on the reader who is able to receive them simultaneously, overwhelming the awareness with multidimensional experience.

Perhaps I think of poetry this way because at the same time I was coming to poetry I was learning dimensional mathematics. Have always loved being able to make connections between realms of experience.

My response to Plato (who excluded us from his Republic) and Aristotle is no doubt overreaction because of the centuries of influence their thinking has had, culminating in the current popular notion that poetry is all about the unreasoning, the emotional (as if that could be separated from the rest of being), the crazy. I was a young poet when I first read Plato and I thought then it was wrong, but how could a young poet stand against the august philosopher? I did, but to no avail in academic circles.

But you are right again--no one on this thread suggests such things--if anything, there's a great deal of lucidity and courtesy here.

[Ken G]

This is an interesting idea, the multidimensionality of communication. We all know the (in comparison) banal concept of double entendre, but that is perhaps nevertheless an example of a kind of two dimensional communication. Or another more significant form is the interplay between meaning and music. When the two are made to resonate with each other, the form is elevated, perhaps in the way a sphere is a more sublime form than a circle, without losing its circularity in a sense. Or one could make the music dischordant with the meaning, perhaps analogous to a spear that from one end looks like a tiny circle but as you turn it around to look at it it becomes more and more long and pointed. No doubt the imagery can play a similar game, building in potency as the spider climbs a frothy flower to brandish its willowy conquest.

While we are on the subect of imagery, music, and folk poetry, and wonder what is your opinion of poetry to put to actual music, a la folk songs? Here is a folk song by John Gorka, a contemporary singer/songwriter who likes to use a lot of imagery and turns of phrase. I'll do it from memory (helps to have a tune!) so I can't guarantee every word:

Night is Woman

Night is a woman who embraces me
I am never lonely in her arms
Deep in her heart I am free from harm
The Moon and the stars are her ancient charms
She gives to me the gift of less to see
Night is a woman who embraces me

I know that she is stronger than the Winter Sun
She brings me to the places I am warm
She's on me like a blanket or a thunderstorm
And she waits for me when I am forlorn
Although she is much older we have just begun
I know that she is stronger than the Winter Sun

Night is a woman who embraces me
Her hair is dark and thick and it will tumble down
She dresses up her shadows in a flowing gown
And she is always welcome when she hits this town
She is always everything she wants to be
Night is a woman who embraces me

Night is a woman who embraces me
She will reach me late and take my hand
Lead me to my dreams and back again
Then she'll run like a shiver from the land
She gives to me the gift of less to see
Night is a woman who embraces me

[jack butler]

This is an interesting idea, the multidimensionality of communication. We all know the (in comparison) banal concept of double entendre, but that is perhaps nevertheless an example of a kind of two dimensional communication. Or another more significant form is the interplay between meaning and music. When the two are made to resonate with each other, the form is elevated, perhaps in the way a sphere is a more sublime form than a circle, without losing its circularity in a sense. Or one could make the music dischordant with the meaning, perhaps analogous to a spear that from one end looks like a tiny circle but as you turn it around to look at it it becomes more and more long and pointed. No doubt the imagery can play a similar game, building in potency as the spider climbs a frothy flower to brandish its willowy conquest.

While we are on the subect of imagery, music, and folk poetry, and wonder what is your opinion of poetry to put to actual music, a la folk songs?


Yes, double entrendre is a fine form of multidimensional communication. The wider category is ambiguity (double entrendre in our minds being usually reserved for sexual innuendo), not in the sense of imprecision, but in the sense of multiple but simulataneous meanings. Wilbur is a master of this, able to make words almost explode in your head. It is more or less what I was talking about earlier when I referred to using the older meaning of vanity. The root meanings of words are a handy source for this sort of simultaneous effect. I admire the analogy you make between the circle and the sphere and the circle and the spear. Now if only the word shake meant circle, we could do some fine puns on Shakespeare. Shakespeare loved puns, and for all the groaning they occasion, I think they are the amusements of playful intelligence. Puns are a form of ambiguity and therefore multiple meaning, after all.

You developed quite a froth of flowery language yourself there. Nice.

As you no doubt expected, I've spent a lot of time thinking about poetry and music. After all, we refer to the music of poetry without being too specific about what we mean. I myself have criticized contemporary poetry for abandoning what I think are two of its strongest sources of value to readers, story and song.

That said, I think there is a difference between the measuring systems of music per se, and music in poetry (poetry that has measure, at least), and hope to get into that in later posts. For now, just this hint: Time is essential to the measuring of music per se, but another system is in use for measurement in poetry. At first this seems paradoxical--how can we measure rhythm with anything but time? But we can, and in accentual-syllablic poetry we do.

The connections between poetry and song are ancient and manifold. Many so-called folk poems originated as songs (some are still being sung--Barbara Allen, for example). Likewise, many songs began as poems. Most of the hymns in most hymnals are very regular poems (if not usually very good ones). Emily Dickinson wrote mostly in what poets call ballad meter (usually 4343, where the numbers refer to beats per line) and what music describes as 8-6. For this reason, you can sing I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died to the tune of Amazing Grace (and I hope you will).

I had a composer friend who loved to do what the musicians call "art songs," which is when they compose music for the singing of a poem. He was especially fond of Wallace Stevens.

In country music you still find frequent use of ballad metre. Incidentally, I will point out the differences in rhyming between poetry and songs: in songs, assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds) is sufficient for the sense of rhyme, as when a country singer rhymes need and me, or love and god (a meaningful rhyme). In poetry per se, consonance is more common (the repetition of consonants), so that Yeats might rhyme moon and green, for example. Exact rhyme of course requires both. Maybe this happens because music is "louder" to our ears--more on which in a moment.

Nowadays pundits love to declare that rock music is the new poetry. I have a few quibbles with this characterization, most especially that I think rock music is far more popular and influential than poetry ever was, but I agree that most people come at what little poetry they are exposed to in the words of songs. This sense of "poetry" can be misleading, though.

Sometimes when poetry is "put to" music the implication is that the poetry is not enough on its own, or that if one art is good, the combination of two must be better. The beatniks with their bongos and droning jazz supporting inadequate free verse are responsible for many of these notions. (Have to admit I am not a big fan of Ginsberg, Corso, et aliae.)

I first came to grips with such questions because of the music of Bob Dylan, which I began listening to in 1964. I loved his work then, and I love it now. When I heard his songs (after I began to be able to make out the words), I felt I was in the presence of stellar poetry.

Imagine my dismay when I bought a book of his lyrics and discovered that, read aloud, without the music, they were not nearly such good poetry. I had to think about the why.

Finally it dawned on me. In a song, the music is more or less imposed, from the outside as it were. The words are organized according to rhythms, as in poetry, but the rhythms are the rhythms of the music. When you take the music away, the internal rhythms of the phrases rise to attention, and since they were not organized according to those patterns, these rhythms clash and sputter and do nothing in particular.

You can see this effect in the very fine song you used as an illustration. Many of the lines, if read as language without music, stumble and are awkward. And yet, in the song, they are elegant.

Poetry per se is organized by harmonizing the music within words--as I have said, you create the music of poetry by how you lean the words together. The music of poetry, that is, arises internally. So it is relatively simple to fit a musical rhythm over the music of a line of poetry, but if a line was written for a melody in the first place, when you take the melody away there is no organizing principle, and the rhythm goes to hell. In other words, it works one way but not the other.

For me a corollary is that neither way is better. They are just different means of organization. Obviously song is dominant nowadays, I suspect because, like movies and their images, melody can physically impose a rhythm on anyone who hears it, whereas it takes considerable training to be able to induce the melodies of poetry in one's own brain. For me, a line of Dylan Thomas is as physically alive as a bar of Bob Dylan, but they have been created differently. No surprise that most people will prefer that which is more readily available.

No stigma either. I don't mind that music is dominant, because I love both music and poetry. My concern is with understanding, clarity. Although I don't mind the dominance of music, I don't wish the glare of that dominance to white out the very real differences. I don't wish the somewhat different and perhaps quiter pleasures of poetry to be entirely lost because of the pleasures of song.

Perhaps all I really needed to say is that once, when I was in grad school, a few of us formed a quondam singing group, which we called, after a line in the Emily Dickinson poem I mentioned, The Blue, Uncertain, Stumbling Buzz, and what we mostly did was put famous poems to music. You should have heard me rocking out on Eliot's Apeneck Sweeny, or Johnny Wink and Wayne McGinnis doing a country version of Gray's Elegy on a Country Churchyard.

Hope to post on a wonderful Wilbur poem about thinking next. The poem is called Mind.

[Ken G]

You can see this effect in the very fine song you used as an illustration. Many of the lines, if read as language without music, stumble and are awkward. And yet, in the song, they are elegant.
I agree, very few songs retain all their poetic force without music-- if they did, one might question how effectively the music was used! Dylan is indeed a good example of this-- his lyrics are often pretty simplistic (how many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man), and his music is also generally quite simple, yet somehow when the two are combined, the simplicity resonates, often in concert with repetition, in a very powerful way. The song makes a statement that is equivalent to the best poetry. A considerably less subtle songwriter who achieves a similar if enlargened effect is Bruce Springsteen, who mastered the technique of hitting the same spot over and over with a sledgehammer until something breaks through. Interestingly, his early work crammed more words into a single song that anyone has ever done, often nonsensical words in free-streaming fashion, but he later settled on the "sledgehammer" style. Some of his better stuff (e.g., Thunder Road, do you know it?) is quite poetic all the same, if never subtle.

[peteshimmon]

I am glad you like the item and your critical
evalution on first reading it is absorbing.
I was moved to keep the cutting when I first
saw it which shows how it impressed. The first
half lulls you then the savage line about a rat
infested ditch kicks in. I tend to feel this is
how one should recite it but I would put the
words "or spare" on a new line to stop the
anger short with the remainder of the poem
being in more sober tones. Which suggests all
poetry needs a runthrough first to establish
the mood in each line. I looked up High Flight
as well the other night, another war effort but
from a more joyful experiance. I have wondered
which advisor of President Reagan suggested this.
Or is that unfair, He knew the poem himself?

Off topic a bit, A very good short scifi story
by Kornbluth grabbed me some years ago. MS found
in a Chinese Cookie. Perhaps inspired by
philosophy about language in the fifties.
The twist at the end disturbs, could there be
something in this? It still seems very topical!

[jack butler]

I am glad you like the item and your critical
evalution on first reading it is absorbing.
I was moved to keep the cutting when I first
saw it which shows how it impressed. The first
half lulls you then the savage line about a rat
infested ditch kicks in. I tend to feel this is
how one should recite it but I would put the
words "or spare" on a new line to stop the
anger short with the remainder of the poem
being in more sober tones. Which suggests all
poetry needs a runthrough first to establish
the mood in each line. I looked up High Flight
as well the other night, another war effort but
from a more joyful experiance. I have wondered
which advisor of President Reagan suggested this.
Or is that unfair, He knew the poem himself?

Off topic a bit, A very good short scifi story
by Kornbluth grabbed me some years ago. MS found
in a Chinese Cookie. Perhaps inspired by
philosophy about language in the fifties.
The twist at the end disturbs, could there be
something in this? It still seems very topical!

But isn't "or spare" intended as a rhyme?

Still, would agree with you that most poetry can benefit from a runthrough before final copy or performance. Perhaps there is resistance to that notion because we equate truth with sincerity and sincerity with spontaneity and spontaneity with immediate response. But I think the only thing about immediate response that leads to truth is that it allows the liars less time to get their stories straight. It also allows the honest less time to do a good job. If you're honest, you're honest no matter how many revisions you go through. Poetry is, for me, perfected speech.

Don't know High Flight, unless it is that paean to the wild blue yonder, but seems unlikely Reagan and I would have similar tastes in poetry. I didn't have much use for him.

For a really fine poem (by my lights) about air battles, check out Yeats's An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. It begins, "I know that I shall meet my fate/ somewhere amid the clouds above./ Those that I fight I do not hate,/ those that I guard I do not love." It refers to the Irish and their sympathies to the Germans and antipathies toward the British in WW1.

I like Kornbluth quite a bit and seem to vaguely remember the story but no details. Can you sketch it for me? Is the premise like the one in Stranger in a Strange Land, that language can literally alter reality by altering our perceptual apparatus? I liked SSL (though it was sexist and has dated), but linguists discount that notion about language now. It's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I ask because it was popular in the fifties and early sixties.

[hhEb09'1]

For a really fine poem (by my lights) about air battles, check out Yeats's An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. Or, the last line of The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell

[jack butler]

Or, the last line of The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell

I hunched in the (?cockpit; ?turret) till my wet fur froze.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Funny that such a poem gets described as "anti-war." It's just factual. That sort of thing happened. Happened a lot. But somehow we are not supposed to say so. Not supposed to see coffins either. Maybe that's why some people think of poetry as being revolutionary. I don't think it is. I think it is just unafraid of the facts, and of stating the facts in the most effective way.

Of course, in an age given to avoiding the facts, that may seem revolutionary.

Or the e. e. cummings poem that begins, "I sing of Olaf glad and big."

True, since Lovelace's effusion, "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars" ("I could not love thee, Dear, so much/ Loved I not honor more"), more poets have thought badly of war than have thought well of it. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that poets like to write poems and it's hard to write poems when you're dead.

[hhEb09'1]

I hunched in the (?cockpit; ?turret) till my wet fur froze.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."belly", weirdly
I suspect this has something to do with the fact that poets like to write poems and it's hard to write poems when you're dead.Probably just as well that we have only one Trees

[jack butler]

"belly", weirdlyProbably just as well that we have only one Trees

Yeah, I remembered later: I hunched in the belly of the state till my wet fur froze. Got the last line a bit wrong too. None of my books here, so having to depend on memory.

Re "Trees": One of the most godawful sickening moments of all time occurred for me in Superman II (and I'm a longtime Superman fan despite the impossible physics, and thought Christopher Reeves was the best imaginable actor for the role, and Donner the best director), when Jor-El declaims to his son in the Fortress of Solitude, reciting "Trees" as an example of the glory of the literature of Earth. Sometimes it seems hopeless, realizing that for most of one's contemporaries, that bathos is what they think poetry is.

You can have fun with the poem though, if you analyze the imagery as stringently as we analyzed Frost's. Some interesting anatomical events occur.

[hhEb09'1]

"its belly"

I'm worried about your ear as you grow older, jack :)

If you want imagery, we should move on to Ogden Nash...

[Ken G]

"Belly" conjures two thoughts for me, one is "beast", as in belly of the, so the plane is now a beast-- dangerous to both sides. And the second is one of digestion, which connects with being washed out with a hose-- like he was so badly "digested" there was nothing worth burying, only washing down the drain. Here "death before dishonor" turns into "death prior to dishonor".

[Tobin Dax]

What I remember being told back in high school was that "belly" refers to a turret on the belly of the plane (the ventral/bottom surface). That makes you an easy target from the ground, after which what's left of you gets washed out of the turret with a hose. I've never bothered to confirm this, though.

[hhEb09'1]

What I remember being told back in high school was that "belly" refers to a turret on the belly of the plane (the ventral/bottom surface). That makes you an easy target from the ground, after which what's left of you gets washed out of the turret with a hose. I've never bothered to confirm this, though.In the poem, the direct reference is to "the State", the belly of the State, but sure there is some parallelism.

Google. Here's a nice webpage about it (http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/gunner/gunner.html), with pictures. Had to be an incredible landing and takeoff vantage point too, if they were allowed to do that.

[jack butler]

"its belly"

I'm worried about your ear as you grow older, jack :)

If you want imagery, we should move on to Ogden Nash...

Told you I was doing it from memory. Isn't the line as I quoted it? In which case, how could it read "its belly"? I will read the poem again soon as I have a chance. Am willing to let posterity judge my ear by my poems.

I like Ogden Nash--once got in trouble with some contempos who took themselves in my opinion too seriously by saying that I preferred Nash to the uberserious scribbles of the wannabe gurus. Light verse is not acceptable nowadays to those types.

I don't find Nash's imagery that interesting, but I love the comic effect of his long postponed rhymes. Of course, in both cases he is deliberately creating comic effects, whereas Joyce Kilmer, I have this terrible conviction, was entirely serious.

Speaking of postponed rhymes--ever seen this limerick?

There was a young man from Japan
whose limericks just wouldn't scan.
When questioned about it,
he said, "I don't doubt it,
since I try to get just as many syllables in the last line as I possibly can."

[peteshimmon]

For the record, the joke poem about a barber I
mentioned awhile back is The Owl Critic by James
Field. The blessed Google will go straight to a
website where some kind folks display it. It is
what a little humour was in the nineteeth
century. It was on a cassette I had from the
library some years ago. Poetry Please and
another put out by the BBC. One had Dylan
Thomas reading his Do not go gentle.. and
there was Joan Greenwood with The Lady of Shalot.
They may still be available.

[jack butler]

For the record, the joke poem about a barber I
mentioned awhile back is The Owl Critic by James
Field. The blessed Google will go straight to a
website where some kind folks display it. It is
what a little humour was in the nineteeth
century. It was on a cassette I had from the
library some years ago. Poetry Please and
another put out by the BBC. One had Dylan
Thomas reading his Do not go gentle.. and
there was Joan Greenwood with The Lady of Shalot.
They may still be available.

It is amazing to me that there are actually voice recordings of Yeats, Frost, Thomas, and others. Paradoxically, hard to understand that there are none of Dickinson, Dunne, Shakespeare. We do not know the sound of Elizabethan speech, however much we may guess at it.

Or for that matter, the sound of speech in the Greece of Homer's day.

Have been promising for some time a poem by Richard Wilbur. Here it is:

MIND

Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

It has no need to falter or explore.
Darkly it knows what obstacles are there,
And so may weave and flutter, dip and soar
In perfect courses through the blackest air.

And has this simile a like perfection?
The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save
That in the very happiest intellection,
A graceful error may correct the cave.

Have always found this a beautiful poem. There is almost nothing wasted in it. It begins with a familiar move, a comparison, a simile--the mind is like a bat. Not any and all mind, but mind in its purest play. I would think this is mind considering the purest and most abstract questions, and I love the acknowledgement of that activity as play. Those who delight in thought will surely understand perfectly. As always, Wilbur uses all associations, and in addition to the notion of play as amusement, I find the notions of play as in the play of a rope or any less-than-rigid system and play as the extending of something (playing it out) very useful.

The poem is three quatrains of iambic pentameter, incidentally, rhyming abab, and that fact becomes important rapidly. Form itself, rhyme and meter, are a kind of abstract play. There those who treat form as restrictive, but I think it is only restrictive if one feels one is ordered to follow it. For me, as for Wilbur, I suspect, the choice of rhythm and pattern is a free choice, and my interest is in seeing how well I can do the dance, the happiness and release that comes from doing it.

Notice the lovely work with alliteration and other sound-effects, the echoes in "beats about," "caverns" and "contriving" and "conclude," and "all alone" and "wall of stone," for example. It is as if one were hearing pulses of sound reverberating from wall--which of course is what the bat is doing.

I love the word "contriving," the sense of deliberateness it implies. The bat, and by inference, the playing mind, know how to avoid disastrous impacts. There is a delicious and deliberate ambiguity in the choice of words in "conclude against a wall of stone." The word "conclude" has as one of its possible meanings precisely the sort of collision a bat striking a wall would endure--but it also happily and obviously refers to the result of thinking, the drawing of conclusions. Every truly agile mind knows how to avoid conclusions that stop all further thought. How do such minds know?

Like the bat, they have no need to falter or explore. I love those two words too. The one, for us, means failure; the other is a word we love to use to describe speculative thought: We explore possibilities.

But Wilbur's mind in its purest play has no need for these things. Notice that he characterizes them as needs, by the way. Not absolutes, but needs. Why would we need failure? Hmm. How can we not "need" to explore? Deeper hmmm.

Surely all good thinkers know that elation in which we can see problems coming before they arrive and forestall them by the very way we think.

Consider, too, the phrase "senseless wit." Actually, with regard to the physical side of the simile, a "sense" is involved here, the sense of hearing. But I think Wilbur refers instead to that which is inexplicable. An older meaning of "wit" in English is "knowledge," and I think this is the wider meaning Wilbur appeals to. (This usage survives in words like "wisdom," "unwittingly," and "dimwit," and is still in use in German, as for example in "wissenshaft.")

So "a kind of senseless wit" refers to knowledge that has no obvious basis in data or evidence--it is senseless in that it doesn't make sense in mundane terms. Nevertheless, we have all experienced it.

There are highly enjoyable ambiguities in words like "Darkly" and "blackest." The bat doesn't need light, and mind in its purest play does not necessarily scan to those who judge by the light of common sense only. "Perfect courses" is also a phrase rich with association.

But it is in the third stanza that the poem takes off. It doesn't something amazing, something akin to leaping from two dimensions to three. It jumps out of frame. Not content with the mere simile, it suddenly turns the poem itself, the very activity we are experiencing, into a simile. We are brought face to face with the fact that the poem is precisely such play as is under discussion. The poet has the courage to point out exactly how difficult the play is and raise the question of the validity of the simile. "And has this simile (the poem) a like perfection?"

It's as if a tightrope walker were to look down and comment casually to the audience, You know, that would be a long way to fall, and then stroll on across the rope.

Not only that, the stakes are getting higher as this stunning realization dawns on us. Since we know the form of the poem, we know that after the posing of the question, only three lines remain, fifteen feet, in which to answer it. And they must rhyme in a certain pattern.

The poet apparently wastes three feet of the fifteen he has left, restating the simile. Then another foot and a half on the word Precisely, as if he were dithering on the edge of the abyss.

The word Save is wonderfully poised on the end of the line, and there is a sympathetic pause as we understand there are only ten feet left in which to save the situation, two lines.

Incidentally, I want to point out that in accentual-syllabic English poetry, a foot can occur across two distinct syntactical units. This is what happens in "Precisely. Save". The first syllable of the last foot belongs to "Precisely," and the last syllable to "Save." One of the implications I hope to explore in later posts is that "time" in poetry is not the same as time itself, or as time in music. Time in poetry is the flow of the rhythm, and conventional time is an element in that flow, but is not identical with it.

The last two lines brilliantly satisfy both the form and the simile. There is a sort of tender irony on the word "error," which I believe is directed at our concept of error. In this case, the error of the simile is corrected, or at least the limits of the simile are established. The simile is fine as far as it goes, and well worked out. Except. Save one fact. And the conclusion of the poem is exactly the sort of graceful error which mind in its purest play can happen upon, and no other sort of thinking can.

Again, my apologies if the punctuation or typology are off. Doing this one from memory too.

[hhEb09'1]

There those who treat form as restrictive, but I think it is only restrictive if one feels one is ordered to follow it. For me, as for Wilbur, I suspect, the choice of rhythm and pattern is a free choiceCheck out A Simplification

Again, my apologies if the punctuation or typology are off. Doing this one from memory too.There's always the internet (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Spencer.Rugaber/poems/bat.txt). :) According to that, you missed a semicolon, and added a comma. Not bad!

I can't find A Simplification (http://www.bautforum.com/fun-n-games/58737-poetry-science-5.html#post1009684) on the internet though

[Len Moran]

Have been promising for some time a poem by Richard Wilbur. Here it is:

MIND



Without your interpretation (is that the right word to use?), this poem would I am afraid have meant little to me, which in itself exposes my woefully inadequate ability in this respect. And yet I have always been intrigued by the ability of poems to invoke such feeling in others, if not myself, so just to have a glimpse of this from a poet like yourself is enlightening.

You mentioned previously that one can analyse in depth a specific poem, but that a trained reader responds in moments to that contained within such in depth analysis. And it begs the question, what original richness am I missing through not having this training, relying on interpretation instead? But I suppose that what I am missing cannot be described so easily, for presumably that is the essence of poetry.

I particularly liked your explanation regarding the way the poem suddenly turns in on its self, the act of understanding the poem being the essence of the message itself, and it seems to me, a message which in turn underscores the understanding.... like two mirrors facing each other.

I hope we have similar posts from you in the future.

[toejam]

Poetry?
There must be music in it.
Music, music, music. Music with meaning if you're lucky, but music. Meaning even I can give to music, but music to meaning...? And music is anything from the past (except for large chunks of mathematically clever Bach, and 99.99% of bombastic Wagner, and Schubert's lieder) to Poulenc & Shostakovich. Beyond that I confess ignorance. Too much good stuff before that for a simple mortal to comprehend. Forget comprehend. FEEL.

The scientific, deconstructive, pages of this thread I found so dry that even my computer jammed after page 2 & refused to proceed, "PAGE NOT FOUND" the poor thing said to me, and it was by a rather roundabout way that I fooled it into going on.

There was no music.......

I ran to Houseman and he said:

Orators and poets, sages and saints and heroes, if rare in comparison with blackberries, are commoner than returns of Halley's comet: literary critics are less common.

So don't feel insulted by my limited opinion.

Houseman also said:

Meaning is of the intellect, poetry is not.

and,
...I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.

And he said, somewhere that I cannot now find for an exact quotation that he "could no more define poetry than a terrier could define a rat" but that they both knew the genuine article when they saw it.

He also said a great many foolish things about Science.

And English to a foreign mind, mine, at the time when all the English I knew was "cowboy", which I pronounced "kovboy" & OK which I pronounced okay, okay, was the only foreign language which seemed to be a stream of sounds with no subdivision into individual words or even sentences. I was 12 and spoke my own language and a French "argot" and had heard, however briefly, about half a dozen other foreign languages spoken at me by then.

Oh, & such quotes of Houseman as are accurate are from his lecture "The name & nature of poetry", quotes I scribbled down years ago. He said at the outset that he renounced his first intention of lecturing on the scientific subject of the Art of Versification, an art which forms a great part of your discussion here. But you are perhaps familiar with that lecture?
He made a point of distinguishiung between Verse & Poetry. Some of your discussion, IMHO as they say on the internet, deals with verse, not poetry.

[jack butler]

I hope we have similar posts from you in the future.

Thank you. Been away for a while, working on a book. I would say that what happens with extensive training is that what seems awkward and time-consuming at first becomes engrained and immediate with practice.

I find that it is much this way with any ability. I could not imagine the coordination required to dribble a basketball while running, and it did take a while to master, but soon enough I was running up and down the floor without thinking about how I was dribbling. When one sees a dancer or a gymnast perform, one is seeing not merely the effort of the moment, but years of repetitive and at times dull practice. Remember when you learned the multiplication tables, how much trouble they were to commit to memory? But now you know that 7 times 4 is 28 without even thinking about the matter, and you can therefore perform more complicated mathematics, like algebra, with relative ease.

In yoga, I have learned, it takes years of repetition, during which time one feels awkward and strained, to develop the ease of movement that was the goal all along.

Difficult to communicate the effect of realizing all these meanings in a very short period of time, and extremely difficult to suggest them, since in suggesting them one is forced to be linear. But the point is to develop a nearly instantaneous response, so that one may experience a sort of transcendent awareness.

The effect of a great deal of information concentrated into a short period of time is very like that of a great deal of energy concentrated into a short period of time.

[jack butler]

Poetry?
There must be music in it.

Well of course. Do you mean to imply that one cannot, in poetry, experience meaning and music simultaneously? That would be an extremely limiting view of what the art has to offer.

Why should I feel bound by Housman (a poet whose work I greatly admire, by the way--can quote great reams of it, thanks to the music)? And not even Housman, but your selective rendering of dimly-remembered Housman. Am fairly certain my science is better than his. For that matter, am fairly certain my poetry is better than his.

Why should I not speak of science and poetry together, since I am confident no amount of talk can take away the mystery of poetry? It is precisely those who feel that the mystery of poetry is fragile, cannot bear examination, who try my patience. I feel the same way about the world. Whatever can add to my understanding and delight, science or music, is welcome. Those who are afraid that understanding will somehow destroy mystery rather than deepen it have a very weak and threatened sense of wonder, it seems to me.

I attempt to speak of the mysteries of the music of poetry in ways that scientists might find interesting. If you presume that is the extent of my musical understanding, you may presume inaccurately.

Opinions may be honest but ill-informed. For that reason, I find opinions in general the least interesting attributes of a mind.

Regret, however, that my disquisition struck you as dry. Perhaps it is. I can testify only to my fascination with the subject. In any case, you are certainly free to read no more of my prose.

[blueshift]

A bit late to engage in this discussion but, since I have written a good deal of poetry and love science I may as well throw in my own two cents here.

When children run off and play they often come across something in their pathway that puzzles them and they cannot drag it back to ask what it is. The words aren't there for them to describe it so they must turn to old words and make some comparisons. Something is like something. Something implies something. Something is given human-like characteristics that it really doesn't have.

Simile, metaphor, metonymy.

Poetry is often vague because the poet, like the child, is puzzled and must invite someone with a firmer mental grasp to resolve the puzzle. Poetry quite often knocks at the door of science and asks it resolve the metaphor.

All scientists used metaphors and similes to describe things to others and even reached for those metaphors themselves to give them a temporary satisfaction until experiment would destroy the metaphor.

Kepler had his Platonic solids arranged to describe planetary orbits. Maxwell had his gears and idler wheels to describe current. Einstein had his giants with outstetched arms and elevators with cables cut loose to describe GR. Bohr used jump rope scenes to describe quantization.

Once they pursued those matters further they would toss their metaphors aside, unless it was still needed.

Free verse quite often resembles what science does when it experiments. It is quite often spoken in third person, just like a lab paper is written. A list of hypotheses and/or experiments eventually lead to some metamorphosis that might question pre-conceived notions, notions that may have drawn someone down a long-labored waste of time. A conjunction usually appears and the word "But" quite often starts a line where the new realization starts to follow.
Much of what Billy Collins writes comes out that way.

While all poets are not in touch with science, many have been. Percy Bysshe Shelley insisted that one of the roles of the artist is to "absorb the new knowledge of the sciences and assimilate it to human needs, color it with human passions, transform it into the blood and bone of human nature."
(p.382, "The God Particle" by Leon Lederman.)

[victor003]

Great, cool

[Disinfo Agent]

I remembered a poem by Rilke that I've always liked, with a few celestial references.



Abend

Der Abend wechselt langsam die Gewänder,
die ihm ein Rand von alten Bäumen hält;
du schaust: und von dir scheiden sich die Länder,
ein himmelfahrendes, und eins, das fällt;

und lassen dich, zu keinen ganz gehörend,
nicht ganz so dunkel wie das Haus, das schweigt.
nicht ganz so sicher Ewiges beschwörend
wie das, was Stern wird jede Nacht und steigt—

und lassen dir (unsäglich zu entwirrn)
dein Leben bang und riesenhaft und reifend,
so daß es, bald begrenzt und bald begreifend,
abwechselnd Stein in dir wird und Gestirn.


English version: "Evening" (copyrighted) (http://www.picture-poems.com/rilke/images.html#Abend)