On Free Verse and Ignorance

Nabokov

THEY kept count of my smokes, and this bland curiosity made me hold my cigarette at an odd, awkward angle, as if I were smoking for the first time; I kept spilling ashes in my lap, and then their clear gaze would pass attentively from my hand to the pale-gray pollen gradually rubbed into the wool.

-- from The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov

This excerpt exemplifies the fluid, harmonious prose that is so characteristic of Nabokov's work. It really puts my own writing to shame - and unlike Nabokov, I am a native english speaker.

Nabokov wrote a small book (essay? paper?) titled Notes on Prosody. In this book I hoped to discover the secret to his prose style, but it turned out to be a thorough analysis of english and russian verse. His method was surprisingly rigorous: he created his own formal classification of tetrameters, and used it to quantify how frequently various poets used the available patterns. I won't describe the classification here, as it's not particularly relevant.

You can tell that Nabokov's background as a russian aristocrat influenced his understanding of english meter:

In Russian, a polysyllabic word, no matter how long (provided it is not a blatantly artificial compound with the seam showing), can bear but one accent [...] In English polysyllabic words, on the other hand, there may occur a secondary accent, especially in American speech, but still there are numerous long words that have only one accent, such as 'guárdedly' or 'consídering'" (11-12).

Secondary accent has grown common in the proletarianized english of modern times, to the point that you'd sound pretentious saying "guárdedly" and "consídering" the way Nabokov describes, which is close to the infamous mid-atlantic accent.

Nabokov, too busy tallying the "scuds" and "depressions" present in John Donne's extensive oeuvre, had no time for the fundamentally informal technique of free verse:

A fourth form, which is specifically vague and rather a catchall than a definite category (not yet having been instrumental in producing great poetry), takes care of unrhymed free verse, which, except for the presence of typographical turnpikes, grades insensibly into prose, from a taxonomic point of view (4-5).

Hmm... so what does he think about this blog's favorite modernist poets?

I was ever exposed in the twenties and thirties, as so many of my coevals have been, to the poetry of the not quite first-rate Eliot and of definitely second-rate Pound. I read them late in the season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend’s house, and not only remained completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did.

-- from Nabokov’s 1964 interview in Playboy, as reprinted in Strong Opinions

To drop into the vernacular for a second -- "bro is LITERALLY--" no, I had better not.

Fussell

In an earlier post I praised Paul Fussell's book Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. Fussell takes a looser approach to metrical analysis, considering meter where it arises, not restricting himself to footic lengthameters. This method is clearly more suited to analyzing free verse.

Because successful free verse generally avoids the illusion of stresses arranged in some form of patterned repetition, it probably cannot be scanned, but it can certainly be analyzed and appraised, and its rhythmic movements, even if subtle, can be judged as reinforcements or impediments of the progress of idea and feeling. Many free-verse poems operate traditionally to this degree: that they establish a non- or anti-metrical verbal continuum as a grid against which occasional metrical moments are perceived as especially forceful (84).

Whitman, for example, modulates the length of his lines to convey openings, conclusions, or add a general kind of emphasis:

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west - sun there half an hour high - I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

And Pound ends lines in amphibrachs to echo Homer's Odyssey.

................ lamps fluid in wáter,
Pine by the black trunks of its shádow
And on hill black trunks of the shádow
The trees melted in air. (XXIX)

But what's the value in "echoing" an older technique, if not to flatter readers who pick up on the reference? Older forms of poetry sound dignified, yet pretentious and unnatural; they're too different from our own way of speaking. The modernists attempted to rebuild poetry by combining ancient elements of versification with contemporary language, so things like "terminal amphibrachs" are meant to evoke a subconscious effect without being obtrusive.

In free verse the abandonment of capital letters and punctuation must say something consonant with what the predications in the poem are saying. The sudden shortening of a line must say something. The degree of line-integrity or enjambment must refract the rhetorical status of the poem's address. And any momentary deviation into meter must validate itself, must appear not a lapse but a significant bold stroke. For the reader to attend to things like these may be harder than for him to respond to, say, a skillfully reversed foot in a metered line. But he must learn to attend to them if he is to take a pleasure less doctrinal than artistic in the poetry of his own time (91).

Fussell's thorough defense of free verse blows Nabokov's baroque slander out of the water.

Analyzing metrical poetry is already difficult, and free verse, which is still relatively new, presents an even greater challenge. Poetic techniques produce such abstract effects that we lack the proper words to explain them without sounding pretentious, underwhelming, or handwavey. And this may be why Nabokov took a quantitative and not qualitative approach in his Notes on Prosody.

Ignorance

Since the 20th century, scholars and cultural commentators have built up this crude history of the arts, subdividing it into various movements - romanticism, impressionism, expressionism, futurism, dada, postmodernism, abstract expressionism, etc. - and positing a dialectical theory of evolution, where each movement is initially seen as absurd, but then overthrows the dominant one, and so on; until it catches up to modern day, and people try to classify and predict whatever phase we're in. Some interpret this process as an unravelling or explosion, leading to a culture depleted of meaning.

Many aspects of this historiography are manifestly true, documented in the form of manifestos and newspaper articles. But it presents a real issue. The cliché that "all artists are misunderstood in their time" can be used to argue that any contemporary art which is poorly received by critics (or the public) is merely misunderstood, and its genius will inevitably be recognized later.

The truth is that not all art is for everyone. Free verse is a uniquely american form of poetry, and Nabokov, an exiled russian aristocrat, can be forgiven for not appreciating it. We can blame him for not putting in the effort to understand it, but even if he did, would that have changed anything? It's far better to be honest about one's opinions than pretend otherwise. The contemporary art world must be full of critics who take the latter approach, and our culture suffers as a result.

I can appreciate Andy Warhol's work only after watching an hours-long exegesis of it on youtube. Joan Mitchell's paintings have immediate appeal though I know next to nothing about them.

Some of Aphex Twin's compositions inspire awe, while others make no sense. On the other hand, I don't believe any knowledge of music theory would improve my opinion of Stravinsky's work. Ugh! The cacophony! Turn it off! Turn it off!!!