By Clive
James
Poetry vol. 199.4
In this essay Clive James looks at
the trend in much of contemporary poetry that avoids anything that smacks of the
tradition. Of these free verse poets, James recognizes two types: poets who
eschew technical considerations like form, meter, rhyme, etc… in hopes of
achieving a specific result, and poets who ignore technique because they have
none. James traces this retreat from technique to Pound and the modernists, who
were revolting against a poetry that was all technique, all flourish for the
sake of flourish – the literary equivalent of ‘peacocking’. Pound and Eliot,
while moving away from traditional forms, were still superbly educated in
technique, thought it a necessary part of every poet’s education. A poet who
could not write in the tradition was not a poet at all. The trouble arose when
successive generations of poets, versed only in poetry from the modernist
period and onward, misunderstood the move away from form and measure. Where
Eliot still used form and measure, he used his substantial formal prowess to
highlight content while actually hiding the technique used to make that content
so pertinent, so essential. A reader can see this in Prufrock, which drops into
iambic when emphasis is needed, ending on two iambic, rhymed tercets. As well as in The Waste Land, which aside from falling in and out of measure as
needed, contains hidden within it perfect sonnets. To Eliot and other masters,
technique’s prime use was to hide itself, James calls it a ‘subservient
impulse’, one that, when made dominant results in the empty flourishes that the
modernists rebelled against. That many contemporary poets have missed this key
point has created a poetry that is only delineated from prose by the occasional
line break (and often it’s not even a good line break). Technique is not for
demonstrating one’s skills, but to hide them to allow what one has to say to be
said in the most compelling way possible.
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