Abstract

Poetry doesn't write about what it writes about. Critics may now agree that this tends to be so, but why? Is it, as here argued, inherently so because of poetry's two or more rhythm-levels? Or is it, as many "explicating" critics imply, noninherently and only recently so because of the two or more diction-levels of the symbolist heritage? If the answer to the latter question is no, then the explicators have brought us to a blind alley by being oversubtle about the ambiguities and ambivalences of diction and undersubtle about those of rhythm. The fact that good prose also has two rhythm-levels is not to the point. The tension between two irregular rhythms, as in prose, is simply not the same as that between one irregularity and one formal, traditionally shared regularity in poetry. The half-conscious uncovering of rhythm's hidden language helps explain an ancient truth: unlike a prose essay, a tragic poem or a tragic verse-play may leave the reader feeling exalted while an exalting love poem may leave him mournful. The explanation is not some miraculous "transcending" of tragedy and of the human condition but the uncovering of a palimpsest layer. What will be needed, from now on, are not generalizations but precise trochee-by-iamb-by-spondee analyses of why the relevant passages in King Lear, for example, achieve tragic joy by means of the joy-connoting rhythms beneath the somber words. While translating certain German and Russian poets of our century, I am also making a parallel analysis in parallel languages. My conclusion: the future translator should consult his dictionary less and his ear more . Poets, then, are not our Shelleyan "unacknowledged legislators" but our unacknowledged kinaesthesia. Peter Viereck, professor of European and Russian history at Mount Holyoke College, received the Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Terror and Decorum ; this and his Conservatism Revisited and The Unadjusted Man have recently been reprinted by Greenwood Press. In a slightly revised version, "Strict Form in Poetry" appears as the appendix in his book of poems, Applewood, for which he has been awarded a fellowship by the Artists Foundation. See also: "On the Measure of Poetry" by Howard Nemerov in Vol. 6, No. 2