Culture
John Keats, Chopped Prose and Other Letters to the Editor
What Am I, Chopped Prose?
To the Editor:
“This concept of the free verse poem as ‘chopped’ prose,” Elissa Gabbert writes in her lead essay for the poetry subject, “comes from Ezra Pound by way of Marjorie Perloff, who quotes Pound in her influential essay ‘The Linear Fallacy.’” An astonishing assertion, this, on condition that Pound is himself arguably the best free verse poet within the language! What he really stated is: “Don’t suppose any clever particular person goes to be deceived while you attempt to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably tough artwork of excellent prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.”
Lineation, in different phrases, shouldn’t be sufficient to show what would possibly in any other case be learn as unremarkable prose into poetry. Thankfully, we’ve, from Pound and William Carlos Williams to Frank O’Hara and Lorine Niedecker, down to the current, a physique of free verse that’s what James Joyce known as “verbivocovisual” — the very reverse of chopped prose.
Marjorie Perloff
Pacific Palisades, Calif.
‘Rhyme’s Rooms’
To the Editor:
With two or three exceptions over a few years, my coverage has been not to answer evaluations. However David Orr’s current therapy of my ebook, “Rhyme’s Rooms: The Structure of Poetry,” so determinedly ignores its contents as to recommend private mischief or malice. (I hope that’s not the case.)
I’ve by no means earlier than written a ebook that units out its ambitions so clearly. In my first paragraph, I pose the query that drives all 24 chapters: To what diploma do our bodily limitations of ear and eye and reminiscence form our studying and writing of poetry?
So far as I do know, no ebook earlier than mine has pursued this query systematically. Orr might disagree with a few of my conclusions (e.g. the historic primacy of the iambic pentameter line derives from its asymmetry, or rhymed poetry inherently strikes towards dissonance and entropy), through which case I’d welcome debate. Or it could be that such questions of poetic construction don’t a lot curiosity him, through which case he ought to clarify why he thinks them unhelpful or irrelevant. As a substitute, he by no means engages with any of them.
Orr claims a devotion to the poet-critic Randall Jarrell, whose chosen essays I as soon as edited. Frankly, this puzzles me. Jarrell embodied the notion {that a} reviewer has an ethical obligation to evaluate not the ebook he believes the creator ought to have written however the one the creator got down to write. Orr must ask himself one query: What would Jarrell have product of his evaluate?
Brad Leithauser
Amherst, Mass.
Generational Biographies
To the Editor:
To write down a biography of Keats — who died at 25 however left a paper path proving simply how absolutely he had lived — is a momentous enterprise. James Russell Lowell hoped to put in writing one. When he failed to take action, his cousin Amy Lowell took on the duty: “I wish to think about that the duty has been deputed to me in his stead.”
She started writing round 1912 and completed in 1924, when she delivered by chauffeur the 1,160-page manuscript to her editor, Ferris Greenslet, at Houghton Mifflin. Greenslet suggested enhancing the pages down however Lowell refused: “Ferris, you’re a expensive good boy however you don’t know a factor about biography, not a damned factor!” With out a phrase taken out, the two-volume ebook was revealed in early 1925.
Months later, Lowell died of a stroke, glad that she had fulfilled her purpose: “An important poet has one thing to offer to each era, and it has appeared to me time that mine ought to set down its impressions and put its explicit view on file.” Now, Lucasta Miller has put down her era’s impression and has accomplished it comparatively briefly, at 353 pages. Keats is a poet all the time and each time, together with these instances.
Nina Sankovitch
Westport, Conn.
Unhealthy to Verse
To the Editor:
The poetry subject
Was a waste of time.
It was too lengthy
And didn’t rhyme.
Andrew R. Solow
Woods Gap, Mass.