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ern analogues, then proceeds to comment on modern format mallers
such as capitalization, indentation, fragmentation, and on the ways
contemporary poems have been influenced by the look of poster art, the
look of photography, and indeed the look of other poems on a page.
One amusing observation is especially worth quoting:
At the present time in the United States, there is a widespread,
received, free-verse style marked by a narrow
(25-30
em) format,
strong use of line-ending as a syntactic marker, etc., which plays
about the same role in the ascent to paradise as the received Longfel–
low style did a century ago. Magazine verse then was wrillen in it, as
magazine verse today derives from the original voices of W.S. Merwin
and James Wright, for example. The very look of the received poem
on the page jingles and tinkles today the way neat accentual-syllabic
rhyming once did.
The mediocre we have always with us, and I think this nicely describes
what happens when poets do not choose forms but fall into them willy–
nilly. The phenomenon of
randomness
in the visual appearance of
modern poetry has to do with modern physics, as
slenderness
has to do
with the understanding of our modest status in the universe; but poets
for whom such matters are not intimate realities can of course do no
more than jingle and tinkle.
Any critic of Hollander's stature must provoke arguments. Some
of mine are fairly trivial. I disagree with a scansion of Donne's "E legy
on his Mistresse" which stresses pronouns and gets metrical regularity
at the cost of rhetorical sense. I believe a comparison Hollander makes
between Ben Jonson and James Joyce shou ld have been made with
Pound. Especiall y after Hollander's own sensitive description of
Jonson (e.g. "his 'translations' proper never aim at preserving a
particular poem ... but at carrying over a method, a style, a way of
writing, thought, and life"), what else can spring to mind but Pound's
Seafarer, Homage to Propertius, Cantos?
I am distressed by a treatment
of William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All" which calls this poem
"a soundless picture of a sound less world." True, Williams's version of
"the slovenly wilderness" is at least initially visual and spatial, but he
manages an astonishing translation of visual to aural texture, e.g.
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-
