"The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot

"The Hollow Men" can be found here [link]
 

some of Eliot's own line periods

 

Perhaps I move a touch too quickly with this post. In defense my intent here, as with other posts of this nature, is not to argue definitively but to prompt thought.

 

Seeing a small word – an adverb or pronoun or conjunction – at the end of a line is these days a too reliable cue that the break is unpurposed, in continuation of the previous post that the line carries no sense of a line period, that it is not a constructed line; such words are too frequently strong evidence that the text is not verse at all but prose with line breaks pretending to verse.

Take, as a quick example, and possibly too easy an example, Philip Levine's "The Second Coming," which appears in the February Poetry Magazine, found online here [link]. Out of eight lines, five of them end in small words: "the," "only," "is," "a," and "of." At first glance – indeed at that first "the" – a reader should know that the text is not verse, that it will show little of that fundamental quality of verse, the crafted line.

That the text is shaped does not defeat the assessment, it does not magically turn a prose text into verse. One need only think about the shaping of text in magazine advertisements as cases in point. There is nothing about concrete shape that excludes the possibility of crafting lines, as such

that

the text

is physically

shaped does not

excuse the author who

desires to write verse from

the requirement of writing lines.

Tamburlaine the Great, Pt 1 by Christopher Marlowe

Back from my break. To say, I was able to finish the project for which I had blocked off the time. Which is a good thing. Perhaps the final result was not as good as I had hoped for, but we can't expect the best results every time.

As I said on my last post, initiating the break, I am unsure how I want to proceed with this blog. The longer posts like this one are fun, but can also be laborious. And I would like to try to give more effort to smaller, "spur of the moment" posts, as well as more posts that respond directly to verse. Whether and how I might do that, however, I do not yet know.

---

 

the line period

 

My launching point for this excursion is a moment from T.S. Eliot's "The Blank Verse of Marlowe" (found in The Sacred Wood). There is no reason not to get right to it, so:

The verse accomplishments of Tamburlaine are notably two: Marlowe gets into blank verse the melody of Spenser, and he gets a new driving power by reinforcing the sentence period against the line period. The rapid long sentence, running line into line, as in the famous soliloquies "Nature commended of four elements" and "What is beauty, with my sufferings, then" marks the certain escape of blank verse from the rhymed couplet, and from the elegiac or rather pastoral note of Surrey, to which Tennyson returned.

We will pick up Marlowe shortly. Right now I want to focus on the concept the Eliot brings into his discussion of Marlowe, that of the line period.

It is a wonderful term. It is not synonymous with line break, and the reasons why are important and speak to its general superiority. For a line break can be arbitrarily had. Simply apply a carriage return and, voilà, you have a line break. However, a line period – as with the sentence period – speaks to a construction that is attending to far more than the mere question of where the line ends. A sentence period does not exist merely because it marks the end of the sentence. The presence of the period speaks to the nature of the words that precede it – and to the words that follow it in that a period also marks the beginning of a new sentence.

Review: Poetry Magazine (Oct. 2015) – Part II: Eleanor Hooker, Franz Wright

The October 2015 issue of Poetry Magazine can be found here.

links to individual texts:
Eleanor Hooker, "Nailing Wings to the Dead"
Franz Wright, "The Raising of Lazarus"
section headers are also links

 

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the other posts in this series

• Part 1: Introduction, Matthew Sweeney, Guillaume Apollinaire
• Part 3: Corey Mesner, Katie Peterson, Rae Armantrout
• Part 4: Rae Armantrout, Cynthia Cruz
• Part 5: Matt Hart
• Part 6: Randall Mann, Reginald Gibbons
• Part 7: Christine Gosnay, Claudia Emerson, James Longenbach
• Part 8: Quickly Now, Through the Rest
• Part 9, Finale: Head Shots: Crash Davis vs. the Zombies

---

 

breaking lines vs. writing lines

– editing and an added footnote, Apr. 3, 2016

 

This was slow in coming. In part, I have been in that peculiar situation of being in a bout with an illness whose medications create more and more severe symptoms than the illness. Though, also, there is that this is yet the beginning of the project from the writing side: as such, there is not only the exploration of the texts but also the search for the ideas and themes will be carried forward through the project. Hopefully, the tempo will pick up after this, as the texts in the issue are used more and more as examples to points already made than used to the much longer effort of establishing the points.

I am exploring two texts from the October issue in this part. Since Eleanor Hooker, the author of the first, "Nailing Wings to the Dead," is another holdover Irish author, I want to add to it the first text by a U.S. writer, "The Raising of Lazarus" by Franz Wright. The two also create a usefully contrasting pair: the first is loosely formal verse, the second free verse; as well, the second is a much stronger piece than the first.

The primary effort here will be toward the groundwork for exploring lines and line breaks in the texts to come: it is one of the greatest weaknesses in contemporary verse culture, and perhaps the most tell-tale sign of writing sophistication – or absence thereof – in contemporary verse. For the moment I set aside the question of a work's being ideationally dead or living and focus on technical issues. Though, with both works, I will also look at some moments in their construction. I will start with examing such issues in "Nailing Wings" then turn to such in "Raising Lazarus." It is in the latter I will turn to the exploration of lines, carrying that exploration back to "Nailing Wings."

Yet, the central thesis of this exploration of an issue Poetry Magazine is that contemporary verse, unlike Leavis's description of the popular verse of his time, is not merely dead but indeed bad, so I will begin – as I generally will throughout the project – speaking to the quality of the works. In keeping with the thesis of this blog, however, the approach will remain exploratory, from the viewpoint not solely of a general reader but also of a writer.

 

 

Eleanor Hooker, "Nailing Wings to the Dead"

 

I start, right at the start, at the first word, with a very common event in contemporary verse: the incorrect use of connecting words: here, "since."

Since we nail wings to the dead, she calls ravens from the sky to inspect our work. "For flight," they say, "first remove their boots."

Using the wrong adverb or conjunction or using one where one is neither needed nor wanted is a common error in writing, verse or prose. (It is one I have to constantly watch for in my own writing.) Either the trend has been increasing over the years or I have become more and more alert to it, for it seems the mis-use of such adverbs and conjunctions has become sloppier and sloppier both in speech and in the writing of persons supposedly intelligent and alert enough to catch the event. The worst is with the word but. On television, especially live, in news broadcasts, sports channels, and commercials, you will very frequently hear the word but used where there is no 'but' relationship, where either an and or nothing at all should have been used. I am sure that most of these errors exist by way of spoken speech habits invading the drafting of texts. Frequently, the words are used as filler material, something similar to ums, a means to connect one thought to the next without letting any silence appear in between. Though, I also believe, considering commercials and most broadcasts are not free-wheeled but scripted, that they are also, simply, symptomatic of a lack of attention and poor language skills on the part of writers: poor skills because they are exactly the type of thing that good editing would catch.[FN]