The heroic couplet

Yvor Winters has a very famous defense of the heroic couplet in his mammoth collection In Defense of Reason. I'm inclined to agree with nearly all of its conclusions, though not with the vengeful sort of impulse that leads Winters to them (and often takes him further into more absurd generalizations). This is understandable though, since even if wasn't a consequence of his particularly vengeful poetics, which tried to undo years of a particularly expressionist or expressivist (what he loves to call "Romantic") view of the role of poetry and literature by valorizing an austere hyper-rationalism, the heroic couplet had been so crapped upon over the years by so many insensitive people that some retribution was due. What's really great and still shocking, though, is that Winters focuses his argument by pitting the couplet aganst blank verse:

The heroic couplet must have certain qualities which enable the poet employing it to pass easily from description, to lyricism, to didacticism, to satire, and so on, or even at times to combine several of these qualities at a single stroke. It is doubtful whether so much freedom is possible in blank verse; the only satirical poet who has employed blank verse with major success is Ben Jonson, and much of his satire depends upon significance derived from the structure of the play--the details from line to line are usually variations upon an anterior theme rather than autonomous summaries.
-In Defense of Reason, 141

You have to appreciate that poet-critic sense of there being a stake in various verse forms, such that the fate of poetry itself seems to be in the triumph of one form over another. Though I've expressed annoyance with the sort of overzealousness of poet-critics when they get on such a track as this in the past, you can't at all blame them here, when the issue is form; and critics actually can only benefit from trying to feel things more intensely in this way (as long as they don't, like poet-critics, start turning the focus of criticism away from interpretation and towards manifesto-writing: that's how you get theory). But I say this as if critics weren't this impassioned already: most good ones are, because they have a deep, nuanced sense of form and know the significance of shifts in form throughout literary history.

Of course, everything about Winters' argument turns on his equivocating about "freedom" when he says: "It is doubtful whether so much freedom is possible in blank verse." Later, he will say that he means by freedom what we usually take to be its opposite. But if we agree that there is some sense in which freedom in general includes ease in passing between the functions Winters enumerates (description, lyricism, didacticism, satire, etc.), it's very true that the heroic couplet actually has more freedom here than blank verse.

This is because what matters in blank verse is argument. Now, argument means much more than we tend to think it does in all sorts of verse forms, or subordinates more elements to its elaboration than we--who have a very un- or anti-didactic sense of the role of literature--are usually willing to grant. But blank verse takes this to the max, because without the unity of the line, it needs higher semantic connection or a tighter syntactic arrangement. At the same time, this grammatical demand actually allows nearly any rhetorical possibility to be deployed: rather than fall back on just a few--heroic verse notably squeezes everything it can get out of parallelism, chiasmus, zeugma, and the simile, because it isn't quite capacious enough to admit any other figures--the whole canon of rhetoric is open to blank verse, and can vary them with ease. Also, because the line is stable, but not confining, new areas of interplay between meter and sense open up that are less concerned with reinforcement and more with pure rhythm. All of this explains why Milton is so much better at blank verse than Wordsworth, though the latter has more nuanced sense of the line itself and everything it can do: each speech, each narrative bit of Paradise Lost is masterfully put together as an argument and advances the argument of the whole, and this is what drives the verse along and wins you over to its movements.   In Wordsworth, the more reflective and lyric turn of the verse does not lend itself to such clarity of argument, and the principled resistance of Wordsworth to the classical canon of rhetoric--his immense privileging of certain tropes over others, which reorients rhetoric immensely--does not allow such full-on deployment of all linguistic possibilities. Only in meter does Wordsworth perhaps excel Milton as far as blank verse goes: whenever he wants to, he can easily pull off the contrapuntal effects which are the most spectacular sign of Milton's utter mastery of prosody, and complete exploitation of all the freedom of the open line--but he has such a nuanced sense of the role of rhythm (despite his rather flat theoretical presentation of it) that he can subordinate it to a timing which works on scales Milton (if only because of the novelty of his work) could not go down.

The point though, is that all of this can't happen in the heroic couplet--and that, really, this isn't a problem. For there are downsides to having the argument so much at the fore, and upsides to having a less strained relation between it and the verse form. Since in blank verse we are suddenly dealing with structures that extend over huge amounts of lines, and that suddenly become juxtaposed to the slightest variation in meter, the turns in the language, the points of pressure, become at once larger in scale and smaller than they were. This is wonderful if everything is connected via argument--we've seen what Wordsworth can do when these larger scales are exploited, and Milton most definitely plays with the smaller ones--but where argument now fills things in and connects, there was a very tight, well-fitting scale already established. And the heroic couplet takes advantage of nearly everything at this scale--which is, if not all of rhetoric, certainly most of rhetoric as well as all the tightest relations between rhyme, sense, and meter. So if we start to think of freedom in terms of a certain right-sizedness, being in the sweet spot which allows one to deftly switch between all these techniques of versification, we can see heroic couplet doesn't seem rigid or inflexible at all. Thus, Winters continues:

Ben Jonson himself employed the heroic couplet in some of his shorter poems, when he wished to indulge in a more direct and concentrated attack, and with remarkable vigor, in spite of the roughness of his versification. As a didactic instrument, blank verse is comparatively heavy and comparatively incapable of epigrammatic point; as a lyrical instrument, the range of blank verse, though wide, tends to be more closely limited to the grandiloquent and is less capable (in spite of charming passages in Fletcher and of Tears Idle Tears) of approaching the flexibility and variety of song. The heroic couplet, all things considered, appears to be the most flexible of forms: it can suggest by discreet imitation, the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable; it can contain all of these effects, if need be, in a single poem.
-In Defense of Reason, 141

You see, that's a bit strained, since whenever you read a heroic couplet you find it can very, very easily become monotonous (too regular) or, when it turns epigrammatic, too forced (too irregular). And then the comparison to blank verse becomes comical, since you'll find none of that there (the threat in blank verse, of course, is the prosaic, and even Milton falls into this sometimes). But Winters has certain very amazing possibilities of the couplet in mind, like the following, which he quotes:


No, no, poor suff’ring Heart, no Change endeavour,
Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her;
My ravish’d eyes behold such charms about her,
I can die with her, but not live without her:
One tender Sigh of hers to see me languish,
Will more than pay the price of my past anguish:
Beware, O cruel Fair, how you smile on me,
’Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.

This is Dryden's very famous "One Happy Moment," and Winters is thinking about how, with the feminine ending here and the internal rhyme at the caesura, the thing turns into a song meter (see In Defense of Reason, 135-6).

But what's more telling to me is that he turns precisely to Dryden in making such a case for the heroic couplet against its strongest possible antagonist, blank verse, even though he thinks it just can't get any better than the more regular, consistent Pope:

Pope through the concentration of his entire forces upon a single method achieves a greater range in certain individual poems than Dryden ever achieves in a single poem. [...] Pope, in combining a comparable diversity into a single complexity, varies the couplet noticeably less than does Dryden; yet he is successful, and to the reader familiar with his sensibility he is one of the most exquisitely finished, as well as one of the most profoundly moving, poets in English.
-In Defense of Reason, 138

Given this, even though we might wonder why Pope couldn't be used to make the argument against blank verse, it's no surprise that after saying heroic couplets can contain"the effects of nearly any other technique conceivable [...] if need be, in a single poem," above, he gives up Dryden, and goes on to make the case for the intrinsic virtues of the couplet by hitting the point home with reference to "Popian balance":

What, then, makes the couplet so flexible? The answer can be given briefly: its seeming inflexibility. That is, the identity of the line is stronger in rhymed verse than in unrhymed, because a bell is rung at the end of every second line; the identity of the line will be stronger in the couplet than in any other stanza because the couplet is the simplest and most obvious form of stanza possible. [...] The poet may move in any direction whatever, and his movement will be almost automatically graduated by the metronomic undercurrent of regularity; and if he chooses at certain times to devote himself to prosaic explanation, the metronome and the Popian balance, emerging naked, are capable of giving his prose an incisiveness possible in no other form, and of maintaining the relationship of the didacticism to the rest of the poem--the relationship in regard to feeling, I mean, for a didactic passage would of necessity represent by explicit statement the rational relationships within the poem.
-In Defense of Reason, 142

This I think is a little too far, and is redolent of the minimalist excesses of Paul de Man, fascinated as both are with the automatic and mechanical. The bell is important, though, and even if things seem forced, Winters makes a lot of sense of it--if, that is, we read him a little against the grain and really understand that by the bell, he means not only rhyme but everything epigrammatic or everything involved in a concentrated turn in poetry, which rhyme so wonderfully helps out. This is what connects the bell to the argument about the identity of the line, more than the fact that this is the smallest stanza form.

Focusing on size and issues of regularity and automaticity instead leads him to say something which has to be one of the greatest little phrases I've read in criticism, but which seems a bit ridiculous:

A longer stanza is likely to be tyrannical.
-In Defense of Reason, 142

What follows is an interesting discussion of Spenser which justifies the statement more, so don't think it too ridiculous: my aim is only to show how committed Winters is to certain strands of his argument, rather than the one he should be following. He could have made a better case if he would have simply continued the argument against blank verse, for some people would say it is in blank verse that the identity of the line is strongest: shorn of all rhyme, it simply sits there, and rather than seeming like a part of the whole, it stands out all the more for remaining taut and internally unified. The argument here, if it would have admitted more of a role for the turn that rhyme itself gives verse, would have revealed this as a weak attempt to cover up the fact that the blank verse line is, essentially, not even a part, but a fragment, relying too much on meter. But that also would take Winters beyond the rigorous couplet of Pope back to the looser, more fanciful couplet of Dryden, who is willing often to extend a couplet into a triplet, or use amazing and absolutely unexpected rhymes and variations between rhymes. The form wouldn't be as pure.

But this, I think, should recommend Dryden all the more as the true hero of the heroic couplet, saving the form from the most vicious attacks: indeed, if we wanted to extend the argument more, we'd cite the fact that Dryden watched Milton very closely, and clearly thought his translations were a way of rivalling Milton, though they couldn't be original works of his own genius in the same sense. There's just nothing like the relaxed nimbleness of Dryden, the combination of a confident, strong line with the ability to make it fold and reform around the most playful thought. And if this isn't accomplished always by the most taut, tensed, controlled version of the form, the form in Dryden provokes it, which I think is more important than whether it is pure or not. The thing is just sheer fun, in a sense which the work and even play of Pope can't approach.

Especially when Pope is are understood as automatic, and this is the point at which we have to remember that, unlike Winters, the fact that Pope doesn't approach Dryden in this particular respect doesn't actually argue against him. For if I think that Dryden's example can defend the couplet better than Pope's, I mean only that: it does not imply that Dryden actually has a purer couplet, as Winters does with Pope. The idea that the purest form makes the best, least vulnerable model presupposes a lot about form itself that is pretty dubious, and shows us that questions about the vitality of a particular form in the end need to be posed differently and in a more historical manner: concerned with vitality, we can easily go beyond passionately delineating what a form can do when compared to another form, and, like Winters, start comparing versions of the same thing in some weird search to find the form itself. Such an effort ultimately to make us feel the weight of the form's accessibility--or, more likely, its inaccessibility--as if we ourselves could simply take it up again. Not that we can't: it's just that this will be more complex, more social and more historical venture than the effort (even given that Winters pursues it with more consciousness of the social and historical role of poetry than most) would make it seem.

In short, we shouldn't think of Pope as purer than Dryden, or Dryden as purer than Pope. Rather, we should say that Pope just has a certain inventiveness that works on a different level than Dryden, and accomplishes different things. Dryden seems to me to indeed remain more committed to the individual line, and experiments more than Pope with metrical possibilities--in the sense that Pope has too capatious an understanding of them all not to explore one without a point, just for sheer fun, and never with that happy sort of ignorance as to how it will come out. He thus actually works at the expense of the heroic couplet as a couplet sometimes. Pope, on the other hand works continually to display and reinforce masterfully chosen diction, to hit home something almost too clearly. And so when he uses the couplet, he is much more within it, exploring its ability to vary and indeed balance: one might say he thinks more in the couplet, distributing ideas and words with precision. It is from this that Pope's poise and balance comes, not from regularity.

If this were Milton...

...there would be epic simile where that rock is:

She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan--
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the huge cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still
With measured motion, like a living thing
Strode after me.
-Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), I.401-412

In other words, that "when" in line 405 would function differently, so as to elaborate something about how swans are when they are doing so and so. And we'd have no dash (or semicolon, in the 1850 version), but instead that wonderful Miltonic enjambment that can introduce thirty lines or so (sometimes more with a sublimely equivocal "or") extending the comparison. What's important, though, is that Wordsworth--quite perversely, really, as with everything in the epic, lyric preface to a poem that is The Prelude--indeed gives us all we would need for that Miltonic simile. All the complex qualifications by heaping up imagery are there. It's like he's gutted the Miltonic form, partly by shooting it through with continual touches of actual or anti-metaphoric action ("I struck and struck again"), and partly (or mostly) because all these aspects apply to the rock. That's what's so striking about "like a living thing": the ghost of the simile insists on some level that we should still be talking about the boat being like a swan when ...it steals its way over water with measured motion, say, or when, from behind a craggy steep it glides, mounting the air, sailing smoothly aloft... And--in the final twist--Wordsworth is indeed doing this, since the measured motion is of course only the movement of his own rowing. But meanwhile the "living thing," has seemed both too obvious and too strange--or too strange precisely because, applied to the swan, it would have been too obvious. In other words, we shuttle between two metaphoric possibilities, one concrete and the other abstract: the first is due to the new tenor (the mountain), the other was called up not by the other tenor (boat) but by its huge and mighty form or gutted vehicle which should have been there (like an unbesotted, unspotted spot of time, like the impersonal form of time itself, like a "when"). And shuttling between them, moving through the concrete simile to the ghost of the other simile and its thwarted epic openness, is what causes the "living thing" to apply only strangely to the cliff. This is classic Wordsworth: what seems easy, even cheesy at first is actually doing a huge amount of work. More than that, it is allowing you to sink into the bits you naturally think are deeper: I doubt no one who reads this famous passage has any problem with "strode," however much they may balk at the commonplace "like a swan" and the almost banal (or at least horribly vague) "like a living thing." And I'm sure while reading it, they hit that inversion hard, and give themselves over to its wonderful lengthened "o"-sound, which lets them draw out the action of the cliff and give it that dark vitality. But these prosodic effects, which we might be quicker to accept as significant, are only substantial because of that subtle, almost hidden work those dismissed similes are doing. In fact, the passage is only read thoroughly and heard fully when, carried along by the rhythm and the first simile working together, we resist that temptation to pause and linger that the dash gives us at the beginning, and steal right over it, just as those who revel in the "strode" have to resist the temptation the spondee produces--for it turns out this was no mere inversion after all, but stress following stress--to move on after "me."

Weird Wordsworth

Timothy Morton has his fascinating Romanticism class at Davis available for podcast download here (link will open iTunes). Particularly good are the sessions on Wordsworth. Morton's sense of the poet is pitch perfect, and while he stresses all the essential characteristics, he also makes them interesting--not just by infusing them (or rather, as is the case in his amazing book on Shelley's vegetarianism, revealing them to be infused) with the profound (but really wonderfully levelheaded) ecological concerns for which he is perhaps more widely known (that is, outside literature). No--he also makes these features interesting by doing that great thing you simply have to do with Wordsworth, which is show how unbelievably weird his poems really are. His reading of "Old Man Travelling" (later called merely by its subtitle "Animal Tranquility and Decay," but with some of its most crucial lines cut out) is particularly excellent, since it labors over so many of the pauses and negatives, which are so prevalent that they appear (if they can appear) even in the first (shockingly abrupt) sentence (line 2):

The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought--He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
--I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
"Sir! I am going many miles to take
"A last leave of my son, a mariner,
"Who, from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
"And there is dying in an hospital."

It is a wonderfully ironic, even bitter piece--but it is also just extremely weird (in ways the "Old Cumberland Beggar," say, from which Wordsworth said "Old Man" is merely an "overflowing," isn't). The irony is easy to detect: "insensibly subdued/ To settled quiet," when he is indeed making the "effort" of--precisely--traveling. Then there is--and this is more bitter--the fact that he is "by nature led/ To peace so perfect" (again on the second syllable, preceded by [almost building up a mental inversion even as the stress is regular] a directional indicator [in a poem teeming with prepositions and indeed prepositional oppositions: look at "by whom" and "to whom" in l. 8-9] horribly misapplied or mistaken: the speaker does not really know the way the man is subdued or traveling, what he is is subdued or where he is traveling to), when he is precisely going to meet the result of a "sea-fight": his dying son. All this is there, but then there is just the sheer weirdness that comes from the almost overbalance (to use a Wordsworthian term) of this irony, and which Morton's focus on the speaker's use of negative perception (the birds "regard him not," and he is presented as "a man who does not move with pain") really excellently underscores. In other words, more striking even than the irony is the way the ironic misperception of the speaker is built up so excessively: in the second instance that I noted especially ("To peace," and I should stress that there are many more instances), the irony shades into a bitterness so intense that it is hard not to attribute even a sort of cruelty to Wordsworth--perhaps the single quality that that is most thoroughly un-Wordsworthian (even though Wordsworth could be cold, his poetic voice is constructed so as to make cruelty almost impossible: a sympathy so profound that it is too deep for tears--or perhaps so profound that it seems a thing "of which/ he hath no need," a sympathy that is not even sympathy--pervades his work). So we are left with not just the irony but its weirdness, something precisely like--because this is perhaps most ironic--its "poetic justice." Why? Penetrating to this level of unanswerable questioning (if I can say that) is what reading Wordsworth is all about.

The history of lyric hurts

Among the many, many gems in Stewart's book, looking at it again I'm blown away most perhaps by her initial presentation of the function/innovation of lyric, which is just overflowing with amazing formulations. Commenting on Wordsworth's famous (but still always shocking) statement about the intrinsic connection between meter and the alleviation of pain ("There can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose"), Stewart says the following:

In theories of lyric from Vico forward, the enunciation of pain at the origin of lyric must appear before the emergence of a self-conscious sense of one's own subjectivity [...]. To equate pain with subjectivity is to equate the body with subjectivity and so to confuse the most collective with the most individual. Pain has no memory; its expression depends on the intersubjective invention of association and metaphor. The situation of the person resides in the genesis of the memory of action and experience in intersubjective terms--that is, in the articulation and mastery of the originating pain. Coleridge [in Biographia Literaria] explains that in the "frequency of forms and figures of speech," we find "offsprings of passion" who are as well "adopted children of power." Yet the mastery of pain through measures and figures is not merely repressive; it is as well a matter of coming to knowledge and expression. Coleridge's explanation shows a subject coming into activity out of a passive relation to sense experience, memory, and expectation. Here the figures and forms created are those of a subjectivity enunciating itself.

Divergence in lyric is thus not between language and music but between a subject transforming him-or herself from the somatic both toward and against the social. The history of lyric is thereby the history of a relation between pronouns, the genesis of ego-tu and ego-vos in the reciprocity of an imagination posing and composing itself and its audience via the work of time. Lyric conventions of addresser and addressee are the working through on the level of literary genre of the function of linguistic shifters.


[...] First person expression in lyric is related existentially to the context of the poem as a whole; it is the poem that makes first-person expression emerge in its individuality as it engages the reader in the eidetic task of the appearance of the "you." The doubled "I" (authorial intention the expression of first person voice in the text) encounters a doubled "you" (the reader's intention towards reception, the implied addressee in the text).
-Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 46-7.

For what it's worth, I can only agree with everything here, and not just the importance of "intersubjective inventions," over the fashionably oversimple equation of pain with the body, as she nicely puts it, but the unbelievable displacement of the conflict within lyric from a tired opposition (which Wordsworth himself often uses, lacking--unlike Coleridge--a sophisticated critical language to express the deeper things his poetry is indeed up to) to one that is not only more problematic and fresh but, as you can see from where the discussion goes, much more (again, to echo my last post) intuitive. The line on the lyric genre that summarizes this is just unbelievable.