This may be wrong, throughout; but a useful corrective to the last, is Arthur Danto’s book The Abuse of Beauty. Good art need not be beautiful: this was a lesson learned late, a hard-learned lesson of Modernism and Post-Modernism. In Danto’s characteristically serpentine train of thought, the conclusion is overdetermined. There is, for one thing, the idea, due to Clement Greenberg and now passé, that each artistic medium had its own proprietary goal, “purifying the medium...of whatever was extrinsic to it.” Paintings, therefore, should not aim to be “of beautiful things,” they should instead “be purged of illusionism of any kind,” for “flatness is what is unique to the medium.” Thus, Cezanne turning mountains into patches of color, and the more extreme deconstructions in cubist works.

Flatness and formalism aside, Danto’s main case against beauty, as the aim of art, is Duchamp’s discovery that a work of art can be indiscernible from an “ordinary thing,” that is, a non-artwork. This discovery, of course, was later amplified by Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement, and today art museums advertise collections containing snow shovels, Brillo boxes, and the like. Now Danto is famous in philosophy for endorsing the converse: for any non-artwork you like, there could be a work of art indiscernible from it:

I found it philosophically thrilling to realize that nothing outward need distinguish a work of art from the most ordinary of objects or events—that a dance can consist in nothing more remarkable than sitting still, that whatever one hears can be music—even silence.

More, an artwork like that could be great, could even be a masterpiece. It’s a small step from here, to art does not aim at beauty: one need only observe the adulation applied, in some quarters, to works of art indiscernible from things that are “ordinary” in both senses: neither works of art, nor particularly beautiful.

As an aside, Danto tells a fun story about how little art might aim at, when these lessons are applied relentlessly. He quotes a 1969 interview with “the artist Douglas Huebner,” who said:

I’ve stopped making objects, and I’m not trying to take anything away from the world. Nor am I trying to restructure the world. I’m not trying to tell the world anything, really...I’m just, you know, touching the world by doing these things, and leaving it pretty much the way it is.

This is a dispiriting speech, for a philosopher. Wittgenstein famously said that philosophy “leaves everything as it is,” but doing this was, and remains, hard work, sometimes decades of frustrating intellectual labor. Meanwhile, when artists discover that they can produce art while “leaving everything pretty much the way it is,” well, they just sprinkle some fairy dust and kick of early for lunch.

Of course, two things can be true: art need not aim at beauty; and, beauty remains a worthy goal for artists to pursue. So why did “avant-garde” art, which thought of itself as pushing art forward, so often aim so deliberately at ugliness? Because, in the ideology of those they were rebelling against, beauty had a “moral weight.” G. E. Moore was into this idea, and his statements of it were influential. Danto quotes this bit:

that which is meant by beautiful is simply and solely that which is an end in itself. The object of art would then be that to which the objects of Morals are means, and the only thing to which they are means. The only reason for having virtues would be to produce works of art.

I added those italics, in a fit of exclamation. I’ll go to the mat for the importance of art in a human life, but—its production is “the only reason for having virtues”? Slow down! Anyway, if the gurus of your time were saying such things, you too might “[find] it so urgent to dislodge beauty from its mistaken place in the philosophy of art,” and only by being shunned could it be dethroned.

G. E. Moore wrote in the 1910s, 1920s, but I wonder how much a similar dialectic explains punk’s often relentless interest in making ugly music. Maybe not much? Not all ugly art is a “statement” in a meta-debate about the place of beauty in the arts. Sometimes, ugliness is just appropriate to the subject of, or emotion in, the work. If good art need not be beautiful, also ugliness can help make art good. And so I imagine, for example, that Neil Young chose an ugly distorted guitar tone for “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)” because it made the song better, and not for any deeper or higher reason; ditto, the assaultive distortion on the breaks in Radiohead’s “Creep.”

That good art might be ugly, I said, was “a lesson learned late, a hard-learned lesson of Modernism and Post-Modernism,” but that’s not true, nor does Danto himself believe it. It was just a lesson “we” learned late; we, in a wise one’s words, had to “unlearn what we had learned.” Danto mentions art from outside the western tradition:

The Victorians had thought that “primitive peoples” were, in making art, trying to make beautiful objects, only they did not now exactly how—hence their “primitivity.” The Edwardians [American translation: early 20th century] thought themselves advanced because formalism enabled them to see what Fry called “Negro sculpture” as beautiful. But they were wrong in thinking that they had learned through formalism to see the beauty that was the point of African art. That was never its point, nor was beauty the point of much of the world’s great art. It is very rarely the point of art today.

Danto’s book is short, so he does not bring up medieval European art, but well he might. For as the middle ages progressed, the medievals became increasingly interested in showing and contemplating the death of Jesus, as the agonizing death of a human being. Early medieval crucifixion scenes tended to show Christ triumphant on the cross, but by the high and late periods it was the “complete dereliction” Jesus that drew interest:

Christ is shown with no beauty or dignity, and sometimes without any exterior sign of his divinity beyond the usual halo around his head; he is (to all appearance) a common criminal, abandoned to a horrifying death. (Richard Vilahdesau, The Beauty of the Cross)

The most gruesome of these may be the “plague crosses” in Cologne:

Neither medieval artists, nor medieval culture, thought of art as autonomous, an “end in itself.” What we call medieval art was made for devotional or pedagogical purposes, not for some pure act of aesthetic contemplation. So “internal aesthetic” factors likely play a minor role, in explaining the shift from Christ Triumphant to Christ Suffering. Not no role—a move toward “realism” in medieval painting must have been important. That accepted, what were the other factors in the shift? Vilahdesau writes,

We might cite the influence of Franciscan preaching...the sense of guilt inspired by the midcentury scourge of the plague...and the increasing “humanistic” and empirical emphasis on sensation and feeling in general.

These factors are non-aesthetic, and two of them are also “external,” to the place of contemplating the crucifixion in Christian practice. I wish I knew more about the third kind of factor, also not aesthetic, but still internal. If the “forsaken” Jesus was always a proper object of Christian piety, did it just take time, and the passing through of prior stages, for Christianity to fully grasp its importance?

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Napoleon discovered her on his summer holiday, which he took each year on the Aegean, in deference to tradition. He dug up the scattered pieces himself, refusing all aid. Only one of the wings was found. After lamenting this misfortune, the great general tasked Davout with manufacturing a mirror image. From hints in Herodotus, experts have hypothesized that the sculpture was commissioned by Alexander the Great, to commemorate his defeat of the Persian army, and to honor his new title, King of Kings. If geographical, linguistic, or culinary barriers make a trip to France too costly, a 3/5-scale reproduction may be seen in the Museum of the American Revolution, in Yorktown, VA.1 She stands just inside the rotunda entrance. If you check with a compass, you can verify that she is facing toward the British Isles—in fact, directly toward Buckingham Palace—a subtle, and sophisticated, thumb-to-nose. Outside the museum, on tall poles, fly the flags of the three countries involved in that great conflict: Great Britain, France, and America. It is no coincidence that the French flag is the tricolore that Napoleon’s troops wore on their lapels, not the Royal Standard that de Grasse’s ships-of-the-line hoisted at the Battle of the Chesapeake. Winged Victory is a perfect specimen of Hellenic art.

Of course photographs of sculptures cannot do them justice. I have been enamored of this work as I have been by few others, so I set out to acquire a three-dimensional reproduction. None were available in the Louvre gift shop, but the Getty Museum in California will ship you one, and kindly seclude under its base the “Made in China” sticker—confirming, once again, that America is the best place to shop for souvenirs from your European vacation.

Our experience of Victory is necessarily incomplete, as we must imagine the missing head and arms. The latest quantum computers (not yet available commercially, but accessible for a fee to full professors at MIT) have produced reconstructions of the lost appendages, if only virtually. As is in the nature of quantum phenomena, not all the reconstructions agree.

But I myself, and let’s be serious for a moment, while I value this enterprise, I think the real statue-fragment is better than any of its virtual completions. In my temporal-imperialistic moods, I think it might be better even than the intact original. Re-headed and re-armed, Victory appears to have just landed on the prow of a ship. She has an airy lightness, and as we search for the mood or feeling she expresses, it’s her face and gesture that draw our attention. But this,

in this fragment’s headless state, the expressive power of its torso, and of its strong legs and fluttering drapery, stand out more. I imagine her struggling boldly and proudly against a whipping headwind, her wings, useless in such weather, thrust back by her forward momentum. The original may have been Victory Achieved; what we unearthed, and assembled, and have now in our care, is Victory Pursued.

An earlier version of this essay was published in September 2024.

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In most of these texts, the prophet represents himself as the mouthpiece for God’s words...and it is perfectly fitting that God should address Israel not in prose, which is closer to the language of everyday human discourse, but in the elevated and impressive diction of poetry.

Other instances of the thought, that poetry is for the “elevated and impressive,” are everywhere. Shakespeare tended to use prose for the low or the comic, but when the time came for a king to give a stirring speech, or a prince to deliver an introspective monologue, iambic pentameter it was.

The most important moment, I believe, in the history of thought about poetic meter, occurs in Robert Frost’s letter to Walter Pritchard Eaton, dated September 18, 1915, when he writes:

I am only interesting to myself for having ventured to try to make poetry out of tones that if you can judge from the practice of other poets are not usually regarded as poetical. You can get enough of those sentence tones that suggest grandeur and sweetness everywhere in poetry. What bothers people in my blank verse is that I have tried to see what I could do with boasting tones and quizzical tones and shrugging tones (for there are such) and forty eleven other tones. All I care a cent for is to catch sentence tones that haven’t been brought to book...But summoning them is not all. They are only lovely when thrown and drawn and displayed across spaces of the footed line.

Iambic pentameter may be an excellent vehicle for the elevated and impressive, but it is also, Frost asserts, an excellent vehicle for almost any other “tone,” and for the voices of people who are neither God nor devil; and poets have been too skittish, or too blind to those possibilities, to try them out systematically. This remains true today by default, since few poets write in iambic pentameter in the first place.

Between Marshal Pétain’s capitulation to the Nazis in 1940, and the Liberation of Paris in 1944, the French wrote over three million letters of denunciation to the authorities. After the war, some denunciations were deemed, retroactively, criminal acts: the crime of “indignité nationale.” Fascinated by their surface and their substance, I set out to write a poem based on those letters. While I admit to an interest in the more standard heroic possibilities of iambic pentameter, here my aims were Frostian. The letters are a fascinating mixture of “tones.” Rarely were the writers trying simply to convey information. They were just as keen to signal things about themselves, to the agents of the Vichy state: patriotism; sophistication; alignment with its (sick) values. They wanted to denounce “traitors,” but they wanted to sound appropriately bureaucratic in doing so. Bureaucratic tones are underrepresented in metric poetry—I’m not aware even of Robert Frost trying—but poetic they can be, when they contain an undercurrent of terror. Also poetic, in this case, is the fact that these writers’ mixed goals did not mix well: because virtue and vice do not mix well. Nor, and this is no coincidence, could the writers quite carry it all off. Their sophistication is often sour and out of tune.

That’s how it struck me, anyway. This may be serendipity, but I have leaned into it. For I should say, the letters were written in French (of course), and discussions of them referred me to a compliation titled La Délation sous l’Occupation, of which no English translation has been published. Unable to pay a real live French person to produce one, I have relied on machines to do it, machines which are, despite recent advances you may have read about, not entirely reliable. But their unreliability was, in this case, poetic, in a way worth explaining. It’s familiar enough that modern English is a mixture of German and French. Because French was, in the centuries after the Norman Conquest, the language of England’s ruling elite, French words that came to English tend to have a “fancier” meaning in English, than their originals have in French. For example, “travail” in French means (simply) “work,” but in English it means “painful or laborious effort.” Computer translations from French tend to “transliterate” French words, rather than replace them with simpler non-French words that are closer in meaning: “travails” may remain “travails,” and not be translated as “labors.” The denunciations, therefore, in my eyes, appeared to try quite hard to use the fanciest—and so, Frenchest—English words they could, even when those words were not well-suited to their intended meaning. This was, sometimes, quite amusing, as was the contrast between these elevated stylistic aims, and the sometime pettiness of the “infractions” being reported. And then, here and there, through this curtain of administrative and euphemistic malaprops, some plain and brutal language would protrude. In a poem, this could be magnified into something grotesque.

One story about World War II, is that its great evils should not be wholly blamed on a few monstrous men; shares should also be distributed to the masses of collaborators, each of whom perpetrated his or her own microdose of evil. These letters are among them, and they smell of it.

The Spirit of a Broken People:
French Letters of Denunciation

I: Salutations.

Monsieur le commissaire,

With great respect, we draw to your attention—

It is our honor to inform you that—

Duty requires that we make known to you—

We would be grateful if you would examine—

—We submit these grievances without
Prejudice, trusting you to judge their import.

II: Accusations.

This man now wears the star, and now does not
Depending on the color of the sky.

The sound is low, but through thin walls I’ve heard
My neighbors listening to the London broadcasts.

This man will sneak out early like a weasel
And go distribute leaflets in the dark.

She has corrupted children in her care,
By teaching them to call the Marshal traitor.

My daughter, now nineteen, deaf to my wisdom,
Has been enticed to ruin—by a Jew
I’m sure, for he displays a rare intelligence,
And has evaded my attempts to find
The proofs sufficient to eliminate him.
He wears the cross, and shows no hesitation
Near churches or cathedral entrances.

Two young Jews were encountered in a washroom
Immersed in shameful activities
Not relevant inside a cinema.

This man, heavily mixed with Jewish blood,
Was once my company’s director; now,
In order to evade the racial laws,
Officially he is nothing. But he sits
In the same office, and gives the same orders,
While everything is signed by a straw man.

Their flour cards are insufficient for
Their gluttonous appetites, so they’ve begun
Seeking their pleasures in black market trades.
Fat, sleek, and full of self-assurance, they
Smoke brand-name cigarettes, and throw unparalleled
Masquerades, where they dance into the night.

This Jew, convicted for illegal prices,
Has played the game of medical certificates
Declaring him unfit for hard detention.
But he is a false invalid, who now
Circulates through the town without remorse.

Disorders have been caused in Christian families
By Jewish women, who use harsh deceptions—
Inborn in them as natural endowments—
To lead our men away from pious duties
And join with them in sick and furtive acts.
Once their teeth are in, they can swallow up
Resources that were purposed to support
The needs and longings of a wealthy household.
I here abjure the privilege of revealing
Misfortunes suffered by another, but
I venture to draw your benevolent
Attention to my spare and humble case.

III: Admonitions.

Despite his brazen and revolting insolence,
This Jew, through occult powers, escapes detention.

Now the archbishop murmurs opposition
Against recent techniques of prophylaxis.

A brief report, which I prepared, contains
Evidence to defend my allegations.
And if I may confess my aspiration,
You would do well to send them to a camp.

Is it absurd to mention that a small
Lesson in terror might, temporarily,
Quell this woman’s venomous orations
Against the occupiers and the Marshal?

The overabundance of sheer documentation
That I submitted, must explain why no
Proceedings have been launched, against the hundreds
Of Levys, Hirsches, Blumenfelds, and Solomons—
Whom Germany expelled—now occupying
Remunerative situations. While
These krauts, indulged, speak everywhere like masters,
Our good French doctors have been driven out.

A ruling is required from you, regarding
Musicians of French nationality
Who likewise belong to the Jewish race.
Is it legitimate that they perform
As soloists in our orchestra? Fear not,
In this capacity no contact with
The general public will be possible.

Laden like a pack animal, with products
Destined for the black market, where the crowd
Will press in, shove, and laugh; where fearlessly
He’ll hawk old butter at a gouging price,
Tranquil and easy going: as he passes
The armed police discretely turn their backs.

I write in protest against those officials
Who advocate for leniency, when priests
Are found forging baptismal documents
For Jews. I cannot share the view that no
Evil intent accompanies these acts.
They are defrauding us, and in such cases
Laments of charity are no defense.

All these anomalies produce deplorable
Effects on French morale and national love.

Your inquiries must be more than half-hearted.
If they are energetic, if your service
Is not a myth, then I believe that my
Complaints will not remain without effect.

IV: Supplications.

We, the undersigned, here certify
That all of our constructions are in strict
Conformity to truth and to the facts.

We beg that you permit us to express
Our most profound and heartfelt admiration.

Our names should be sufficient indication
That our own Frenchness is beyond impeachment.

We are convinced you will bestow no mercy
On those who weaken us with their resistance.
Financial ruminations we forswear;
Our endless wish is but to play a part
In this essential work of purification.

Consider us at your disposal. Our
Confidence in your justice is complete,
And we trust in your cold discrimination.

We write these lines without hostility or malice.

Vive la France.

This poem is part of Interviews With Vampires. See also The Fall of France, 1940, and Occupied France, 1940-1944.

For more WWII poetry, try Prelude to a Storm, or Poets of World War II.

My book, American Independence in Verse, is available everywhere books are sold.

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Also, give the guy a break. If anyone deserved to indulge a fantasy of “simple and wholesome goodness,” it was Walt Disney. As a child he had nothing, except an abusive father. At the age of nine, he was made to wake at 3:30am to deliver newspapers, and this story will break your heart:

Disney’s father didn’t believe children should have toys, but [Disney later recalled] “on nice mornings I used to come to houses with those big old porches and the kids would have left some of their toys out. I would find them and play with them there on the porch at four in the morning...Then I’d have to tear back to the route again.”

Again: this boy’s only chance to play with toys, was with other children’s toys, in secret, on stolen time, before sunrise.

No one thought Disneyland would work. Had Walt Disney revolutionized animation, single-handedly creating the full-length animated motion picture, and made a bunch of people rich in the process? Yes! Had Snow White been called, before release, “Disney’s Folly,” and had the nay-sayers been proven wrong? That’s right! So when Disney pitched Disneyland, surely everyone thought, “damn it, he was right about the film thing, let’s trust him on this?” Not at all! A man invents electricity, yet all doubt his plans for a light bulb.

Experts in the (quote-unquote) “outdoor amusement industry” were sure Disneyland would fail, and they had reasons:

all the proven moneymakers are conspicuously missing...the Castle and Pirate Ship are cute but they aren’t rides so there is no economic reason to build them...Walt’s screwy ideas about cleanliness and great landscape maintenance are economic suicide. He will lose his shirt by over spending on things the customers never really notice.

Some responses seem so obviously stupid today one can’t but shake one’s head:

Tell your boss to save his money. Tell him to stick to what he knows and leave the amusement business to people who know it.

Here’s a funny story. Disney described his idea to a friend, at the as-yet undeveloped site, orange groves in sparsely-populated Orange County. The friend thought to himself, “I hardly knew how to tell him that, for once, he was making what would probably be the biggest, most ruinous mistake of his life.” Then Disney suggested buying up the nearby land: a chance to get in on the “ground floor.” “In just a couple of years,” Disney promised, that land would be

“hemmed with hotels and motels and restaurants and convention halls to accommodate the people who will come to spend their entire vacations here at my park.” It would “increase in value several hundred times” in the next five years.

The friend declined: “I knew he was wrong.” But he did not know this, because falsehoods cannot be known. Later he described his regrets: “I well remember that short walk across the dry, sandy road because that little stroll probably cost me about a million dollars a foot.”

What were all these people missing? When they imagined Disneyland, they could only see a defective amusement park. Judged in that category, it made every mistake: “rides would be subordinate to story and setting. Most shocking there were no thrill rides,” no roller coasters, no Ferris wheel and no tunnel of love. But Disney did not like amusement parks, which were dirty and dangerous, and attracted lowlifes and dropouts: of Coney Island he said “the whole thing is almost enough to destroy your faith in human nature.” Nor was he aiming to improve the amusement park: what he was building belonged to a category that as of yet had no instances. To call that category theme park is to repeat the mistake, of judging Disneyland by the Coney Islands of the world.

Kendall Walton, in Mimesis as Make-Believe, introduced to philosophers a notion, that the rest of you acquired as a child: that of a prop in a game of make-believe. The starting point is the imagination. You can imagine pink elephants, or going to the moon, idly, in a darkened room, alone. But often our imagings are attached more directly to real things. Looking at a cloud with a suggestive shape, I might imagine that it, the cloud itself, is a castle. The cloud has prompted me to an imagining, which has the cloud as its object. Still, the cloud is just a cloud, and, divine intentions aside, being an object of my imaginings is not what it is for. Yet what happened with the cloud, spontaneously, might be organized deliberately, in an environment built by man. We might create rules for imagining, and we might create things whose purpose is to be objects of those imaginings. Those things are then props in a game of make-believe.

The making of props is pre-historical: ancient Egyptian dolls, carved idols, and the like. And we never stopped. Indeed movies are props in games of make-believe. When you watch Snow White, you imagine, of your seeing the images on the screen, that they are your seeing a witch tempt a girl with a poison apple. However, in the theater, as in most places where one might engage with a prop, the props are limited in number. If the images on the screen are props, the creaky seats and the popcorn on the floor are not. Disney’s great advance was to make a place where everything was a prop. Disneyland was the first designed “immersive experience,” where each thing you saw, or touched, was meant to play a part in the imaginative game on offer. Not for nothing are those who design Disneyland called imagineers. This is why the apt precursor to Disneyland is not the amusement park, but—fittingly—the animated film. In the theater we engage with an imaginary world as spectators; in Disneyland we would do the same, but now as participants. This is also why money spent on the castle, the cleanliness, and the “landscape maintenance” was not wasted on irrelevancies, but well-spent on essentials. Even if no one would attend to every manicured blade of grass, too many of them out of place would break the spell, and ruin the game. “We took the most basic needs of guests and turned them into attractions,” one imagineer said. If you’re wondering how far this can be taken, visit the bathrooms in the Star Wars section of Disneyland today.

If nothing of its kind yet existed, how was Disney to find people with the skills and expertise needed to create it? (More on this, for premium subscribers, below the fold.)

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with eager search
The belfry-tower of the Old North Church,

to count the lanterns: no, he knew, before he left Boston, that the British were coming by sea. Nor was it

two by the village clock
When he came to the bridge in Concord town,

for Revere never made it to Concord: he was detained near Lexington by British Regulars. I don’t begrudge Longfellow his myth-making, and maybe there was a special need, as Civil War erupted, to remind America that

In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken...

Still: Longfellow’s Revere is more theme park ride than man. It has thus been left for us, to put the man himself into a poem. And that call should be answered, for he, and the true events of that night, encapsulate the revolution as well as, or better than, Longfellow’s imaginings. It’s all there: the defiance; the assertion of rights; and the bold declaration of British overreach. “I was not afraid.”

Memorandum on Events of April 18

I was sent for by Doctor Joseph Warren,
The night of 18 April. He desired
I go to Lexington, and there inform
Adams and Hancock, that light troops and grenadiers
Were marching to the bottom of the Common,
Where boats were waiting; aiming, it was thought,
For Lexington, to take them prisoner
Or else destroy colonial stores in Concord.
I left at once, and crossed the Charles; in town,
Acquired a horse, and rode. The moon shone bright.
I sounded the alarm, then joined with Dawes,
When British officers accosted me.
They shouted, “God damn you—stop! One more inch
And you’re a dead man.” Pistol to my breast,
They ordered I dismount, and were surprised
To learn how early I had left from Boston.
But still the officers were confident.
I said they’d miss their aim: I knew what they
Were after, and I’d alarmed the countryside,
And I should have five hundred men there soon.
One of them clapped his pistol to my head:
“Tell the truth, or I will blow your brains out!”
I told him I esteemed myself a man of truth,
And that by what right he took me prisoner
I knew not; and that I was not afraid.

This poem is part of American Independence in Verse, available wherever books are sold.

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John Adams grew up in Braintree, Massachusetts, thirteen miles south of Boston. When, much later, he left for Philadelphia and the wider world—Congress, France etc—he never once wrote his mother, “nor mentioned her in his diary or correspondence,” which runs past fifty volumes.

Similarly, Thomas Jefferson lived with his mother off and on for twenty-seven years, but “only four references to her can be found within his voluminous papers.” As a student Jefferson was “shy, socially backward, and lacking in self-esteem.” But he loved to learn, indeed he became an “obsessive student,” so obsessed that he “once contemptuously referred to most of his schoolmates as wastels who made for bad company.”

Adams studied at Harvard: of course. As a young man he was “gruff and self-centered.” Pondering careers, he supposed he should become a lawyer, but he was “racked by doubt.” When he opened a law practice in Braintree, “only two [clients] knocked on Adams’s door during his first year in practice, and he lost one of those cases by preparing a defective writ.”

George Washington was put in command of the Virginia Regiment in 1754. He then fumbled an encounter with French troops, and inadvertently started the French and Indian War. The conflict spread to nine nations fighting on three continents, and so, in effect, Washington may be blamed for “World War Zero.” As a leader the young Washington was “so self-absorbed that he spent barely one-quarter of the first six months [of his command] with his army.”

Jefferson was smitten with a girl named Rebecca, but he was “too shy for the relationship to proceed very far.” All he managed was to obtain her silhouette, which he “carried...everywhere in a locket.” He could not do more, for he was paralyzed by a fear that “she would rebuff his advances.” Finally, at a ball, he approached her, but despite the Cinderella setting he only “stammered a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length.” When later she became engaged to someone else, he suffered a “violent migraine,” and for six years “made no attempt to squire any young lady.”

What about John Adams’s love life? His “upbringing instilled in him a lifelong prudishness that bordered on the pathological.” He “felt uncomfortable in the presence of most women,” finding it “difficult to make conversation.” That problem wasn’t limited to the fairer sex:

he never learned the arts of swapping jokes or spinning off-color yarns, and never knew what to say when the conversation turned to what he regarded as men’s favorite subjects: women, horses, and dogs.

Adams nevertheless succeeded in courting and marrying Abigail Smith, an astonishing woman who, today, has her own volume in the Library of America, and her own Institute at Harvard University. Benjamin Franklin’s wife could not spell; Abigail LARPed with her husband as Roman nobility, and signed her letters “Portia.”

Two years after the wedding husband and wife sat for a portrait. John “was overweight, pasty, and flabby. He admitted to being thick, but Abigail said he was ‘so very fat.’” Not to be outdone, Adams called himself prudish, stuffy, stiff and uneasy. A family man now, Adams was “a distant father,” not even in town for the birth of his first child, or the birth of his second. As mentioned, Adams constantly recorded his thoughts, in diaries and letters, but

he said nothing about his children in his diary during the first several years of marriage, although his entries ramble on about myriad topics, including the children of others. When Adams finally mentioned his children, it was to complain about the distractions they caused.

After the Boston Massacre, Adams took a big step into public and political life, and served as defense counsel for the accused British soldiers. He won acquittals or light judgments for all. But then he fell seriously ill, and blamed his illness (probably correctly) on the stress of political activism. So, in 1771,

at age thirty-seven Adams...resolved to never again have anything to do with politics.

In 1758/9 Washington retired from arms, married Martha Custis, “the wealthiest widow in the colony [Virginia],” and settled into life as a planter. Now lord of Mount Vernon, Washington was “driven by...acquisitiveness,” sending “one shopping list after another to London.” He was especially “acquisitive” when it came to land, or as we would say today, real estate. Deception, shadiness, these were his standard procedures. Land in the west had been promised to veterans of the war. Washington arranged to inspect the land on their behalf. He then lied to them about its quality—“very hilly and broke,” unsuitable for farming—and bought it from them cheap, “ultimately acquiring 20,147 acres.” Later the men “began to feel they had been duped,” as indeed they had. One former aide said “I am sure I never desire to deal with him for 6 [cents] again.”

In the Virginia House of Burgesses Jefferson exhibited “poor posture” and a “tendency to slump when seated,” and struck those who did not know him as “reserved even to coldness.” He hated public speaking, and what speeches he did make were in “a weak, barely audible voice”:

Not one observer at any moment in Jefferson’s public career ever claimed to have heard him deliver an effective speech.

He married a woman named Martha (strange coincidence), but “said next to nothing about her.” He did write that, for any wife, “all other objects must be secondary to that of pleasing her husband,” and she should take “daily care to relieve [his] anxieties.”

Then, in December 1773, probably at the direction of Samuel Adams, several colonists costumed themselves as Indians and dumped 340 chests of tea into Boston harbor. In retaliation, Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts, closing the harbor and revoking Massachusetts’ charter. You know the rest.

(Quotations from Setting the World Ablaze, by John Ferling.)

See also: Young American; Before Washington.

American Independence in Verse, now available for purchase.

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Baldur von Schirach Interviewed at Nuremberg

It must be something living in our nature:
To strive for the ideal; not to rest
Content with imperfection; and to reject
Half-measures, incomplete solutions.

The Hitler Youth was meant to replicate
The perfect State in miniature. Without
Living traditions, passed from old to young,
The fabric of a people will dissolve.

Through discipline, each boy was taught his function,
And learned the pleasures of participating
In something bigger than himself. The wild
Among them could be tamed with mild corrections.

Indoctrination? An easy criticism.
Show me a nation that has no ideals.
No, their complaint is really that my program
Was well designed, and secretly admired.

You point to individuals, but the real
Causes were harsh conditions even you
Would find intolerable: shortages
Of food, high unemployment, grinding debt.

The Jewish population had been culled
Before I became Governor of Vienna.
I admit that it might be called a crime
To be in charge when all the rest were sent away.

At the Nuremberg Trials Baldur von Schirach was convicted of crimes against humanity. He served twenty years in prison.

This poem is part of the series Interviews With Vampires. For more on the Nuremberg Trials, see Controlled Experiments on Social Pathology

If you like this poem, you might enjoy American Independence in Verse, now available for purchase.

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Timothy Steele’s poetry is on the good side of this bar. It is rewardingly subtle, in both form and content. The poems tend to start small, with close attention to tiny details in a mundane scene:

The lizard, an exemplar of the small,
Spreads fine, adhesive digits to perform
Vertical push-ups on a sunny wall.
(“Herb Garden”)

By placing in its path an index card,
I catch an ant that scurries round the sink.
(“For Victoria, Traveling in Europe”)

Sometimes, this attention is all: at the end of “Herb Garden” we’re still among the herbs, where, “quarrying between the pathway’s bricks, / Ants build minute volcanoes out of sand.” Other poems expand, and concrete details yield to something higher, or more abstract. The beach in “Starr Farm Beach” is named after a farm that’s named (I presume) after its owner, but that name inspires the fancy of “stars / ... sown and grown and gathered for the sky,” and the poems ends thus:

We loved swifts that performed wild swoops and swings
Over the lake in unobstructed air;
We loved fish that, in sudden surfacings,
Nabbed supper with quick piscine savoir-faire.
But we best loved stars rising here and there,
Whether from hopes of something we might sow
Or from a lonely impulse to declare
The kinship of the lofty and the low.

As delightful as the what of the poems is the how. There’s joy in seeing each thing fall perfectly into place. Not just, for example, the rhyme of “savoir-faire” with “air,” but the slotting of the complex and foreign phrase “quick piscine savoir-faire” into the iambic template with exactness and precision. Steele asserts, in All the fun’s in how you say a thing, that “the chief sources of variation in metrical composition reside within the norm”: good iambic pentameter, he holds, rarely contains anything but iambs, and this, he argues, is less of a restriction than one might think. A beautiful example is this amazingly thick line, describing the titular bird in “Black Phoebe”:

Compact, black-capped, black breast puffed to the sun.

The “within the norm” claim in Steele’s theory, made me expect few “trochaic substitutions” in his verse, and even fewer that were not preceded by a “grammatical pause,” the main excusing condition he lists. But they were surprisingly common, relatively speaking. There’s one, in fact, in the just-quoted line, and here are two more, in consecutive lines (each time, in the “second foot”):

A bat cracks, a crowd rises to its feet;
Huge jets lift to the sky, and, higher yet...
(“April 27, 1937”)

Still, it remains true in Steele’s poetry that, metrically speaking, the reins are held tight; things never get out of hand.

Bob Dylan regards the control that Steele so prizes as the enemy of art. Depth of meaning is to be found at the bounds of sense; so one must risk crossing over. Describing the creative drought that was the 1980s, in his memoir Chronicles Volume One, Dylan says, of his famous songs, and of the demands that he perform them,

It was like carrying a package of heavy rotten meat.

And he writes,

after relying so long on instinct and intuition, both these ladies had turned into vultures and were sucking me dry. Even spontaneity had become a blind goat. My haystacks weren’t tied down and I was beginning to fear the wind.

Instinct as vulture; spontaneity as goat; haystacks as...something: three metaphors in three sentences. I don’t know what they all mean, but I want to.

See also:

• All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing by Timothy Steele: Review and Refutation.

• Ancient footsteps, like the motion of the sea: Bob Dylan’s Gospel Music.

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The Nazi prisoners whose letters appear in Dying We Live were German, and Christian, and most of them died for their faith. They wrote to their parents and their wives, their children and their friends; sometimes, they wrote for themselves, in secret diaries and memoranda. I learned about the letters from Philippa Foot, who mentions them in Natural Goodness. Foot was investigating human flourishing and the human good, and she came to assert that virtue was “inseparable” from happiness. The letters were a challenge, or a test, for this thesis. Did not these men and women give up, or lose, a happy life to the demands of virtue? Foot decided they did not: to enjoy another springtime, to play again with one’s kids, after failing to resist, or to speak out against, the Nazi evil, would not be a happy life. For Foot this conclusion, it seems, was hard won; the letter-writers “puzzled” her “for many years.” I would not say they puzzled me. Reading the letters will eat at your mind. And the things I read, that I cannot shake, had nothing to do with happiness or virtue.

What does one write about, in prison, unjustly accused, knowing one will die? What would you write about? These writers found their attention drawn to nature, to details and particularities, and they delighted in it:

Today is a beautiful day. You are somewhere in the fields or in the little garden....I was out walking, I was in the open air, which was full of the essence of spring, or warmth, the shimmer and scent of memories. The naked nerve of the soul was stirred by the poetry of the commonplace, the smell of boiled potatoes, smoke and the clatter of spoons, birds, sky, being alive—the everyday pulse beat of life.

What they see in nature, often reflects their own condition. In trees and seeds and fields they see themselves, and in describing the outside world they express their inner struggle with the nearness of death:

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Prelude to a Storm: 
The British Expeditionary Force, 1939-1940
 
God knows we needed work. The army paid
Room, board, two shillings and “a real man’s life,”
And soldiers’ uniforms would turn the heads
Of pretty girls, on streets and busses, their eyes
Drawn to the borrowed dignity that propped
The corners of our awkward smiles. Some friends
Discovered that their feet were flat, and some
Acquired diagnoses of myopia, 
As epidemics of convenience burned
Through our ranks. We exchanged our knowing looks, 
And watched them fade away like ghosts. We made
For the coast, at the docks we boarded ships,
Remembering mothers who admonished us
Not to shoot “those poor German boys.” Off, then,
Across the Channel, on to glorious France!
We found the British pound could buy a castle;
Eggs, butter, bread aplenty; we gorged on fruit,
Oranges and grapes, until our stomachs ached;
And with every dinner we could drink champagne.
Billeted with the French, some sour, some welcoming,
Sometimes in rooms that had been occupied
By German soldiers in the previous war:
We woke up in their beds, washed in their basins,
And looked at our reflections in their mirrors.
When we would march, the streets would line with children
Admiring us, and raising a salute;
And from our sentries, they’d learn to curse in English.
The villages were bright with bars, and brothels—
We peeked in, listening to the cheerful cries;
We hurried past and down the darkened block,
To turn around and walk back, lingering
Until hot-blooded curiosity 
Could dress our shyness up as courage. We saw
Long teenage legs, saw perfect backs cascading
Luscious brown hair; heard voices loud and French
All smiling and enticing us upstairs
For just ten francs. Some claimed exhaustion, some
Could not keep human nature belted tight.
Daytime, we fell in love with girls in town
Who courted us with parish invitations;
We plead our ignorance of Catholic rites. 
In groups we toured defensive lines, the French
Grinning with pride: their forts impregnable, 
Control rooms buried deep inside the bowels
Completely mechanized, buttons to fire
Weapons from safe and air-conditioned distances;
They Will Not Pass asserted on the badges
They handed out for us to wear, as souvenirs,
Or propaganda. Mornings we’d go up
And see the enemy across the line,
And we would wave, and he’d wave back. We heard
Rumors that German tanks were made of cardboard;
But the French soldiers wore their shirt necks open,
And cigarettes hung loosely from their mouths.
 
The tenth of May: bombs woke us before sunrise.
We rushed outside undressed, and searched the sky.
Like those who, startled by the shaking ground,
Will fail at first to recognize an earthquake,
We wondered why the fighters’ wings bore crosses,
Until they came in low and opened fire.
We hastily assembled, and advanced
Along roads clogged with Belgian refugees
Retreating, young and old, with horses, carts,
Prams, wheelbarrows, anything to carry
A residue of life. The way was blocked;
We spread into the fields that flanked the road, 
And watched as bombers dove and hit the helpless
Column. Cruel, needless death: arms, legs, dismembered
Bodies, all blasted in a heavy cloud of dirt
And blood. The wounded horses we could shoot, 
But for the human beings we had nothing.
This was the enemy that we would fight.
We made our camp, and after darkness fell,
By lamplight our commanding officer said
Heads down, my boys, spirits high, you’ve trained for this. 
We’re now at war. When you shoot, shoot to kill.
We stood, and grabbed our packs, and marched into the night.

Originally published in Talk to Me in Long Lines: text, audio.

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A song can tell a story or sketch a scene, as in “Hearts and Bones,” when Paul Simon sings of

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One and one-half wandering Jews
...traveling together in the Sangre de Christo 
The Blood of Christ Mountains in New Mexico;

or when he sings of going to Graceland, in the song by that name. A song can also communicate a feeling or emotion. Whatever else Robert Smith was aiming at, when The Cure recorded Disintegration, he wanted to convey a sadness and a longing borne of a deep desperation.

Either way, interpretive questions might arise. Wait—are they traveling together through the Flood of Christ Mountains? Does Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” express patriotic pride, or anti-patriotic outrage? There’s something to figure out; there’s something you might get wrong.

A third possibility is that a song is...whatever the listener wants to make of it. In the Epilogue to Malcolm Gladwell’s Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, the two discuss Seven Psalms, Paul Simon’s new album. During the conversation Simon repeats a refrain: the listener completes the song. At one point Gladwell and Simon discuss these lines from “Love is Like a Braid”:

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I lived a life of pleasant sorrows
Until the real deal came
Broke me like a twig in a winter gale
Call me by my name

By “real deal,” Simon explains, he meant “real sorrows”—true loss, compared to which one’s previous sorrows were mild, leaving room for some self-satisfaction in the feeling of them: look how deep and sensitive I am. Gladwell agreed about “pleasant sorrows,” but not about “real deal”: he thought it meant real love, or thing that really matters, as Romeo’s love for Juliet was real, and his sighing over Rosamond was not. Gladwell says to Simon,

MG: That sounds like a love song.

PS: That’s another case of the listener completes the song. Because what I’m thinking was, it’s a kind of indulgence to be moody, or this and that, feeling discouraged or something. And then an actual tragedy occurs in your life. It’s a pleasant sorrow, but when there’s a real one, when you lose someone you really like, when something really bad happens to you, then that’s sorrow. That’s not a pleasant sorrow, that’s real. The other is an indulgence.

MG: It’s funny, I’m completely reading that lyric—you’re right, I’m reading it in a totally different way—

PS: Perfectly fine.

MG: —I think I’m reading it, it’s about, that’s my life, I feel I had pleasant sor—I’m someone who married late, had children late, and I see my life was very pleasant before that, but there was no—nothing, it was sorrowful, in a sense it had no—and now the real deal’s come along...it’s funny, it’s a completely idiosyncratic, personal, reading of that—

PS: You’re not the first person to say that to me about it, to hear it that way—

MG: Yeah

PS: —that’s why I say, it’s really so, the listener completes the song. [...]

But what is this activity of “completing the song”? Simon said, and says again later, that Gladwell’s interpretation is not the one he had in mind. Why doesn’t that make Gladwell’s interpretation wrong?

Some answers can be extracted from Kendall Walton’s essay “Thoughtwriting—in Poetry and Music.” A poem might, and maybe is usually, understood “on the model of an assertive of expressive utterance, addressed to or overhead by a listener.” But another model is possible:

the model of a speech written by a speechwriter, for use by another person…[Poems] contain phrases, sentences, paragraphs, verses which readers can, if they wish, use themselves. The words are there ripe for picking, no matter what the poet was doing in writing them down, and no matter what the reader takes her to have been doing.

A poet’s words might strike me as just the right way of expressing a thought I thought I had....Alternatively, I may think of the words as clarifying my thoughts, as well as providing a means of expressing them.

In this way,

poets sometimes serve not exactly as speechwriters, but as thoughtwriters.

I’ve doubted that any poet meant a poem to be thoughtwriting. But Paul Simon says it out loud, about his songs. He thinks of songwriting as thoughtwriting. Each song is an object listeners can use to clarify or express their own thoughts or feelings. The full range of thoughts or feelings his songs might be used to express, he will not say and does not know, and nothing is wrong with listeners finding meanings or emotions he did not contemplate. Those listeners are not making a mistake, or getting it wrong, because the song is not for communicating an emotion he had in mind. This is the opposite of romanticism: making art is not offering one’s inner life to the world, it is honing a tool, to be used as suits the needs of whoever picks it up.

An earlier version of this essay was published in October 2023.

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Birds can learn to fly without studying physics, but poets, it seems, cannot write iambic pentameter on instinct alone. This conventional wisdom accounts for the experts offering to teach the rules of meter, in their many books, The Ode Less Traveled, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, and so on, with helpful examples, and exercises whose solutions are not (alas) always in the back of the book. The puzzle is that the rules in those books are wrong—not entirely wrong, nor entirely useless, but wrong in many details, and wrong in the abstract, wrong in the theoretical framework they employ—yet still the poets who study them often end up writing good verse that scans. What’s going on?

The linguists, who have made the study of language, and of poetic meter, into a science, have an answer. While some people learn to scan verse using “rules” they read in a book, others are able to tell—and more reliably—whether a line is metrical without such training. These others are no elite priests; even children learn to sing nursery rhymes. The training for this ability is the experience of metric verse, that is, reading a lot of it, and grokking, inarticulately, what separates it from prose, and (God forbid) non-metric “free” verse. Then one may use the true rules of meter to sort those categories, but here the rules are not available to us in consciousness; we do go by feel. We know the rules the way native but naive and untutored speakers of a language know that language’s rules of grammar.

Are the linguists right about this? Who are they to tell the poets and literary theorists that they misunderstand a core subject of their own discipline? One answer is that they have, or claim to have,

uncovered subtle properties of meter which are so detailed as to be unlikely to be accidental, and also so obscure as to be unlikely to be conscious.

If there are indeed generalizations about iambic pentameter that Shakespeare never violated, but which no one wrote down before 1977, or even had the vocabulary to write down before the 1960s, then yes those generalizations are rules of the meter, and Shakespeare was following them, but he was not doing so consciously. Ask him about them (oh, to ask him a question!), and he won’t recognize them.

Convinced? Ready to be? Standard introductions to iambic pentameter by poets and critics, like that in Steele’s book, will say that a line is in iambic pentameter if, either

* it consists of five iambs,

where an iamb is the kind of “foot” that consists of two syllables, the first weak, the second strong; or

* if some of the feet are not iambs, they are “permissible substitutions.”

It is in stating the rules for permissible substitution that traditional metrics founders. When, for example, is “trochaic substitution” okay? (A trochee goes strong-weak.) Steele says they’re allowed only after a pause, but then himself goes on to discuss trochaic substitutions that break that rule, of which he admits he lacks an explanation. Indeed this rule is broken in the very first line of Paradise Lost (stressed syllables in all caps):

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Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

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[Of MAN’S] [FIRST dis-] [oBED-] [-ience, and] [the FRUIT]

“FIRST dis-” is a trochee, with no pause before it. Now Milton was a strict guy all around, in religion he was a puritan, so if there were a rule requiring trochees to be preceded by pauses, Milton certainly wouldn’t break it here on the very first page of his magnum opus. God is watching.

Shakespeare did it too—here, twice in one line! (trochees in brackets, the line is from Macbeth):

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To do worse to you were fell cruelty

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To do [WORSE to] [YOU were] fell cruelty

The right definition of iambic pentameter ditches the project of dividing lines into feet and checking what kind of feet they are, and instead asks you to (i) match the syllables in the line to an abstract template of ten alternating Weak and Strong “positions,” and then (ii) check whether that matching does, or does not, satisfy certain constraints. If it does, the line “scans,” it is metric; if not, not. We can do the matching by writing symbols for the positions over the matched syllables (the alignment between verse and template below is correct in a browser but may be wrong in email, please complain to Substack):

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W    S       W      S W S  W         S     W    S
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

The first, and most important, rule governs which syllables may match to, or “occupy,” a weak (W) position. It is called, confusingly,

The Monosyllable Principle: a W position may not be occupied by the most stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word.

The “trochee” in Milton’s first line, “first dis-,” has a stressed syllable in a W, but “first” is a monosyllable, so the rule is not violated. Similarly, the trochees in Shakespeare’s line involve monosyllables. Only one syllable in either line risks violating the Monosyllable Principle: the “-bed-” in “disobedience.” But it matches to an S, so all’s well.

All this has been set up, so we can get to the “detailed” but “obscure” rules the great poets follow without knowing it. Two such rules are allowed exceptions to the Monosyllable Principle, for poets do break this rule, but the exceptions to its are tightly controlled; not just anything goes. (The exceptions I’ll discuss don’t include the most well-known: the permission to put a stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word at the start of the line. This exception is in all the textbooks, and so is useless to us.)

Here are some examples illustrating our first exception to the Principle. (All from Shakespeare; the word in which the violation occurs will be in all caps.)

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 W     S     W     S  W    S     W   S     W   S
To glean the broken ears AFTER the man 

(As You Like It)

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  W   S     W     S      W    S     W     S          W       S
Like a white hind UNDER the gripe’s sharp claws

(The Rape of Lucrece)

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   W   S  W        S       W     S          W    S      W      S
This tyrant, whose sole name BLISTERS our tongues

(Macbeth)

The first syllables of “after,” “under,” and “blisters” are stressed (and stressed more than the second syllables), but all match to a W. All are instances of an exception called:

“Left alignment”: The Monosyllable Principle can be broken, if the mismatched (stressed) syllable begins a new syntactic unit.

“After” starts an adverbial phrase, “under” starts an adverbial phrase, “blisters” starts a verb phrase.

Here are examples illustrating our second exception:

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   W      S      W   S  W   S     W       S    W       S
Henceforth be never numbered AMONG men!

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

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  W  S  W     S     W     S   W      S    W  S 
And I will comment UPON that offense

(Sonnet 89)

“Among” and “upon” bear stress on their second syllables, which occupy W positions, contra the Monosyllable Principle. Those stressed syllables don’t begin syntactic units, so Left Alignment is not in play. The exception used here is instead

“Right subordination”: The Monosyllable Principle can be broken, if the mismatched (stressed) syllable is subordinated to a (later) stronger syllable that is correctly matched.

“Subordinated” is hard to explain (in my source, the explanation begins “k1 is not itself commanded by a strong constituent k2 whose Designated Terminal Element” etc etc), so we’ll have to take it on authority that “among” is subordinated to “men,” and “upon” to “offense.” (If it helps, earlier stresses in a phrase tend to be subordinated, in the relevant sense, to later stresses.)

The point is this. Shakespeare obeyed the Monosyllable Principle, and only made exceptions that satisfied Left Alignment or Right Subordination (or began the line). But no way could he have thought this to himself, or said so out loud. Neither rule is so much as describable in the standard textbooks on meter. The rules of meter are hard to discern, and the tools of the science of linguistics are needed to discern them.

Should poets and critics care? Indeed we should. Follow Steele’s advice, and either you’ll forgo the use of “trochaic substitution” where it would be perfectly fine, or you’ll throw up your hands and use trochaic substitutions when you shouldn’t. You’re better off reading a lot of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, etc, to get a taste for what they do and don’t do, and then apply that taste to your own verse, the rules in the textbooks be damned. Underexploited expressive possibilities await you.

The science of poetry is relevant to its art. A knowledge of what you can do in a poem, facilitates the writing of better poetry. Take John Donne, famous for venturing past frontiers of meter that stopped Shakespeare short. The author of one paper says that Donne’s “rough” meter is not some unsystematic bending of the rules, but is simply Right Subordination pushed to its limit, and that at this limit Donne creates

a signature cadence ... [where] a misaligned prominent syllable followed by a more prominent correct alignment often [has] a characteristic dramatic effect of inducing, then resolving, tension.

But if my days be long, and good enough
In vain this sea shall enlarge, or enrough
Itself...

(The Progress of the Soul, VI)

This essay is part of Essays on Meter in Poetry.

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References:

• Lev Blumenfeld, Generative Metrics: An Overview. (First quotation.)

• Kristin Hanson, Nonlexical Word Stress in the English Iambic Pentameter: A Study of John Donne. (Second quotation.)

What is iambic pentameter? Why write metric poetry? This on-going series of essays takes up these questions and more.

• Against Feet.

• Theory of Meter: Introduction to an Introduction.

• All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing by Timothy Steele: Review and Refutation.

• Poetry as Low-Grade Musical Material.

• Iambic Pentameter as Chicken Sexing.

• “Apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables...”: on blank verse.

• Naive Sprung Rhythm.

• Book Review: Shakespeare’s Metrical Art by George T. Wright.

• Donald Justice on Meters and Memory.

• Meter and Rhyme—Defended?

• A conversation with “Notes on the New Formalism” by Dana Gioia.

• Don’t you know that you can count me out? Timothy Steele on free verse.

• On Free Verse, with Applications to Walt Whitman.

• What is English meter?, dialogue with at The Common Reader.

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The basic key is F minor, which maintains its sway, more or less, through measure 19, despite a passing flirtation with F major in measures 4-8 and harmonic ambiguity in measures 16-19. At measure 20, A-flat, the relative major of F minor, surfaces firmly and continues to the double bar…

While I do know what all that means, it makes my head hurt, and thankfully Levinson also gives us the good stuff:

..overall I would characterize the effect as one of chaste and mildly elegiac wistfulness. ...the main motive possesses a familiar sighing quality, the dominant rhythm an air of hesitancy and reserve, the open texture and soft dynamic level convey a certain delicacy, the alternation of dominant rhythm and faster arpeggiated one an effect of charm, while the basic F minor tonality and harmonic side-glance at F major generate a mild sense of tension or unease.

Still it’s never good when philosophers learn only from each other. What do musicians say when they write about music? They will of course do plenty of “analysis”—tonic and dominant, stretto and inversion—but how much will they go in for calling music wistful, hesitant, reserved, delicate, or charming? And: assuming they do find “human characteristics” in music, which ones do they find, and which go unmentioned? Sad or joyful music is to be expected, but will music be called grumpy, or introverted, or interested in your stamp collection? I read Charles Rosen’s Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas: A Short Companion to find out.

Rosen calls his book “practical,” “meant as a guide for listeners and performers,” but that is clearly a joke. Stuff like this

The expressivo poco ritenente of bar 99 [of opus 111], however, practically applies to only one chord, the dominant ninth of the sub-dominant F minor with the D flat in the melody. (In spite of the notation, the a tempo of bar 100 should start with the upbeat of the previous bar.)

loses 99.99% of all listeners when the first Italian word hits the page. Long stretches of the book are performance notes: don’t play this faster than 76, that note should be held for its full value. But here and there Rosen does apply to music words that have their “home use” in application to human beings. One motif is called “hesitant” and “momentarily indecisive.” The finale of Mozart’s piano concerto in C is “amiable” (when played at its intended tempo); Mozart’s piano sonata in D ends with a “dashing” and “flamboyant” finale.

Well what is it about the finale that makes it dashing, and what it is about that motif that makes it indecisive? On one proposal, when the way a piece of music sounds and “moves through musical space” resembles the way a dashing person looks or acts, then it is a dashing piece of music; to hear a piece of music as dashing, then, is then to be aware, when hearing it, of this resemblance (if only subconsciously). On another proposal, when a piece of music naturally prompts us to imagine that the music is (somehow) the “sonic” behavior in which a (fictional) dashing person expresses their personality, then it is a dashing piece of music. These proposals—the appearance theory and the persona theory—differ in what they say engagement with, and appreciation of, the human characteristics of a piece of music involves; but both seem to handle “hesitant,” “dashing,” and “flamboyant.”

Does Rosen’s book provide any data that casts one of the theories in a better light than the other? Rosen quotes another pianist referring to the “fiery temperament” of a passage in two-part counterpart, and Rosen himself says that the Largo of Beethoven’s Ghost Trio is “frighteningly spectral.” Now hearing a “fiery temperament” in music seems to require imagining something (a person) having that temperament—a point for the persona theory. The score, however, remains tied, since, on the other hand, “spectral” is a pure appearance term.

There are two more moments in the book that, I think, push the needle more toward the persona theory. About the first statement of the theme of opus 109 (second movement) Rosen writes that “to understand its meaning one must, as usual, imagine the soprano line sung.” If appreciating the theme means imagining it sung, then appreciating it means imagine someone singing it, and that definitely means imagining a persona, in whom the various human characteristics attributed to the music could inhere.

The second moment comes when Rosen discusses the motif that opens the scherzo from the sonata in A flat. He calls it “an affirmation followed by a scherzando comment,” but then observes that the motif becomes, in a later statement, “a question answered by an emphatic new motif.” If the appearance theory is right, then hearing the motif as an affirmation, and later hearing it (when repeated) as a question, just involves hearing its resemblance to assertoric and interrogative speech. This I find hard to believe. Surely to hear it as an affirmation I must imagine it as someone’s affirmation.

This last example is interesting also because with it we have moved beyond, or away from, music exhibiting emotions or character traits. The idea that a bit of music can be happy or sad, or jovial or flamboyant, is one that philosophers have worked hard to account for. The idea that a motif can be an affirmation, a comment, a question or an answer is not really on their radar. It should be.

A earlier version of this essay was published in October 2022, under the title Beethoven: or, on human characteristics in music.

See also: On Appearance Emotionalism.

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Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus' lodging. Such a wagoner
As Phaëton would whip you to the west
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaways' eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalked of and unseen.
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties, or, if love be blind,
It best agrees with night. Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match
Played for a pair of stainless maidenheads.
Hood my unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle till strange love grow bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.
Come, night. Come, Romeo. Come, thou day in night,
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow upon a raven's back.
Come, gentle night; come, loving black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun. 

[Romeo and Juliet III.ii.]

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Walther Funk Interviewed at Nuremberg

My own psychology is complicated—
I was somnambulant when young, and now,
When the moon is full, I’m easily upset. 

He often interrupted conversations
To ask if I would play some music.

Piano—he had a great ear for it, it seemed.

The fundamental differences in talent
Between one human being and another
Must be acknowledged: this was Hitler’s view
As well, and its denial was the root,
The evil root of communism.

Is all this boring you? I’m sure it sounds
Extremely dull. It does to me as well. 

I’ve never been ambitious. I was not
A big man, and did not aspire
To be among the inner circle.

In war a man should not desert his post. 
“My country, right or wrong”: a virtue, yes?
Invented, I should say, by the British.

I favored carrying out that program slowly.

I had no idea where that gold 
Was coming from—

No, no, I’m glad to have your company.
The pacing helps to ease my bladder pain.
It clarifies my thoughts as well. To sit,
To be required to sit at trial was hard; 
The urge to urinate distracted me. 

Donations? Of course not. But people die
Of natural causes, and if some of them
Had gold teeth, or expensive glasses, then
That might have been the source of those deposits. 

I liked good food, good wine; appreciated
A good cigar. My cellar was distinguished.

The judges, I could tell, were very interested
In what I had to say. They let me speak
More than others; they rarely interrupted.

Continue down a road for long enough:
Eventually, to turn aside requires
An act of will beyond your reach.

Some power must remove the rotten things
And all the dirt that’s settled on this world;
And some new instrument must be created.

Walther Funk was Minister of Economics for the Third Reich, and President of the Reichsbank. At Nuremberg he was convicted of crimes against humanity, and sentenced to life in prison.

This poem is part of the series Interviews With Vampires. For more on the Nuremberg Trials, see Controlled Experiments on Social Pathology

If you like this poem, you might enjoy American Independence in Verse, now available for purchase.

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In a nerdy version of the Kevin Bacon game, my college girlfriend once told me that her mother, visiting Paris in her youth, had been pinched on the butt by Jean-Paul Sartre. I can’t remember if she was honored by the attention, but we were all feminists, and Sartre’s reputation for womanizing made him an object of scorn. For me, this attitude bled into a disdain for his philosophy, which only grew as I became aware that I was an analytic philosopher, and he a Continental. He played for the other team, and must be shunned. I never read his work. Being and Nothingness seemed a laughably-pretentious title, and the book surely contained hundreds of pages of overly-subtle nonsense, which could easily be dissolved by one semester of undergraduate logic.

But maybe that ability, to read the deepest of meanings in the most minor of cues, is just the sensitivity needed to explain life in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Or maybe the causation runs both ways: the weird unreality of living under occupation, the paradox of being a stranger in one’s own land and among one’s own people, helped produce existentialism’s obsession with the inescapable in-betweennesses of life.

To start with the material conditions, their new German overlords required the French to set their clocks ahead an hour, to synchronize with Germany’s time zone. This mismatch, between the sun’s location and the clockface, was just one way that occupation defamiliarized everything around them. Of course there was also the fact that one needed to carry one’s identity papers with one at all times. And then there was the famine.

Food was rationed, and (quoting Ousby, as before) by 1944 “People said that the meat ration was so small it could be wrapped up in a Métro ticket.” In another bit of existentialist double-vision, the substitutes for now-rare foodstuffs were substituted in disguise:

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Fast forward to chapter 10. The discussion of Romanticism starts off with a bang, a rare moment of adulation: William Blake

was a poet of the purest inspiration, at once a man and a visionary. There is about his best lyrics a rightness of tone and feeling, an inevitability of rhythm and language which give them a kind of authenticity, even authority, that we accept without question.

This judgment itself, we are to accept without question. Indeed the whole book is a display of what you can get away with, if you are free to assert and not defend.

Reeves isn’t done with Blake’s importance:

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The way Ian Ousby tells it, in Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940-1944, the French after the First World War were a scarred and wounded people, simmering with resentment, distrust, and fear. One in three of their young men had died in WWI—their “Lost Generation.” The Battle of Verdun (1916)

did not just kill or maim...It infected men with what Louis Madelin called a crise de tristesse sombre, an attack of black sorrow...Soldiers deserted without warning, or abandoned positions they were supposed to hold. Some collapsed into a lethargy so deep they lost the will to defend themselves.

Britain and then America had fought with France on the Western Front, but it was French land they were fighting on, and it was French civilians who suffered the collateral damage. After peace was made, another war was thought so horrible, that the French refused to believe another war was possible. Thus, despite the appearance of preparations, the French were not ready, when Germany invaded.

When, six weeks after the invasion, the swastika went up over Paris, France became “a body without a head”:

troops near the Maginot Line killed an officer, Colonel Charly, who ordered them to fight their way out of their encircled position...[France] became a country of civilians who no longer wanted to be part of any war and of soldiers not in retreat but in open flight, soldiers who no longer wanted to be soldiers at any price.

To save the country’s sovereignty, if not its territory, one official proposed an “indissoluble union” with Great Britain, “joining their governments, resources, liabilities, and above all, their destinies.” Churchill agreed (he was a francophone), but too many in the French government thought Britain would fall immediately: “its neck would be wrung like a chicken.” This, and grievances against Britain, from centuries of antagonism, and from perceived sleights during the last war, killed the plan:

Better to be a Nazi province. At least we know what that means.

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The poetry is also uneven. There are not many great ones. The best tend to be concrete, to avoid Big Metaphors, and to skirt too much Universalizing Abstraction. They also tend to be in meter and rhyme. Donald Justice said that to write in meter is “to propose that an emotion, however uncontrollable it may have appeared originally, was not, in fact, unmanageable”—maybe that’s why.

Lincoln Kirstein’s “Snatch” describes a visit to a whorehouse. Here’s a bit of it; I’ve broken his sixteeners into tetrameter pairs, both because your phone screen is narrow, and because it’s better that way:

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Exhausted though still unrelieved, 
   some GI’s lounge against the glass
To sip warm bear and drag dead butts 
  and wait their rationed piece of ass.
...
Too bright and early to make love; 
   nervous fatigue harasses haste
We’ve just been dumped upon this town. 
  We’ve fucking little time to waste...

That use of “fucking” is a moment of poetic genius. The rhyming creates a fairy-tale vibe, which that word breaks through, a shattering reminder of the GI’s actual—desperate, no-nonsense—state of mind.

What’s also rare in the book, surprisingly, are narrative poems about the war’s Big Events. Operation Torch, Midway, D-Day, etc etc, there are no attempts to describe these in verse. Instead we get a focus on moments and on moods. Why this absence?

What narrative there is, rarely does enough to identify where its small story fits into the larger war. Ben Belitt, in “The Spool,” gives us soldiers on a raid:

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He raises his rifle, barrel backwards, and brings
the butt down heavily on the door-panels.
The rifle rebounds.
He measures a second blow, his teeth bared
slightly in a reflex of anxiety. His eye is large.
The butt-plate smashes over doorknob and lock,
the knocker flies upward once, the panel splinters
all at once. The man kicks the door open easily
with a booted foot.

That’s okay, but the poem is marred by a distracting conceit: rather than tell the story directly, it’s told as if we are watching a movie:

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A rifleman moves up the frame...
	A second figure 
breaks through the frame, freezing between the
foreground and the far doorway.

“Beach Red” is a book-length narrative poem by Peter Bowman, excerpted in this collection. It scores high on concrete details, but is too prosaic—the free verse isn’t doing it any favors—and the second-person narration doesn’t really work:

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Rest your body on your legs and on your arms
and for Jesus’ sake don’t let your pimply ass protrude.
Cradle your rifle in the bend of your two elbows
high enough so that no sand gets in the muzzle.

William Everson’s “The Raid” gives only hints about the time and place of the raid it describes. It’s aesthetic flaws are the opposite of those in “Beach Red”: now the writing is too flowery and tries too hard to be poetic:

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They came out of the sun with their guns geared,
Saw the soft and easy shape of that island
Laid on the sea,
An unwakening woman,
Its deep hollows and its flowing folds
Veiled in the garlands of its morning mists.

Better is “The City of Beggars” by Alfred Hayes, about arriving in an Italian port after its capture by the Allies:

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The wops came down to the port
When we docked
Dressed in the most fantastic rags,
Infantry caps on their heads
And feet tied in flour bags.

Better yet is “Troop Train” by Karl Shapiro, which is in excellent blank verse:

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It stops the town we come through. Workers raise
Their oily arms in good salute and grin. 
Kids scream as at a circus. Business men
Glance hopefully and go their measured way.
...
Fruit of the world, O clustered on ourselves
We hang as from a cornucopia
In total friendliness, with faces bunched
To spray the streets with catcalls and with leers.
...
And on through crummy continents and days,
Deliberate, grimy, slightly drunk we crawl,
The good-bad boys of circumstance and chance,
Whose bucket-helmets bang the empty wall ...

Here is a perfect balance of specificity and larger truth: the local’s reactions to the troops, who appear to them as liberators and bringers-of-plenty, contrasts with the soldiers’ vulgar reality. And at the start of the third quoted stanza there’s that stand-out line expressing exhaustion, “And on through crummy continents and days.”

In fact Shapiro has a number of good poems here. One of the great lines in the book (I’ll italicize it) is in his “Lord, I Have Seen Too Much”:

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Lord, I have seen too much for one who sat
In quiet at his window’s luminous eye
And puzzled over house and street and sky,
Safe only in the narrowest habitat;
Who studied peace as if the world were flat.

If you know any poem in this book, you know Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” and it deserves that fame. The last line is always praised, but it’s the opening image and metaphor, especially after so many weak metaphors by weaker poets, that is this poem’s greatest moment:

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From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Jarrell is also eloquent about finding a Nazi death camp, in “A Camp in the Prussian Forest”:

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Here men were drunk like water, burnt like wood.
The fat of good
And evil, the breast’s star of hope
Were rendered into soap.

But the most moving moment in the first half of the book may be in John Ciardi’s “Elegy Just in Case.” The poem opens,

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Here lie Ciardi’s pearly bones
In their ripe organic mess.
Jungle blown, his chromosomes
Breed to a new address.

Ciardi continues on, about the causes and consequences of his possible death, until he breaks from that topic to address a past lover:

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Darling, darling, just in case
Rivets fail or engines burn,
I forget the time and place
But your flesh was sweet to learn.

See also: Prelude to a Storm: The British Expeditionary Force, 1939-1940, in Talk to Me in Long Lines; “I was like a wounded animal…”; Interviews With Vampires.

Below the fold, more Poets of World War II, for premium subscribers: Blakean visions of bombing runs; Howard Nemerov and Richard Wilbur; Anthony Hecht’s devastating World War II poetry; and bitterness, and a refusal of glory or gratitude.

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