V. has traditionally been considered the art or craft of writing verse, as distinguished from prosody (q. v.), the branch of poetics devoted to the theory and analysis of the structures of verse. Verseforms look quite different from the poet’s point of view than from the theorist’s: the poet learns to recognize doubleness (difference) as the very nature of the word’s two bodies (soundshape, sightshape), to think in rhythmical patterns, to know the chances (and dangers) of a rhyme, to discover the freedoms of constraint within a stanza, perhaps to feel the weight of formal trad, or even the freedom of invention, and so by these to find her way of proceeding. The theorist asks how a meter is related to its lang. medium, what happens to a verseform when transplanted into another lang., what a form is capable of, and whether there exist metrical universals. These would seem quite distinct spheres of interest, the one of “technique,” the other “technical” (see below). But in fact it is impossible to draw any clear line between v. and prosody: even the poet herself, when explaining her work, must choose concepts and terms with which to describe technique, and those terms inexorably imply a theory. Poetic praxis always entails theory, even if unconsciously, for performance in a skilled craft implies competence, and competence implies an internalized system of procedures which govern the making and which result in demonstrable regularities of structure in the text The proso-dist’s rules (q. v.) are simply graphical representations of these processes. Theory and praxis are, in much of their middle ground, indistinguishable.
Such mutual implicature is natural and appropriate. Still, it is sometimes essential to recognize the differences between the processes of making and knowing. Unfortunately the lit. of prosody is of little help here, for critics have used the terms “v”. and “prosody” with virtually no consistency. The final ed. of Robert Bridges’ seminal Milton’s Prosody (1921) is subtitled “An Examination of the Rules of the Blank Verse in Milton’s Later Poems,” but an earlier ed. added “With An Account of the V. of Samson Agonistes”; George Saintsbury’s three-volume study of the practice of the Eng. poets is entitled A Hist. of Eng. Prosody (1906-10), but T. V. F. Brogan’s critical survey of prosodic studies is entitled Eng. V . (1981). To the critics and theorists, evidently, an account of praxis is the praxis. Still, there are discernible routes of reference which, when traced, will lead to valuable distinctions.
I. ETYMOLOGY
In its primary sense of “composing verse,” v. descends to us from Lat. versificatio (noun) < versifico (verb) = versus + facio , as in Quintilian. Versus itself is “a turning,” particularly the turning of the plow at the end of the furrow (cf. Auden, elegizing Yeats, extolling “the farming of a verse”): significantly, it is the ending of the furrow that creates, by demarcation, the furrow itself, and not vice versa. So the poet becomes a turner of lines. Words for the making of the thing ( fersian “to versify” is a regular OE verb, with descendants in Piers Plowman and The Monk’s Prologue )and the thing accomplished (the OED gives as a secondary sense of v. “verse-form or -structure; meter”) are old, but the noun of action is apparently recent: the first certain citation of “v”. in Eng. is 1603. Late and unstable, the word seems quaint even in the Ren., and in the late 19th c., in the reaction to the numbing excesses of Ger. Philology, it took on the pejorative connotation of “pseudo-scientific,” a coloring that still lingers a century later.
“Prosody” derives from Lat. prosodia , “the accent on a syllable,” which is of interest because Cl. Lat. verse was quantitative, though the confusion of accent and quantity was literally millennial. In Ren. Eng., prosodie denoted “the Art of accenting, or the rule of pronouncing wordes truely long or short” (Henry Cockeram, The Eng. Dictionarie , 1623). Early Eng. grammars, following their Med. Lat. models, ordinarily treated sounds, letters, syllables, spelling, punctuation, and syntax, followed by a concluding section (commonly called the “Prosodia” or “Prosody”) treating pronunciation (accent) and usually also verse (misconstrued as “quantity”). Verse was treated under this rubric because the grammarians conceived verse as spoken, hence subject to the rules of pronunciation, and because verse was considered the most important of all uses of lang. “Prosody” therefore came to treat the inflections of speech not marked by orthography and their organization in verse. Though “prosody” originally referred to only the former of these subjects, the term soon came (since the “Prosodia” contained both) to be used for both, as evidenced by Dr. Johnson’s definition in the Dictionary: “Prosody comprises orthoeëpy, or the rules of pronunciation, and orthometry, or the rules of v”. Unfortunately, the word has been preserved in both senses even to the present day—for the prosody of speech, a linguistic phenomenon, and for prosody as analysis of verse-structure, i. e. verse theory. The conflation of the distinction, which arose historically as a mere textbook convenience, has led to some eccentric results in modern times, such as Jakobson’s claim that the study of poetry lies entirely within the pale of linguistics. The view taken here and in the entry (q. v.) is that while lang. is the material out of which poetry is made, the laws of rhythmical organization evidenced in verse are not merely laws of linguistic structure but rather one manifestation—like others in music and dance—of higher laws of rhythmicity as a perceptual frame and cognitive skill which humans use to organize the experience of any event or text wherein repetition is made systematic.
II. COMPOSITION AS PRAXIS
It is worth trying to assess what can be said about poetic praxis as performance in a skilled craft, here the craft of words. This is an important subject because praxis is a vast subject only dimly understood and because both poets and critics have at times objected to its study, albeit for very different reasons. For many critics in the 20th c., the study of compositional praxis has been derailed by the successive critical repudiations of biographical crit., the intentional fallacy (q. v.), the several versions of psychological crit. (q. v.), and the notions of authorial presence and voice (q. v.). Nor have studies of poetic performance (q. v.) been mainly interested in craft. In our time, only oral-formulaic theory (q. v.) has been willing to investigate, carefully, modes of poetic creation where composition and performance coincide. It has also been the only critical mode able to produce substantial results at correlating compositional processes, including their presumed motivations (e. g. speed of oral composition, fluency in fitting phrases together), with the structural features of recorded texts (i. e. the formula).
Many other critics, recollecting the excesses of both mechanism (so Schipper) and impressionism (so Saintsbury) in prosody ca. 1880 to 1930, have disparaged the study of versecraft as too “technical”. These critics find the study of craft inimical to whatever ethos of insight or intensity (q. v.) or expressiveness or memorableness that the age defines as “poetry”. For them, the poet’s knowledge about forms and meanings is personal and intuitive, the kind of hand-knowledge accrued by any worker in a skilled craft such as woodworking or painting, knowledge which, once acquired, becomes a habit of action, not pieces of verbal information stored in the brain. But this is to misunderstand the nature of techne in art.
Finally, many believe, quite reasonably, that fitting words to any pattern is a process which is capable of infinite products, so that even superficially similar instances (say, any two villanelles) are profoundly different. Every instance Makes It New. Wright has made a strong case that nearly all the effects that are of interest in poetry are local and semantic. If so, abstract prosodic forms such as rhyme schemes and metrical patterns are only of limited interest; since they are invested with radically different meaning in every specific case, every case is unique. This is the empiricist view of poetry, the argument from organicism (q. v.). On this account, a comprehensive register or index of poetic forms would be mainly useless if it were even possible.
This may be true for the fitting of words into lines, but at the larger level of text organization, versecraft can teach poets—and critics—what types of narrative, thematic, or structural developments are facilitated or even made possible by a given form, such as the tripartite logic encouraged by the quatrain-quatrain-couplet structure of the Shakespearean sonnet. And (computerized) analyses of forms can have any number of productive uses in providing illuminating comparisons between poets. Poets vary widely in the range of their formal interests. Some try many forms. Victor Hugo, for example, arguably “the most creative versifier in the history of Fr. poetry” (Gri-maud), wrote 146 stanza forms in 153,000 lines of verse—but only 7 sonnets. Thomas Hardy, he of the most fertile formal invention in Eng. poetry, tried 170 different forms. Some try only a few. Some develop only a few forms extensively, exploring their expressive limits; others experiment. Some seek distinction by showing superior mastery of forms already handled by the great masters of the past; others repudiate these forms as worn out, preferring to seek out modes as yet unknown (so W. C. Williams). But we cannot know all this without taking stock.
III. TECHNIQUE
But we must realize that technique need have little to do with the genesis of composition. Hence study of v. does not infringe the “intentional fallacy”. As for the two general theories that have so far been advanced about the nature of composition—that the poem is the result of inspiration (q. v.), or that it occurs only by dint of hard work (revision)—the artist will not see these as mutually exclusive. Intention (q. v.) there may or may not be in a work, but design there certainly is, and the study of design and its effects is the study of the transactions between a text and a reader. Regardless of how ideas or felicitous phrasings come into the mind—in a trance, reverie, or waking dream, read in the newspaper or overheard in a restaurant—the poet must work them into the fabric, stitching until the seams are rendered invisible, hidden artfully in the design. In “Adam’s Curse,” Yeats says,
A line will take us hours maybe;Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been nought.
This is as much as to say that the processes of writing and of reading are, if bound together, inverse. It is therefore the task of any student of technique to study most carefully the kinds of fabrics and the types of stitchings that were used in the work so as to see how mere fabric became design, or order, hence art.
As an antidote to our instinctive modern aversion to whatever is “technical,” an aversion which, let us note, comes from technology, it is worth remembering that Eng. art comes from Lat. ars , Gr. techne , i. e. “the knowledge of how to make something”. Art therefore arises, literally, from technique , skill at making. Technique is therefore the antithesis of the technical. As one critic puts it,
Discovering the secrets of a techne , particularly as employed by a great artist, is first and foremost a passage into delight. And since artists tend to work by taking apart the whole of reality and then reassembling it according to the techniques of their art, purely technical considerations may be the surest threads to their labyrinths.
(Mullen 5)
Insofar as one comes to perceive technique, one comes to be able to understand how a poet managed her craft, how well she controlled the medium and turned it to her ends. This is the sense in which one can say that one develops an informed critical judgment, for it is not true of judgment as it is of taste (q. v.), to each her own: judgment surpasses mere taste in recognizing skill and accomplishment. Technique is not all of art. But absent accident, discovery, furor poeticus or the divine afflatus, it is the one compositional strategy left, and indeed the only one among them all which presumes the possibilities of learning artistic means and accruing skill over time.
Poets may learn technique consciously, by imitation of models, or by study of prosodic manuals, or by discovery and invention; and poets may very well manifest technique in their work without consciously knowing or even being able to articulate what they do: this is quite common. Making and knowing, even knowing and articulating, are distinct. Consequently, when the critic studies v., she must inspect not what poets say they are doing but what they actually do. What a poet says or even thinks she is doing may be quite different from what she can be shown to have actually done, a fact sometimes made manifest by poets who reflect on their own art (Coleridge’s marginalia; Hardy’s notebooks; Bridges’ letters), who write mimetic examples of technical effects (e. g. 11. 337-83 of Pope’s Essay on Crit ; Hollander’s Rhyme or Reason ), or who write critical essays on poetry (Dryden, Coleridge, Housman, Valéry, Eliot). What they say usually reveals much more about who they are and how they conceive their craft than about what in fact they did.
To study a poet’s v., then, is to recognize which forms were chosen and whence they were learned, to try to assess the scope of the poet’s formal invention (how many forms tried, old or new, in what modes, and of what difficulty), and to gauge how the chosen forms activated meaning. In the course of such work, the critic may well make use of statistical data, but her chief aim is to discover not so much what the instruments were—though that is an essential preliminary—as what the poet did with her instruments, i. e. what she did with what she had.
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