An Introduction to English Poetry by James Fenton Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 144 pp., $20 IN 1798 A SLIM VOLUME OF POEMS appeared in Bristol, England, entitled “Lyrical Ballads,” the anonymous work of two young and little-known poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It sold well, despite an overwhelmingly hostile critical reception; a second edition appeared in 1800, a third in 1802. The two young men went on, of course, to become the greatest poets of the age, indeed of the century in Wordsworth’s case.
What made these poems so successful? Literary historians have often singled out the “Lyrical Ballads” as the book that started the poetic revolution known as English Romanticism: The poems violated a number of conventions common to poetry of the day, and they were cast in the language of everyday speech rather than in the grandiloquent diction then thought essential to poetry. But while there is some truth in this account of things, scholars over the last three or four decades have shown pretty convincingly that the poems in “Lyrical Ballads” weren’t so original in form or subject as the poets themselves claimed them to be. Why, then, were they so successful? How did they start a revolution? The answer has less to do with their originality than with the fact that they were so exceptionally, thrillingly good. In other words, Romanticism in English poetry came about largely because the English literate public of the early nineteenth century were capable of discerning great poetry when they saw it, whatever hidebound reviewers might say.
Alas, if a work of equal power and depth were to be published in 2002, it would have little chance of being read by more than a handful of people, and virtually no chance of igniting the imaginations of two or three generations, as eventually Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetry did. The reasons for this can hardly be crammed into a book review. But several come to mind, chief among them that poetry must now compete with movies, television, and pop music. Another reason for this state of affairs, though, deserves consideration: the sheer awfulness of most of the verse written over the last four decades, and the effect it has had on the reading public.
Ask the average intelligent person whether he or she likes poetry, and the response will fall somewhere between a polite no and an embarrassed shrug. Probe, and almost certainly you will find that the reason has something to do with not understanding what poetry is “all about.” No surprise there. English metrics haven’t been seriously taught to the young for decades, and since the 1960s, poets themselves, with a few honorable exceptions, have eschewed metrics as “inauthentic” and confined themselves to “free verse,” the ostentatious absence of meter. But while there may be some merit in free verse (I do not think so), its imposition as doctrinal orthodoxy since the ’60s has rendered generations of intelligent people deaf to the rhythms and melodies of English meter–from schoolchildren who are taught to write “poems” but not instructed in meter (except for the haiku), to poets who think of metrics as a weird convention of yesteryear, like photographing dead people.
THUS DOES IT FALL to the poet James Fenton in his splendid little book “An Introduction to English Poetry” to acquaint the interested but perplexed with English language poetry, and, in the process, to plead with today’s poets to take poetic form–which is to say, poetry–seriously.
Fenton’s twenty-two small chapters seek to explain, as accessibly and winsomely as possible, the basic ideas involved in reading and understanding English poetry. What is the purpose of rhyme? What are iambs and trochees, pentameter and fourteeners, and how have poets used these things to make their words say more than would be possible otherwise?
In answering such questions Fenton is aware that many contemporary poets view metrics as little more than arbitrary and life-denying rules that poets of bygone eras imposed on themselves just to see if they could do it. Fenton goes shows this notion to be the self-serving sham it is, but he does so by definition and analysis rather than by argument and ridicule, appropriate as argument and ridicule would have been in this context.
Three brief chapters–“The Sense of Form,” “The Iambic Pentameter,” and “Variations on a Line”–explain the nature and purpose of metrics as well as can be done in so short a space. Having defined the most important meter in English poetry, the iambic pentameter, Fenton goes through several lines of Tennyson’s “Tithonus.” What is remarkable about iambic pentameter is that, while a poem like Tennyson’s may be indisputably iambic pentameter, it constantly varies from that pattern–and the rhythmic variety the poem produces is, in large measure, what makes it beautiful. The meter was made for the poem, and not the poem for the meter. Here are four lines from “Tithonus”:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Only the first of these lines is in perfect iambic pentameter: Emphasis is placed on the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth syllables. The other three lines exhibit subtle variations. Fenton remarks upon the fourth line that “Tennyson could easily have avoided the extra syllable–the line has eleven syllables–by making the summers into a more conventional plural: ‘And after many summers dies the swan.’ But he does not do this. Clearly he prefers the idiomatic flavour of ‘many a’ . . . The irregularity he has introduced is not a mistake. It is another variant, and in this case a very gentle variant, on the classic pattern.”
Other chapters discuss the uses of rhyme, the iambic tetrameter, the trochee, the sonnet, the longer forms such as the Spenserian stanza, and the minor forms such as the triolet. Fenton’s is far from a comprehensive introduction; his choice of topics and poems, while sufficiently representative, reflects very much his own interests. It is more of an invitation than an introduction. But although it is possible to complain about some of Fenton’s preoccupations (do we really need six pages on the sestina?), his choice of poems to illustrate poetic principles is by and large commendable, as is his practice of relaying, when possible, the entire poem rather than excerpts: The reader feels that he has read something other than a treatise.
Short and instructive as the book is, it is not flawless. Fenton’s strategy of addressing aspiring poets themselves gives certain passages a cliquish quality; the chapters on song and libretto-writing, for instance, sound like a how-to manual.
MORE IMPORTANT, Fenton tries too hard to establish his non-elitist credentials, as when he remarks, with what sounds to me like insincerity, that rap has poetic precedents in ancient extemporaneous rhyming. Similarly, he stops short of saying what needs to be said about free verse, namely that the few respectable poems written in free verse are respectable only because they partake of the rhythms of metrical poetry while hypocritically claiming to eschew it, and that the elevation of free verse as the Only Way to Write Authentic Poetry has rendered two generations of versifiers incapable of hearing the music of poetry, and has lent itself easily to the creepy self-indulgence that scares normal and intelligent people away from poetry. Fenton seems to recognize this, but he is too kind to say it.
What is most troubling about this book, however, is that it had to be written at all. One hopes it will repair some of the damage that made it necessary.
Barton Swaim is writing a doctoral thesis at the University of Edinburgh on nineteenth-century literary criticism.
