The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

The mode continued in this lofty styleUntil–with manic laugh and mocking smile New modes emerged, a kind of fractured, mad Enjambment turned up. Pauses. Something had Gone wrong…or right? The stops and starts of human Speech burst through. Now, once formal lines assume an Unforced, casual air, but nonethelessObey the rigid rules of metre, stressAnd rhyming. Gradually another changeTakes place. New poets start to rearrangeThe form, unpick the close-knit weave, make room For looser threads of consonantal rhyme.The modern age with all its angst and doubt Arrives, picks up the tab and pays its debtTo history, precedent and every voiceThat did its bit to mould heroic verse.And still today we grudgingly affirmThere’s life in the old dog; our mangy formStill bites, still barks, still chases cats and birds,Still wags its tail, still pens and shepherds words,And, taken off her leash, this bitch on heatWill walk you off your pentametric feet.

HEROIC VERSE is far from dead. Since its Chaucerian beginnings it has been endlessly revivified: after a playful Elizabethan reshaping it acquired marmoreal elegance in the eighteenth century, only to undergo a complex reworking under John Keats, Robert Browning and Wilfred Owen until it emerged blinking into the light of modern day. At first glance it seems remarkably simple, too simple, perhaps, even to deserve the appellation ‘form’: it is as open as they come, neither laid out in regular stanzas, nor fixed by any scheme beyond the simple aabbccdd of the rhyming couplet. New paragraph presentation is possible either with line breaks or indentation as I have offered above, but in general the verse is presented in one unbroken block. Only the occasional braced triplet will relieve the procession of couplets. To the modern eye this can be forbidding; we like everything in our world to come in handy bite-sized chunks. Yet you might say that handy bite-sized chunks is what heroic verse is best remembered for: Pope’s Essays on Man and on Criticism are veritable vending machines of aphorism.A little learning is dangerous thing;Not to go back, is somehow to advance,And men must walk at least before they dance.Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is man.Hope springs eternal in the human breast.All are but parts of one stupendous whole.One truth is clear. Whatever is, is right.True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

That last apothegm might be the motto of this book. John Dryden, in my estimation, was the absolute master of the heroic couplet; his use of it seems more natural, more assured, more fluid even than Pope’s:Repentance is the virtue of weak minds.Either be wholly slaves or wholly free.For those whom God to ruin hath design’d,He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.Errors, like straw, upon the surface flow;He who would search for pearls must dive below.Beware the fury of a patient manBy education most have been misled;So they believe, because they so were bred.The priest continues what the nurse began,And thus the child imposes on the man.

But these were poets from a time when poems, like architecture and garden design, were formal, elegant and assured: this was the Age of Reason, of Certitude, Sense, Wit, Discernment, Judgement, Taste, Harmony–of ‘Capital Letter Moralists’ as T. E. Hulme called them. The voice and manner of these Augustans can sound altogether too de haut en bas for our ears, from lofty to lowly, as if delivered from Olympus.

Their taste and proportion is akin to that of the architecture of the period; by the time of the aftermath of the French Revolution and the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads their course seemed run, the profusion of nature and the agony of self seemed to become a more proper study of poets, just as the Gothic and picturesque began to entice the architects. Run your eye down the Index of First Lines in an edition of Pope and then of any Romantic poet and compare the number of entries in each which begin with the word ‘I’. The ‘egotistical sublime’ had landed. It would be a pity if, in our instinctive veneration for all things post-classical, Romantic, post-Romantic, Decadent, Modernist and Postmodernist we overlooked the virtues of late-seventeenth-and eighteenth-century verse. After all, most of us aspire to live in houses of that period, fill them with eclectic fittings and furniture from later eras as we may. The neoclassical harmony and elegance of construction remains our ideal for housing. I think it can be so with verse too. Naturally the discourse and diction, the detail and decor as it were, are of our age, but the rationality and harmony of the Augustans is not to be despised.