One By Poe

Some of my colleagues in the English Department are working hard to put together a conference about and celebration of Edgar Allen Poe and his writing. The event is called (wait for it) SymPOEsyium. Poe's 200th birthday is in January; the event is in February. A colleague and I are going to discuss Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition." There's going to be a parody-of-Poe contest, and maybe someone will open a cask of Amantillado sherry. Of course, the jokes about pendulums, live burials, and ravens abound.

I just re-read the following not-famous (also known as obscure, I suppose) poem by Poe, and I found it pleasing in some respects. The influence of Wordsworth--perhaps Coleridge, too--is evident, I think. The focus on the poem seems to be on how the river is in one sense an emblem of art but then on how it becomes a mirror that reflects a woman's face but, more importantly, reflects the adoration of someone who admires her. Of course, we've come to expect a reference, oblique or direct, to Narcissus in poems about water, but that's really not what Poe seems to be up to here. The woman isn't admiring herself.

I like the reference to "old Alberto's daughter," as if the reader is supposed to know who that is, and the line "the playful maziness of art" is most amusing, sounds modern, and doesn't quite sound like Poe. The expression freshly portrays the way a river--which seems quickly to become a brook or a creek--represents art; more typical ways would be to think of the river's flow as similar to the imagination's flow, or to conjure images of sources--headwaters, etc. "Playful maziness of art" I found to be a good surprise. Addressing the subject of the poem right away, followed by an exclamation point, was something of a conventional move, to say almost the least, in the 19th century, as was personifying nature. The poem is derivative, but it has its original moments, and for Poe, it's light, so it has that going for it, too.










To a River





by Edgar Allan Poe





Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow


Of crystal, wandering water,


Thou art an emblem of the glow


Of beauty- the unhidden heart-


The playful maziness of art


In old Alberto's daughter;


But when within thy wave she looks-


Which glistens then, and trembles-


Why, then, the prettiest of brooks


Her worshipper resembles;


For in his heart, as in thy stream,


Her image deeply lies-


His heart which trembles at the beam


Of her soul-searching eyes.

The Orthodoxy of Imagery

Once the Imagist movement, free verse, and Modernism hit Poetry a hundred years ago (or so), the image became the defining element of poetry. If you're writing a poem, the one thing you have to have in there is imagery--words that create images in the readers' minds; that's the conventional wisdom. It's also pretty good wisdom--"No ideas but in things," as W.C. Williams put it. Or, when in doubt, write something that will make a picture.

At the same time, poets should resist orthodoxy, even if the orthodoxy is good advice 90% of the time. There's no need to fear abstract language as if it were a disease, for example; and sometimes poetry is made good and even great by language that doesn't convey imagery. So, yes, the Imagists, et al., were on the right track, but there's never only one track in poetry.

Here are some favorite image-free lines from poems that have endured:

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" --from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, the opening line. What a great way to open a poem! Yo, Shake, well done! The line is "spoken" to someone, a "thee," but it also sets a task for the poet. Now, we readers might associate "summer's day" with imagery of our own, but the line itself contains no imagery. But what a great line of poetry. It is image-free but rhetorically interesting.

"The world is too much with us/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." --Wordsworth's famous poem, of which the first line is the title. No image here, but splendid lines of poetry.

More lines from Wordsworth, these from "Resolution and Independence," stanza 6:

My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,
As if life's business were a summer mood;
As if all needful things would come unsought
To genial faith, still rich in genial good;
But how can He expect that others should
Build for him, so for him, and at his call
Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?

Nice stanza! The speaker is confessing to having been something of a privileged, passive optimist, and he follows the confession with a great rhetorical question.

And the famous lines from Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty./ That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know." A droll reader might respond that he or she also needs to know how to use public transit, a toothbrush, and--these days--an ATM, but that droll reader would also be a smart-aleck. Anyway, Keats's lines will last longer than that urn did!

from Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," stanza 3:

My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

"Smothering weight" is close to being an image, but it isn't an image. It's general--but it nonetheless conveys a feeling we often have when we are dejected. And there's something fine about the direct observation, "My genial spirits fail." I prefer that to an image Coleridge might have reached for. And I sure like his use of iambic meter here.

from Thomas Hardy, "Hap," the first stanza:

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing.
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Hardy's writing a theological poem of sorts, and this stanza expresses a preference for a vengeful god over no god at all. The sense, the rhythm, the phrasing, and the rhyme carry the lines--without imagery. But what a great presence of "voice" these lines have, and the lines set up Hardy's theological "problem" well.

Here are some lines of despair from a poet who most certainly did believe in God, Gerard Manley Hopkins:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

The idea, the voice, and Hopkins's great sense of sound carry these lines. The lines do not, strictly speaking, convey images, but they're nonetheless specific--and riveting.

Some famous image-less lines from Yeats's "The Second Coming":

The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

To be fair to Yeats and the orthodoxy of imagery, the poem does famously end with a sphinx-like beast that "Slouches toward Bethlehem to be be born[.]" Now that is quite an image.

And a poem from Langston Hughes, called "Motto":

I play it cool and dig all jive.
That's the reason I stay alive.
My motto, as I live and learn,
Is Dig, and be Dug, in return.

These lines are funny, warm, and generous; a voice you want to hear speaks through them; and they're rhythmic. --No imagery, per se, but what a terrific poem.

So the question for poets and readers of poets is not "Imagery or abstraction?" Poets may use both, and a more pressing question is this: "Is the language--whether it conveys an image or not--interesting--does it engage the reader?" Poets would do well to lean on imagery early and often, but they would also do well to follow their instincts, even if their instincts tell them just to "say something." The something may not have an image, but it may still work, for a variety of reasons. If it doesn't work, 0ne can always rewrite it (even after it's published, as W.H. Auden famously did, much to the objection of scholars and critics), and maybe an image in its place will indeed be better.