Structure & Surprise

Two excellent, and relatively new–certainly new to me–essays that discuss poetic turns (though without calling them such) have appeared in some recent publications.  They are worth note–and worth reading by anyone interested in the turn in poetry.  They are:

“The Temporal Lyric,” by Carl Dennis (in Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play).

Dennis suggests that lyric poetry has suffered from the tendency to read lyric as narrative.  He suggests, instead, that we think of lyrical poetry in terms of speech acts, viewing the poem “as a dramatic event in which a fictive speaker performs a speech act that gives specific embodiment, in a particular context, to one or more of the basic tasks that we ask ordinary language to perform–explaining, questioning, demanding, promising, apologizing, praising, castigating, pleading, and the like.”  Furthermore, according to Dennis, “Each one of these acts has its particular plot if we use the term to refer not to a sequence of temporal events but to a sequence of rhetorical moves that carry out the task that the specific function requires.”

Those “rhetorical moves,” of course, are turns, and Dennis does a great job of mapping out the moves (which he in fact twice refers to as “turns”) in some terrific poems: Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” Donne’s “At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow,” Dickinson’s “These are the days when Birds come Back–,” Frederick Goddard Tuckerman’s “An upper chamber in a darkened house,” and Bishop’s “The Fish.”

“Reading Keats’s Plots,” by Jack Stillinger (in Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth).

Noting that “[r]eaders and critics of poetry, even at this late date in the history of practical criticism, are still primarily concerned with idea, theme, and ‘philosophy,’ seeking in effect to replace the literary work in process (what it is, what it does) with interpretive conversion, paraphrase, or translation (what it means),” Stillinger argues that poems’ “plots” often are dropped from the conversation about what the poem in fact is and does.

By performing some close readings of the plots of some poems by Keats (The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” The Eve of St. Mark, and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), Stillinger reveals the significance of plot in poetry.

While some of the plots Stillinger discusses are in fact narrative plots, others are much more what are refered to on this blog as structures, particular patterns of turns in poems.  Stillinger, for example, discusses what is called here the dialectical argument structure, stating, “There are numerous ‘binary’ oppositions and conflicts, with resolutions involving the triumph of one side, a merging of the two sides, or the introduction of some third term.”  Additionally, he examines “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in light of its connections with the greater Romantic lyric, that is, the descriptive-meditative structure.

Very smart, yet simultaneously very accessible, Dennis’s “The Temporal Lyric” and Stillinger’s “Reading Keats’s Plots” have, among many other things, contributed substantially to the growing body of literature concerned with the poetic turn.