Previously on this blog, I’d reflected upon (and praised!) Peter Sack’s notion of the “dolphin’s turn.” As I noted in that post:
According to Sacks, the dolphin’s turn is “a transformative veering from one course to another, a way of being drawn off track to an unexpected destination…” (Sacks adds: “[T]his turn is paradigmatic for the transportation system of poetry itself, both in its technical “versing,” and in its thematic and figural changes.”) The dolphin is associated with such turning, of course, because it is a creature that itself is always transgressing boundaries, leaping and diving.
In large part, Sacks’s lecture (which you can listen to here) is an analysis of the dolphin’s turn as it occurs in a variety of poetic works, from the “Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo” to poems by Mandelstam, Celan, Bishop, and others.
One poem Sacks did not mention, but which I think deserves mention, is John Keats’s verse epistle to his brother George, and I make my case for my view over at the Keats Letters Project. (You can link directly to it here.)
While you should read Sacks, and perhaps my extension of his thinking, Keats’s verse epistle is required reading for those who love poetic turns. Dive in!
Structure & Surprise 