How to Sound Cool and Make Sense

I’m about to teach my kids a tiny set of lines from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism–lines that set an all-but-impossible task for writers of poetry.  As Pope would have it,

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

So: all you would-be poets (and I’m convinced there are more of us than like to let on), it isn’t enough to have a flash of inspiration in which some hitherto unknown (to you) truth comes to light.  It also isn’t enough to arrange words in a clever order to achieve a distinctive (to you) rhythm or internal rhyme.  Such seemingly spontaneous edifices of genius are, by Pope’s standards, sandbox-and-plastic-shovel style.  For example, here’s a set of maddeningly sophomoric lines written by yours truly, years ago:

My barbaric yawp reverberates and circulates
Among and over embattled city sky scrapes.
I pronounce the clouds that crowd the uncut sky
And tickle sides of proud, pretentious window panes.

The great question is, of course, how a window pane could possibly be as pretentious as the poem itself.  Cheap sound devices and vague metaphors everywhere!  An allusion to an obscure passage in Whitman–but wait!  It’s no longer obscure because it was popularized by none other than Robin Williams in that cheaply sentimental and melodramatic teen-flick-posing-as-amateur-sociological-essay, The Dead Poets Society.  (Yes, I did.)  Don’t even get me started on the erratic adjective-noun pairings in that piece of tripe.  (My poem, I mean–not the movie.  Although Williams’ monologue about his adolescent caveman beat poet group is almost as bad.)

So, if the linguistic equivalent of dollar-store fireworks isn’t what poetry is about, then what does Mr. Pope expect from the “sound” of a poem?  How can it echo the sense?

What he means is that every line has to sound like the thing it is talking about.  A dog?  It has to bark.  A train?  It has to whistle.  The words have to recreate the sound of the experience the poem is relating.  Otherwise, what good are they?  Words are just sounds.  The least they can do is sound like what they say.

This sounds hard to accomplish, but it isn’t.  It’s impossible.  Almost.  Pope himself gives a masterful demonstration in the few lines following my little epigram.  I recommend reading them.  But it’s not just a Brit genius and classical scholar like Pope who can manage such a task.  Several newer, several older, several American, several uneducated, several fresher and several stodgier poets than the consummate artist and Tory softie Pope can make their poems sound like they’re supposed to.

The lesson I’m teaching on poetic sound and sense has inspired a short series of blog posts.  Tomorrow I’m going to start writing about how some of my favorite poets, some of whom are, like me, no Alexander Pope, write poems that sound like what they talk about.  I have a feeling Pope is right that this effect “comes from art, not chance.”  Much as Homer would like us to believe that he’s just channelling the Muse, and Plato wants us to believe that the rhapsodes are possessed of a divine madness, and that crazy Isaiah keeps saying that the Spirit of the Lord has come upon him–the fact is, the brothers got skills.

So, as it turns out, do the sisters.  Which is why I’m starting tomorrow with Gwendolyn Brooks.