A Translation of Experience
Andrew Crozier, 'Free Verse' as Formal Restraint
Shearsman, 216pp, £14.95, ISBN 9781848613966
reviewed by John Clegg
'Free Verse' as Formal Restraint. Surely the quotation marks are in the wrong place? We all know what we mean by 'free verse,’ give or take, but 'formal restraint' is up for grabs – and, indeed, Andrew Crozier succeeded in doing what he set out to only by employing a very odd definition of the words. Here are the first two sentences of the abstract (the book, I should mention, is his 1973 PhD thesis, published now for the first time with an introduction by Ian Brinton, and the Examiner's Notes from JH Prynne):
'This point of view contrasts with...' Yes, indeed, but the two points of view are not contradictory. Or rather, what seems to be at odds is whether or not the 'creation of artistic form' really does depend upon the 'principle of restraint' – not whether free verse provides an example of that principle in action, as Crozier’s title suggests.
What is this principle? Crozier’s treatment of it is derived from (and in contention with) Eliot, especially Eliot’s writings on Pound:
This comes in the middle of the second chapter – at the end of which, Crozier drops the topic of ‘restraint’ altogether, or so the reader might think. The bulk of the thesis (chapters 4-7) gives an account of certain modes of organisation in poetry, and a fascinating history of how these were defined and theorised. It is at its most useful and interesting when chasing the old rabbit ‘what is the relation between poetry and music?’ I was surprised to find the discussion had been going on at such a high level since the 16th century, and Crozier actually gets to argue with some of his 16th-century sources, not just point them out as exploded examples.
The discussion of ‘speculative music,’ or the ‘music of the spheres,’ is particularly valuable. The idea that poetry and music are somehow linked, but that this link is ‘not directly analogical’ (see Crozier’s abstract above), has always seemed a hostage to fortune (do they both end up being analogical to some third term?). But ‘speculative music,’ an extension of Pythagorean doctrine popularised by Kepler in his Harmonices Mundi Libri V (1619), is another example of a phenomenon (the proportion of the movement of the planets) explained in terms of music while resisting the direct comparison: the ‘music’ was not supposed to be audible. Crozier finds Sidney gesturing towards this in his Defense of Poesie:
Crozier makes clear that Sidney in this passage is concerned with the practical matter of setting text to music, and the need for guidance here does seem to be the animating problem that produced the torrent of marvellous Renaissance criticism. Thomas Campion, whose Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) is discussed at length, is inevitably a key figure here. His guess at the nature of the analogy between poetry and music Crozier summarises as an insistence on proportion and balance, and goes on to show in a brilliant close reading how central these concepts were to Campion’s own poetic practice.
As the arts of poetry and music become less interconnected, criticism on the relationship between the two becomes correspondingly strained. Part of this is surely that, as the fashion for setting poems to music dissipated, there was simply less practical impetus for uncovering Sidney’s ‘secret musicke’. There was also a renewed striving towards objectivity, as Crozier notes in his discussion of Dr Johnson, and his assault through unkind examples against Pope’s idea that ‘the sound should be an echo to the sense’:
One might agree with Crozier that this was reductive, and still agree with Dr Johnson that where the mechanics of association were not the same, criticism of Dr Johnson’s sort couldn’t go much further.
The conclusion of the thesis, ‘Free Verse and the Natural Restraints of Language,’ sees Crozier return to the Poundian idea of ‘absolute rhythm,’ and suddenly the relevance of the music of the spheres becomes apparent; free verse is restrained, in a good way, because its language ‘mediates objectively’ with the world; its regularities are not those imposed on it by a shop-bought metre, but rather by the deep harmonic elegancies of the world itself. The critic’s task, presumably, is to determine how effectively this mediation has been accomplished. As Crozier notes rightly, ‘Trust is a major demand upon the reader here.’ (No less so than it was for Dr Johnson, although Johnson was less willing to concede his trust.)
Impressively, this is mostly argued for rather than asserted, and argued for closely and clearly. In a couple of pages, Crozier sketches a convincing vision of language as simply a ‘system of conveyance and storage’ for perceptive and cognitive inputs, a ‘translation of experience.’ Prosody, Crozier suggests, is a means of attentiveness to the features of language which cannot be mapped back onto reality (in other words, prosody is what is gained in translation). ‘One of the things which should be discernible in a fully coherent theory of modern poetry, I would contend, is the abolition of any distinction between prosody and poetic meaning which makes the use of relational terms such as correspondence necessary.’
On the final step in his argument, which connects free verse to our unmediated experience of the world itself via the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Alfred North Whitehead, I can’t comment because I don’t understand it. As a final flourish, he offers a close reading of a William Carlos Williams poem, demonstrating that it is more effective in free verse than it would be in metre, and that freedom in line-breaks is what allows Williams to create the parallelisms that are the main successes of the poem. The close reading is convincing, but the argument is so dependent on line-breaks (rather than Pound’s ‘absolute rhythm’ or any other sort of formal restraint) that the reader may wonder why line-breaks haven’t been mentioned before. (This is the penultimate page of the book.)
A duller account of how free verse achieves its effects might run something like this: metre presumes an oral norm; it creates expectations in a listener which can then be fulfilled or defaulted on in surprising ways – that is to say, one of the primary functions of metre is to allow a listener to identify the line-endings. Once poetry moves onto the page, this function of metre becomes redundant. The expectation which remains (one might call this the restraint, but I am not convinced this is a helpful framing) is that line-breaks will mark the end of sentences or natural syntactic pauses; it is this expectation which allows free verse to be surprising or delightful. This account, though, would not have made for an interesting thesis; and Crozier’s thesis is deeply interesting, for the range of material covered, the enthusiasm with which he fills in the details of his historical arguments, and the overall strangeness of his position. Shearsman and Ian Brinton are to be congratulated for republishing such a valuable and rebarbative work.
My intention in writing this thesis has been to cast some light on the prima facie case that free verse, in abandoning the exercise of metre, has abandoned that principle of restraint upon which the creation of artistic form depends. This point of view contrasts with a general contention on the part of the exponents of free verse that their works possess form which is not only unique but which also bears an immediate relation to the significance of the work, a relationship felt to be "musical", although not in any directly analogical sense.
'This point of view contrasts with...' Yes, indeed, but the two points of view are not contradictory. Or rather, what seems to be at odds is whether or not the 'creation of artistic form' really does depend upon the 'principle of restraint' – not whether free verse provides an example of that principle in action, as Crozier’s title suggests.
What is this principle? Crozier’s treatment of it is derived from (and in contention with) Eliot, especially Eliot’s writings on Pound:
Eliot’s pleasant figure of metre hiding behind the arras to nudge the inattentive reader is a fair description of some of his own poetic practices, and is the explanation of a man for whom metre exists in a casual relation to the discourse it is associated with, something bought ready-made at the store, but it dismisses irrevocably from mind the Poundian insistence on an exact correspondence of particular emotion and rhythm in a single-minded expression of sincerity via technique. Pound’s “absolute rhythm” suggests a formal restraint in poetry which will be creative of its own achievement; it is a restraint not derived from an autonomous art-world but from sources which provide the whole of art’s activities with a context.
This comes in the middle of the second chapter – at the end of which, Crozier drops the topic of ‘restraint’ altogether, or so the reader might think. The bulk of the thesis (chapters 4-7) gives an account of certain modes of organisation in poetry, and a fascinating history of how these were defined and theorised. It is at its most useful and interesting when chasing the old rabbit ‘what is the relation between poetry and music?’ I was surprised to find the discussion had been going on at such a high level since the 16th century, and Crozier actually gets to argue with some of his 16th-century sources, not just point them out as exploded examples.
The discussion of ‘speculative music,’ or the ‘music of the spheres,’ is particularly valuable. The idea that poetry and music are somehow linked, but that this link is ‘not directly analogical’ (see Crozier’s abstract above), has always seemed a hostage to fortune (do they both end up being analogical to some third term?). But ‘speculative music,’ an extension of Pythagorean doctrine popularised by Kepler in his Harmonices Mundi Libri V (1619), is another example of a phenomenon (the proportion of the movement of the planets) explained in terms of music while resisting the direct comparison: the ‘music’ was not supposed to be audible. Crozier finds Sidney gesturing towards this in his Defense of Poesie:
Beside that it [verse] hath in it self a kind (as a man may well call it) of secret musicke, since by the measure one may perceive some verses running with a high note fit for great matters, some with a light foote fit for no greater than amorous conceytes.
Crozier makes clear that Sidney in this passage is concerned with the practical matter of setting text to music, and the need for guidance here does seem to be the animating problem that produced the torrent of marvellous Renaissance criticism. Thomas Campion, whose Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) is discussed at length, is inevitably a key figure here. His guess at the nature of the analogy between poetry and music Crozier summarises as an insistence on proportion and balance, and goes on to show in a brilliant close reading how central these concepts were to Campion’s own poetic practice.
As the arts of poetry and music become less interconnected, criticism on the relationship between the two becomes correspondingly strained. Part of this is surely that, as the fashion for setting poems to music dissipated, there was simply less practical impetus for uncovering Sidney’s ‘secret musicke’. There was also a renewed striving towards objectivity, as Crozier notes in his discussion of Dr Johnson, and his assault through unkind examples against Pope’s idea that ‘the sound should be an echo to the sense’:
There is another side to Johnson’s assumption about the unlawful character of many felt instances of particular resemblance [between sound and sense], however, which sees the principle of association not as something inherently “subjective”, idiosyncratic and wayward, but as the essential mechanism by which complex emotional and intellectual responses are built up from simple, atomistic ideas [...] If, then, artistic imitation entails the imitation not of external nature directly, but of a complex mental or interior image, it becomes a matter almost of faith that the mechanics of association are the same for all normal and healthy men.
One might agree with Crozier that this was reductive, and still agree with Dr Johnson that where the mechanics of association were not the same, criticism of Dr Johnson’s sort couldn’t go much further.
The conclusion of the thesis, ‘Free Verse and the Natural Restraints of Language,’ sees Crozier return to the Poundian idea of ‘absolute rhythm,’ and suddenly the relevance of the music of the spheres becomes apparent; free verse is restrained, in a good way, because its language ‘mediates objectively’ with the world; its regularities are not those imposed on it by a shop-bought metre, but rather by the deep harmonic elegancies of the world itself. The critic’s task, presumably, is to determine how effectively this mediation has been accomplished. As Crozier notes rightly, ‘Trust is a major demand upon the reader here.’ (No less so than it was for Dr Johnson, although Johnson was less willing to concede his trust.)
Impressively, this is mostly argued for rather than asserted, and argued for closely and clearly. In a couple of pages, Crozier sketches a convincing vision of language as simply a ‘system of conveyance and storage’ for perceptive and cognitive inputs, a ‘translation of experience.’ Prosody, Crozier suggests, is a means of attentiveness to the features of language which cannot be mapped back onto reality (in other words, prosody is what is gained in translation). ‘One of the things which should be discernible in a fully coherent theory of modern poetry, I would contend, is the abolition of any distinction between prosody and poetic meaning which makes the use of relational terms such as correspondence necessary.’
On the final step in his argument, which connects free verse to our unmediated experience of the world itself via the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Alfred North Whitehead, I can’t comment because I don’t understand it. As a final flourish, he offers a close reading of a William Carlos Williams poem, demonstrating that it is more effective in free verse than it would be in metre, and that freedom in line-breaks is what allows Williams to create the parallelisms that are the main successes of the poem. The close reading is convincing, but the argument is so dependent on line-breaks (rather than Pound’s ‘absolute rhythm’ or any other sort of formal restraint) that the reader may wonder why line-breaks haven’t been mentioned before. (This is the penultimate page of the book.)
A duller account of how free verse achieves its effects might run something like this: metre presumes an oral norm; it creates expectations in a listener which can then be fulfilled or defaulted on in surprising ways – that is to say, one of the primary functions of metre is to allow a listener to identify the line-endings. Once poetry moves onto the page, this function of metre becomes redundant. The expectation which remains (one might call this the restraint, but I am not convinced this is a helpful framing) is that line-breaks will mark the end of sentences or natural syntactic pauses; it is this expectation which allows free verse to be surprising or delightful. This account, though, would not have made for an interesting thesis; and Crozier’s thesis is deeply interesting, for the range of material covered, the enthusiasm with which he fills in the details of his historical arguments, and the overall strangeness of his position. Shearsman and Ian Brinton are to be congratulated for republishing such a valuable and rebarbative work.