Furniss, Tom; Bath, Michael
Anglo-American Criticism
Furniss, Tom; Bath, Michael, (1996) "Anglo-American Criticism" from Furniss, Tom; Bath, Michael, Reading poetry: an introduction
pp.55-59, London: Prentice Hall ©
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Significant Form
55
The way this suspended syntax mimes the action at this point may also be
reinforced by the line division. Although there is no punctuation after 'Fiend', and
the syntax of line 117 runs on into line 118, the line divisions may induce readers to
pause momentarily before reading on to find out what the 'Fiend' does. It would be
worth rereading these lines and asking yourself whether (particularly if you read the
lines aloud) you are inclined to mark the end of line 117 by pausing, however
momentarily, after the word' Fiend '.It might be possible, then, to claim that a reader's
uncertainty concerning any purely metrical pause after 'Fiend' reinforces the way the
suspended syntax acts out the meaning of these lines - after all, the whole passage
is describing Satan's hesitation. Both syntax and lineation, then, can be said to be
miming or acting out that hesitation, so that the poetry would be doing what it is
saying. Yet there is a further complication in these lines, since the delayed verb 'Stood',
when it does eventually arrive, does not resolve the syntactical suspense at all clearly.
Readers might well expect 'Into this wild abyss ... the Fiend jumped' or 'plunged'.
Instead, what we get is 'Into this wild abyss / [he]/ Stood'. That is, to say the least,
unidiomatic - you don't 'stand into' anything in English. It is only with the second
verb, 'look'd', that we (at last!) get a verb that can complete the grammar at all
satisfactorily.
Some readers might be inclined, once they recognize the strange syntax in these
lines, to criticize Milton's 'faulty' grammar. Indeed, one of Milton's earliest editors
'corrected' the grammar at many points in the poem, including this one.' But if the
syntax and grammar of this passage were 'normalized' the effect we have just described,
in which the syntax acts out what is being narrated and causes us to participate
imaginatively in that action, would be lost. These lines exhibit that close relationship
between form and meaning which readers have often felt to be one of the desirable,
if not definitive, characteristics of poetic language. By manipulating the form of the
sentence and taking advantage of the effects made available by metrical form, Milton
can be said to be making the form significant. In what follows we will be looking at
various ways in which poetry uses 'significant form'.
Anglo-American
New Criticism
The assumption that form and meaning should be closely related in poetry was most
strongly affirmed by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (1817). Coleridge argued
that the form of a poem was something that developed from within the poem itself,
like the organic growth of a plant. This Romantic theory of organic form was taken
up and developed by the New Critics in the twentieth century as an all-embracing
description of poetic form which included all the techniques of versification,
word-choice, figurative devices, and so on. In this theoretical practice, which may
well have influenced the way you have been taught to respond to poetry, the various
formal features of the language of poetry are said to embody, rather than merely
1
Milton's Paradise Lost: A new edition, ed. Richard Bentley, London: 1732.
56 Formal Introduction
reflect, a poem's meaning. Readers are taught the difficult, but rewarding, techniques
of showing how a poem's entire formal system - its metre, line breaks, rhyme,
assonance, consonance, alliteration - works together in complex ways to make the
poem's message far more profoundly realized than it could have been in any non-poetic
discourse.
The New Critical assumptions about the relationship of form and content are
articulated most clearly in Cleanth Brooks's essay about 'The Heresy of Paraphrase'
in his book The Well Wrought Urn (1947). In this essay he celebrates 'the resistance
which any good poem sets up against all attempts to paraphrase it' (p. 196). The idea
that it is possible adequately to paraphrase a poem induces us to 'split the poem
between its "form" and its "content" (p. 201). He rejects this 'dualism', quoting with
approval W.M. Urban's Language and Reality: 'form and content, or concept and
medium, are inseparable' (p. 199).This is because, for Brooks, 'The relation between
all the elements [in a poem] must surely be an organic one - there can be no question
about that' (p. 200). The formal features of a poem do not merely echo or 'contain'
the sense, but play an active part in shaping it:
The truth is that the apparent irrelevances which metrical pattern and
metaphor introduce ... become relevant when we realize that they function
in a good poem to modify, qualify, and develop the total attitude. (p. 209)
In analyzing poetry, then, we need to pay attention not only to what a poem says
but also to how it says it (in fact, though we can make such distinctions intellectually,
we cannot separate one from another in an actual poem). Such New Critical
assumptions underlie the way students of literature are often asked not merely to
analyze a poem's metre or identify its use of rhyme or alliteration, but to describe
how they 'modify, qualify, and develop' the poem's meaning - which is essentially
what we have done with the passage from Paradise Lost above.
Another classic work of New Criticism is W.K. Wimsatt's The Verba/leon (1954).
Wimsatt explains the title in a prefatory note: 'The term icon is used today by semiotic
writers to refer to a verbal sign which somehow shares the properties of, or resembles,
the objects which it denotes' (p. x). Wimsatt's notion of the icon is influenced by the
philosopher C.S. Peirce's distinction between three different kinds of sign: the arbitrary
sign, the index, and the icon. In arbitrary signs (such as words) there is no natural
or inevitable relationship between form and meaning. In an index, the relationship
between sign and meaning is causal, as when one says that dark clouds are a 'sign'
of rain. An icon, however, is the kind of sign that bears some inherent resemblance
to the thing it signifies: a portrait resembles the person it depicts; a map actually
resembles the countries it represents. Poetry, of course, like all verbal discourse, uses
words - arbitrary signs which have no causal relationship with or resemblance to
that which they signify or refer to. Wimsatt's purpose in The Verba/leon, however,
is to argue that poetry is unlike other forms of discourse in that it tries to make its
language iconic. His claim is that poetry uses language in a range of ways which
'somehow' seem to make it resemble the thing which is being described or presented.
At a general level, Wimsatt, like other New Critics, argues that a good poem's' content'
ought to deal with the full complexity and richness of human life, and that its form
Significant Form
57
(the interplay of all its technical devices) ought to display a corresponding richness
and complexity. As Wimsatt puts it: 'Complexity of form is sophistication of content.
The unity and maturity of good poems are two sides of the same thing' (p. 82).
Both Brooks and Wimsatt stress that they are talking about the relationship
between form and content in good poems, and this indicates that this principle of the
inseparability of form and content is being proposed as a criterion of evaluation.
That is certainly the way this principle had already been understood by many
twentieth-century critics, particularly those who were preoccupied with the evaluation
and revaluation of particular texts and authors. In 1936, for instance, F.R. Leavis
condemned Milton's style on the grounds that it was uniformly heightened and
inflated in ways which made it impossible for precise, local meanings to be fully
realized in the verse: 'To say that Milton's verse is magniloquent is to say that it is
not doing as much as its impressive pomp and volume seem to be asserting.'? Leavis
argues:
subtlety of movement in English verse depends on the play of the natural
sensemovementand intonation against the versestructure.... No such play
is possible in a medium in which the life of idiom, the pressure of speech,
is as completelyabsent as it is in Milton's Grand Style.(p. 51).
Leavis contrasts Milton's language with John Donne's in this respect; in Donne's
poetry, he claims, 'The words seem to do what they say' (a formula which echoes
Jonathan Richardson's comment on the lines from Paradise Lost which we quoted
above). Although Leavis's essay anticipates American New Criticism by some years,
the idea that 'good' poems somehow close the gap between doing and saying is
wholly compatible with the New Critics' idea that form and content should be
inseparable. In the criticism influenced by these assumptions, the belief that a good
poem is one that somehow 'does' what it 'says' became axiomatic.
Leavis's objections to Milton's poetry were largely answered by Christopher Ricks
(Milton's Grand Style, 1963), who shows how the language of Paradise Lost can be
analyzed in ways that reveal precisely that play of 'natural sense movement and
intonation against the verse structure' which Leavis denies. In passage after passage
(including the passage we have already analyzed), this leads Ricks to suggest that the
words do indeed seem to 'do what they say'. In many instances it is a matter of the
relationship between metre and syntax, in which the dynamics of the sentence structure,
working across the line endings and setting up their own rhythms and grammatical
suspensions, act out what is being described.
But though Ricks's defence of Milton's style questions the accuracy of Leavis's
analysis, it clearly shares the evaluative criteria on which it was based. We would
like to examine the possibilities opened up by such criteria by looking at another
passage from Paradise Lost which responds to the same process of 'reading in slow
motion' that we recommended at the beginning of this book. The following lines
describe the creation of the world in such a way that the formal properties of the
language give us an extremely vivid impression of the way the Creator imposes order
1
'Milton's Verse', in Leavis (1964) Revaluation, p. 45; the article first appeared in 1933 in the journal Scrutiny.
58 Formal Introduction
on chaos - the same chaos which we have seen Satan teetering on the brink of in
the passage we discussed earlier. The point of view this time is that of the angels
standing on the boundary of heaven, a viewpoint which the descriptive language
encourages the reader to share.
On heav'nly ground they stood, and from the shore
They view'd the vast immeasurable abyss
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turn'd by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains to assault
Heav'ns highth, and with the centre mix the pole.
Silence, ye troubl'd waves, and thou deep, peace,
Said then th 'Omnific Word, your discord end.
(VII,210-18)
Even before analyzing the passage, it might be felt that this is a dynamic and energetic
piece of description in which the language is somehow turbulent in describing
turbulence, then calm and orderly when referring to God's imposition of order. Only
careful analysis, however, will show what the metre and rhythm contribute to this
effect. Paradise Lost is written in blank verse - unrhymed iambic pentameters - but
simply to identify the metre does not take us very far towards showing how the sound
of these lines appears to realize their meaning by making the turbulence of chaos
more fully present to the description. We could get closer to such a demonstration
by paying attention to those places where it seems difficult to fix the regular duple
rising stress on the syllables which an iambic pentameter metre normally requires.
For instance, the word 'immeasurable', in line 211, seems itself to be immeasurable
(remember that metre literally means 'measure'). How many syllables does it have?
Where do the two beats required by the metre actually fall? The fourth of these lines
(213) seems to require a stress on the first word, 'Up', even though the underlying
metrical pattern would lead us to expect it to be unstressed. This stress on the
preposition could be said to dramatize the very turbulence it describes. It is not just
the literal meaning of the word that achieves this effect but its position in the line,
separated from the verb that governs it: the normal word order would be 'Turned
up from the bottom', so that we could say that the disturbed syntax reflects the
disturbance that is being described. This, together with the disturbance of the expected
metre, would help us to account for the impression that the very turbulence of chaos
is reproduced in the verse movement.
The extraordinary line in which God ('th'Omnific Word') imposes order on this
chaos responds to a similar analysis. Our own analysis of the way the stresses fall in
line 1l7is as follows:
/-
/-
/
/
/
/
Silence, ye troubl'd waves, and thou deep, peace,
b
b
b
b
b
This rhythm disturbs the regular iambic pattern of the blank verse at the beginning
and the end of the line. 'Silence' requires a stress on the first syllable and shifts the
Significant Form
59
beat to the very beginning of the line. At the end of the line the two words 'deep,
peace' seem to require equal weight or stress (the assonance of their identical vowel
sound reinforces their need for equal emphasis). These metrical irregularities produce
effects which appear to emphasize and act out the meaning. The effect of beginning
the line with an unexpected stress seems to add to the imperative force of God's
command of'Silence'. At the end of the line the double stress ('deep, peace') powerfully
overrides the metre, while the assonance suggests through its very sound the calmness
and order it is prescribing. Both 'Silence' and 'peace' are imperatives in this sentence,
and could be seen as synonyms, yet their different relation to the metrical form of
the line gives them a very different rhetorical force, so that we seem to hear the act
of creation in the very sound of the line. It is as though the divine fiat is immediately
carried out - as though God has only to order something and it immediately comes
to pass.
A model for such a rhetorical effect could be found in the Bible's description of
creation in Genesis 1: 3: 'And God said, Let there be light; and there was light'. This
may be why Milton chooses to call God 'th 'Omnific Word' ('Omnific' means 'maker
of everything'). The key text for seeing God as 'Word' or Loqos is John 1: 1, 'In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God'.
This text provided the traditional justification for identifying God as 'Word' when
thinking of his powers as Creator, partly because these opening words are the same
three words ('In the beginning') that open the Book of Genesis itself which, as its
name implies, is about the creation of the world. Milton quotes the same three words
very near the beginning (I, 9) of his own poem to signal his closeness to his biblical
source. Although this research into the biblical subtext to Milton's text seems to have
shifted from 'formal' analysis to analysis of allusions, influences and intertextuality
- issues we shall examine in greater detail in Chapter 13 - it may suggest how careful
Milton has been in giving substance to his account in his own verse of the creative
power of the voice of God. In effect, both in the Bible and in Milton God can be
thought of as the most powerful and effective poet of all, since the universe really
does do what he says. Yet it is Milton's own poetry which allows us to experience
God's effective creative voice by re-creating its effects through the poem's own
language. It is the interplay of form and content in Milton's own verse that allows
us to 'hear' God's commands taking effect. Thus Milton as poet can be seen as
imitating God's creativity. That may be because Milton shared something of Sir
Philip Sidney's belief that the creativity of the poet ('maker') was the closest we could
get on earth to the creativity of the Creator ('the Heavenly Maker of that maker'),"
The Double Paffern
Our analysis of passages from Paradise Lost has paid particular attention to the
interaction between syntax and verse-line, and the way this forms a double pattern
•
Sidney (1962) An Apology for Poetry, p. 8.