disdain
Michael Rutherglen
i.
As it is recounted in Girgio Vasari’s deeply but subtly literary Lives of the Artists, the story of the painter
Giotto di Bondone’s “O” stands as a foundational art-historical fable. When asked by a courtier sent by the
Pope for a sample of his work,
Giotto, who was a very courteous man, took a sheet of paper and a brush dipped in red, closed his arm to his side, so as to
make a sort of compass of it, and then with a twist of his hand drew such a perfect circle that it was a marvel to see. Then,
with a smile, he said to the courtier: “There’s your drawing.”
As if he were being ridiculed, the courtier replied:
“Is this the only drawing I’m to have?”
“It’s more than enough,” answered Giotto. “Send it along with the others and you’ll see whether it’s understood or not.
The Pope’s messenger, seeing that that was all he was going to get, went away very dissatisfied, convinced he had been
made a fool of. All the same when he sent the Pope the other drawings and the names of those who had done them, he
also sent the one by Giotto, explaining the way Giotto had drawn a circle without moving his arm and without the help
of a compass. This showed the Pope and a number of knowledgeable courtiers how much Giotto surpassed all the other
painters of that time. And when the story became generally known, it gave rise to the saying which is still used to describe
stupid people: “You are more simple than Giotto’s O.” This is a splendid witticism because of the circumstances that gave
rise to it but also because of the pun it contains, the Tuscan word tondo meaning both a perfect circle and slow-witted
simpleton.1
The point of this anecdote is not merely that it highlights Giotto’s genius or technical facility, but that it
reckons briefly with the conventions of artistic creation. The courtier in the story would have subscribed
to the model of life dictated by Baldassare Castligione in his Book of the Courtier, at the core of which is
the ideal of sprezzatura, a strain of grace that stems from the apparent avoidance of effort. One might call
it the affectation of affectlessness. The courtier should strive “in all things...to conceal all art and make
whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” 2 One should
eschew obvious effort: “to labor and, as we say, drag forth by the hair of the head, shows an extreme want
of grace, and causes everything, no matter how great it may be, to be held in little account.” 3 By way of
example, Castligione observes that “Often too in painting, a single line which is not labored, a single brush
stroke made with ease and in such a manner that the hand seems of itself to complete the line desired by
the painter, without being directed by care or skill of any kind, clearly reveals the excellence of craftsmanship.” 4 Giotto’s “O,” then, enacts perfectly this highest of courtly values. It affects affectlessness.
In English, sprezzatura is often rendered as “nonchalance,” a close but not equivalent term. The art
historian Paul Barolsky points out that the Italian word quite clearly descends from the verb “sprezzare,”
to disdain,5 an active process that exists only hazily in the English surrogate.6 It is with this meaning also in
1. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, vol 1. trans. George Bull (Penguin Books), pp. 64–65
2. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Anchor Books, 1959), p. 42
3. Ibid
4. Ibid, p. 47
5. Paul Barolsky, Michelangelo’s Nose (Penn State Press, 1990) p.136
6. Oxford English Dictionary: “(deliberate) lack of enthusiasm or interest; casual indifference, unconcern;” the parenthetical is telling.
2
mind that I wish to apply the concept of sprezzatura to poetry. Both as they exist on the page and in performance, poems necessarily aspire to this condition. The best of them condense and so camouflage the labor
that goes into them; they make rich and strange even the simplest of words, and in so doing play profoundly
upon our intellects and emotions while appearing simple and effortless. As W.B. Yeats once wrote,
A line may take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”
Consider the image of the poet-to-be in rapture to writing she does not understand. Such scenes are
perhaps trite, but what poet would deny the occurrence and importance of these introductions into the
mystery of language? She reads, and the gulf between the brief traversal of familiar words joined in an
unfamiliar way and the deep, emotive response taunts her: like the courtier before the master’s tondo,
over-simple and yet so redolent of complexity, she is humbled and likely cannot articulate why. And the
poem will not explain itself; in Wallace Stevens’s terms, it has too successfully resisted the intelligence,7
even disdained it. But disdain need not lead to disavowal. Writing about the feelings evinced by looking
at depictions of suffering, Susan Sontag notes that “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be
translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the
knowledge that has been communicated.” 8 In the case of first encounters with poetry, the work entailed
is reflexive (as opposed to the outward action implied by Sontag). The process of becoming a good reader
of poetry requires repeated efforts at clarifying the feelings aroused and the development of a vocabulary
by which to render intelligible the knowledge expressed in poems. The goal is not a facility for clinically
exhaustive reports of æsthetic or psychological reactions to language, but the development of a sensibility
that preserves some of the mystery of the initiating encounter. The gulf is not to be completely bridged, the
vertigo entirely explained away.
Nor can it be in the best poems. Condensations of language, experience, and knowledge render them
beautifully inscrutable at an essential level. They are rich because they refuse to mean in the ordinary, exhaustive sense, to signify discretely. That is not to say that sense cannot be made of them at other levels, or
that close reading is invalid—nothing could be more wrongheaded. The transcendental is always founded
in the details of the ordinary, and it behooves us as intellectually honest readers to study them carefully, as
well as the means by which they are transfigured in poems. That asymptotes go to infinity does not stop us
from writing equations for them.
7. Wallace Stevens, “Adagia” in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (The Library of American, 1997) p. 910
8. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador, 2003)
3
ii. sidney’s chicane
1 from Astrophil and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she (dear she), might take some pleasure of my pain;
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know;
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain;
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain;
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay;
Invention, nature’s child, fled step-dame study’s blows;
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
‘Fool,’ said my muse to me; ‘look in thy heart, and write.’ 9
A poem obscures the labor of its creation. The time it takes to write is always greater than the time it takes
to read. Nonetheless, the two seem to converge in the mind of reader, for whom only the finished product
is available, from which the erasures and false starts have fallen away. Apparent brevity is one of the central
and inescapable affectations of a good poem, for we can, and to some extent always do, imagine that the
time of a poem’s composition was exactly the same as that of its performance or reading. Deist timepieceimagery suggests itself here: the vast tinkerer’s toil, the meticulous setting of gears and springs with the aid
of a magnifying glass, all effaced from the smooth motion of the functional watch, the world.
The opening flourish of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella enacts the strain of
composition giving way to the easeful grace of the finished poem, the smooth-running alexandrines and
uniform rhymes of which contain and conceal its often paradoxical content. The sequence’s title, latin
for “Star-Lover and Star,” locates the many sonnets and songs that follow firmly in the Petrarchan tradition: the sublunary Astrophil will pine for the chaste, coldly distant Stella at length and to little effect (the
sequence’s single, stolen kiss occurs after no fewer than 73 sonnets). The first line bears out the tension
inherent in the genre’s conceit by opposing the love of the woman with that of the poetry and the attention
it may merit. “Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show:” the star-starved speaker is both truthfully in love and “fain”—well-pleased, glad 10—to show off his love in his verse. And well he should be the
latter, for the conventions of Petrarchan poetry preclude romantic satisfaction. The object of desire is not to
be obtained; rather, the poet enters into and maintains a lovelorn stasis for the sake of generating verse.11
9. Sir Philip Sidney, “Astrophil and Stella” in The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 1989), Sidney hereafter, p.153
10. OED
11. Richard B. Young, “English Petrarke: A Study of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.” in Three Studies in the Renaissance: Sidney, Jonson,
Milton, ed. Benjamin Christie Nangle (Yale University Press, 1958) p.10
4
Ultimately, this sort of poetry provides a vehicle for displays of virtuosity under the guise of perpetual
unworthiness and frustration. The grace and favor of the lady sought would, if obtained, shatter her icy
remove, the very source of the torment that compels the creative act. It is not she, but we, the readers, who
must must supply the approbation.
Of course, neither the implied readership nor Stella is an easy mistresses, and Sidney acknowledges
that either’s attention must be held. What follows is a record of the poetic toil carried out to this end, one
that carries us as readers through the search for the words and “inventions” (6) most “fit to paint the blackest face of woe” (5), that is, to æstheticize the private torment, to make good poetry of it. As such, the poem
becomes an alloy of two genres, the Petrarchan love poem and the ars poetica, and Sidney immediately
plucks a chord upon this compound harp: the construction “inventions fine” both refers to the idea of
poetic invention, in the sense of a technique or mechanism applied toward a certain end, and is itself an
instance of one such technique—in this case, syntactic inversion. “Her wits to entertain,” the line’s second
inversion, is less nakedly self-referential, and also differs in the grammatical units swapped (subject and
verb, as opposed to subject and adjective). More importantly, it applies the “invention” to the unobtainable
donna and in so doing evinces the generic mixing of the poem. In both cases, conspicuously “poetic” syntax also serves the form of the poem: the iambic rhythm in the former, the rhyme in the latter.
That he is “studying” them, and that they are directed toward “her wits,” indicates the intellectual tenor
of the poet-speaker’s endeavor at this point. Fit words and inventions, as it turns out, are located externally,
in the “leaves” (7) of other writers. Literally the pages of books, these “leaves” function also as the foliage of
figurative trees, foliage from which the speaker hopes, contra reason, to extract rain. This seems especially
delusory when we consider his “sunburnt brain” (8), which implies a climate unfavorable to the retention
of water in plants. “Oft turning others’ leaves,” repeatedly studying the writing of others, then, comes to
seem a labor of questionable efficacy. It is generative in a degenerate sense: words come “halting forth”
afterward, and seem “wanting.” And what do they lack? Oddly, it is “invention,” seemingly the very object
of the poet’s arid study. A crucial reversal takes place here. Invention, once epitomized by a transparently
poetic effect, the syntactic contortions of the sixth line, becomes “nature’s child” (9) a direct descendant of
everything organic, and thus organic itself. Extending the familial trope, Sidney casts study as a pugilistic
step-mother, chasing and beating “invention” from the page. The poet, however, has not relinquished
it: “others feet”—both others’ meters and the paths taken by others to the absconded “invention”—“still
seemed but strangers in my way” (11, emphasis mine). To further complicate matters, the labor of study
gives way to the potential labor of birth, with the male speaker “great with child to speak, and helpless in
[his] throes” (12). In contrast to this miracle birth, conjuring water from dry leaves seems, so to speak, like
child’s play. Finally, after a last and particularly feeble attempt to locate the problem externally—he bites
his “truant pen”(13) as if to punish it for neglecting its duty, as if it were animate, culpable—the poet’s
Heliconian helper speaks: “ ‘Fool,’ said my muse to me; ‘look in thy heart, and write.’ ”(14). The abruptness
of this interjection indicates that the muse, like the commonplace she passes off as a remedy, was always
present. Sidney does not note her entrance but simply acknowledges her presence.
Seemingly trite in substance, the muse’s advice is deeply complicated in context. The poem it ends
is nothing less than a record of its own composition, proceeding from the initiating, Petrarchan impulse
through the frustrations of examining others’ poems, which do not necessarily lead to inspiration, perhaps even away from it, to the final, beguiling, even saccharine truism. No deus ex machina who arrives to
complete the poetic endeavor by delivering the “fine words” sought, the muse instead offers the ultimate
in hazy artistic methodology: look in your heart, get inspired, just write. Following the natal metaphor of
5
the 12th line, she appears like a dispassionate midwife, unsympathetic to the anguish of the foolish, male
mother. Yet technically her interjection does complete the sonnet, however inconclusive it may be. Indeed,
in an important sense, in its very inconclusiveness lies its force, for it allows Sidney to disavow the whole
body of discrete poetic techniques, the reading and research and drafting, and to posit in their place the
anti-technical: inward, emotive investigation. By way of syllogistic reasoning, it forces us to see the poem
as a product of the last line: if poetry is a matter of looking in one’s heart and writing, and this is a poem,
then it must have been created along just these lines, which is to say effortlessly. Sidney looked in his heart,
and out came a sonnet about his inability to produce a sonnet.
In this sense, the poem is pure sprezzatura. It places before us a number of examples of fruitless, graceless labor, only to sweep them completely away with its final gesture. In effortless alexandrines and perhaps
overly static rhymes—there are only four—it argues that quantifiable, intellectual methodologies must give
way to an inscrutable, emotive drive; that if poetry is birth, it must be immaculate. Or at least it must seem
so: Sidney was himself a deeply learned scholar, one whose own “Defence of Poesy” makes constant reference to the primacy of classical poets and their themes.12 He certainly labored to attain the knowledge and
facility with language he displays throughout Astrophil and Stella, but also seems to have understood the
heaviness of this knowledge as impeditive of grace. And to cast it aside, to disdain it, is to emphasize the
ineffable component of composition, to maintain the magic. To accept guidance from this poem is to accept
the fraught and childish notion of art as purely subjective and antithetical to real work—the logical extension of which would be Allen Ginsberg’s deeply problematic “First thought, best thought”—which real
work is, of course, entirely evident throughout the poem: in its form, its self-referentiality, its careful commingling of paradoxical elements, its rhetorical reversals, it can be nothing but the product of a fine and
sly inventor, an intellect bent on an artifice sheer almost to the point of invisibility. “Look in thy heart and
write:” so does the poem hem its perfectly crooked stitching and unstitching in its final moment’s thought.
iii. seams and limits
“If My Head Hurt A Hair’s Foot” by Dylan Thomas
‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot
Pack back the downed bone. If the unpricked ball of my breath
Bump on a spout let the bubbles jump out.
Sooner drop with the worm of the ropes round my throat
Than bully ill love in the clouted scene.
‘All game phrases fit your ring of a cockfight:
I’ll comb the snared woods with a glove on a lamp,
Peck, sprint, dance on fountains and duck time
Before I rush in a crouch the ghost with a hammer, air,
Strike light, and bloody a loud room.
12. Sidney, p. 213 &c.
6
‘If my bunched, monkey coming is cruel
Rage me back to the making house. My hand unravel
When you sew the deep door. The bed is a cross place.
Bend, if my journey ache, direction like an arc or make
A limp and riderless shape to leap nine thinning months.’
‘No. Not for Christ’s dazzling bed
Or a nacreous sleep among soft particles and charms
My dear would I change my tears or your iron head.
Thrust, my daughter or son, to escape, there is none, none, none,
Nor when all ponderous heaven’s host of waters breaks.
‘Now to awake husked of gestures and my joy like a cave
To the anguish and carrion, to the infant forever unfree,
O my lost love bounced from a good home;
The grain that hurries this way from the rim of the grave
Has a voice and a house, and there and here you must couch and cry.
‘Rest beyond choice in the dust-appointed grain,
At the breast stored with seas. No return
Through the waves of the fat streets nor the skeleton’s thin ways.
The grave and my calm body are shut to your coming as stone,
And the endless beginning of prodigies suffers open.’13
In a letter to his brothers, John Keats declared his famous principle of “negative capability,” which he defined as the poet’s “capability of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after facts.” 14 I would like to suggest that, irritable as it may be, facts ought to be reached after up to a point,
and that, misunderstood, Keats’ dictum can lead to vagary and airy abstraction, the vaporous poem without
any purchase on the spine, psyche, intellect, or emotions. Naked disdain for the reader generates opacity
without intrigue. Like pandering, the error opposite it on the spectrum of poetic approaches, extreme disjunction is always conspicuous, a too-visible affect. It tends towards an archetypal imitative fallacy by placing manifestly inscrutable language alongside the inscrutable, drawing a line parallel to the axis and then
gesturing at the gap. And just as both the line drawn and the axis itself are potentially infinitely long, so do
the possible crossings from one to the other proliferate: “the most perfect nothingness affords / the widest
play.” 15 The aging Yeats lay down in the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” 16 not to wallow in scraps for
their own sake but to gather and patch them together. At his most intense, the never-old Dylan Thomas
13. Dylan Thomas, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, ed. Daniel Jones (New Directions, 1952), Thomas hereafter, p. 169
14. John Keats, Letters of John Keats, ed. Frederick Page (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 53
15. A.R. Ammons, “Summer Session” in Collected Poems: 1951-1971 (W.W. Norton, 1972), p. 249
16. W.B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (Scribner,
1983), p. 356
7
engages in a wilder poetic practice, one that involves more jagged materials. He takes Yeats’ injunction
seriously and to new extremes, assembling disparate images and figures into what the speaker of “If My
Head Hurt a Hair’s Foot” would call a “clouted scene.” 17 Therein, the problem of limits subsumes those of
grace and affect, and the central question becomes whether the poem breaks its bounds—of sense, of form,
of language—to disappear into the outer dark of the disjunctive, or only verges upon them, partaking of
linguistic and conceptual extremity while maintaining its center.
“If my Head Hurt a Hair’s Foot” opens with four spondees in succession, immediately announcing its
sonic frontiersmanship: “If my héad húrt a háir’s fóot / páck báck the dówned bóne” (1–2). Eight out of 12
syllables in the poem’s first sentence are stressed. A clutch of simple, Germanic words held together by an
“If” and an elided “then,” the sentence is neither lexically nor structurally complex. Sonically, however, its
freight of stresses makes up only the topmost layer of its density. Alliteration (head-hurt-hair, back-bone),
consonance (head-downed, hurt-foot, pack-back), and a mesh of vowel sounds tap into and exhaust the
music of its monosyllables. Then, having brimmed this first rift with ore, Thomas switches to a more diffuse rhythm: “If the únpricked báll of my bréath / Búmp on a spóut let the búbbles jump óut” (2-3). The
modulation here between Old-English and Latinate meters, between hard-edged spondees and a roomier,
roughly anapestic base continues throughout the poem: “my lóst lóve bóunced from a góod hóme” (23) set
against “the gráin that húrries this wáy from the rím of the gráve” (24); “when you séw the déep dóor. The
béd is a cróss pláce” (13) combining both in one line, and so on. A combination of consistently slanted, often falling end-rhymes and strong line-beginnings—“crúel” in line 11 leading to “Ráge” and rhymed with
the feminine “unrável” in line 12—further deepens this counterpoint. The two-fold application of these
opposed systems gives the poem not only musical grandeur but also formal integrity. It is intricately patterned, well-wrought throughout its ecstasies.
Thomas wrote in a letter of his writing process as follows: “I make one image—though ‘make’ is not the
word: I let, perhaps, an image be ‘made’ emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical
forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out
of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits,
conflict” 18 Conflict within formal limits: returning to the beginning, it is precisely this we find in the convergence of the poem’s imagistic wildness and the intensity of its form. The poem is a mother’s apostrophe
to her unborn child, the “bunched monkey coming” (11) after gestation’s “nine thinning months” (15). The
paired conditionals of the opening stanza commence the grappling. The packing back implored in the first
seems immediately contrastive of the letting out in the second. Depending on the circumstances, the mother holds that her future labor should be either carried out or obstructed. Yet this is not entirely the case: “If
my head hurt a hair’s foot / Pack back the downed bone” already conflicts within itself. “My head” refers
to both the mother’s and her child’s, the “hair’s foot” to child’s skull (foot in the sense of a base or root),
and the mother’s vagina, and also brings into play the question of the fetus’ alignment within the birth canal. Accordingly, the mother’s imperative “pack back the downed bone” can be read as either a grotesque
retraction, the packing of the flawed baby back into the womb, or as an admonition to restore or reset the
broken bone, a conventional, ameliorative act. But whose bone? Again, the conflation of bodies seems to
17. Not solely the province of Thomas: G.M. Hopkins, Hart Crane, and, recently, Lucie Brock-Broido come to mind
18. Dylan Thomas, ed. Henry Treece, 1936; Jahan Ramazani, “Dylan Thomas” in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 2: Contemporary Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2003) p.101
8
fork the possible readings, with either the mother or the child either hurt or healed. The sentence that follows maintains the convention of mother-and-child-as-one along with its attendant spread of meanings.
The “ball of breath” that the speaker claims as her own is possibly many things: the child literally balled-up
inside her, suspended in the “unpricked” amniotic sac, the child constituted, “made of” her breath, her
effort, her oxygen, and still sustained by it; or, a figuratively shaped unit of air in her lungs, a breath “unpricked,” yet to be exhaled. Whichever it is, if it “bump,” happen accidentally upon or more violently hit
against “a spout,” a conduit permitting release from the inside of a container though not a viable external
entrance, or a stream of forcefully ejected liquid, it should be let out. Or, rather, the smaller “bubbles” into
which it has been broken, presumably by way of pricking, should be given free reign to do as they will.
Or, rather, we should say not or, but and. We should not choose at each point one possibility to the
exclusion of another, but instead consider the conflict that emerges when we consider them all at once.
The opposition here between the abortive and the restorative typifies an argument made throughout the
poem: the mother will bring her babe into the world, though to do so is to make it “unfree” by exposing
it to death. She will “bounce” her “lost love” from its “good home” (23) in the womb, thus propelling it
toward “the anguish and carrion” (22). After birth, her “calm body” will be “shut to [its] coming as stone”
(29): no return is possible. The image of “The grain that hurries this way from the rim of the grave” (24),
one of growth and nourishment out of lifelessness, goes far in encapsulating the poem’s tautness, as does
“there and here you must couch and cry” (25): here in the womb, there in the tomb; now in the nurturing
amniotic fluid, then in the cold, cold ground. Unlike Sidney, whose pain is but the prelude to the effortless
birth of a seemingly effortless poem, Thomas’ mother rages like Christ on the “cross place” (13) of the bed,
envisioning both her pain and that which her rough, mortal child is sure to experience. The scene partakes
of all facets of the term “clouted,” which include mending (Yeatsian patching, healing), studding with iron
(“your iron head”), covering with cloth (swaddling), and warm, thickened milk (colostrum).19
Speaking specifically of “If My Head Hurt a Hair’s foot,” Thomas claimed that “It is not a narrative or an
argument but a series of conflicting images that move through pity and violence to an unreconciled acceptance of suffering, both the mother’s and the child’s. This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe
it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering, but being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.” In
that same explanation, he classified it as belonging to a group of his poems characterized by “their vehement, beat-pounding, black and green rhythms like those of a young policeman exploding.” 20 Not obscurer than, more compressed, vehement, beat-pounding: Thomas engages in poetic brinksmanship, but
with a vehemence for rhythmical and imagistic compression that contains his conflicts, that keeps the poem
from devolving into a riot. But still we feel the pull toward chaos, and it is in this balancing act that the poem
attains its grace. Its conceptual complexities are, after all, underwritten by predominately simple diction.
“Nacreous,” “ponderous,” and “prodigies” are easily the most rarefied words among the poem’s trisyllables, of which there are only 12. Hard monosyllables, of the kind we see in the opening, preponderate; in
combination, they come to ramify in ways that bely their straightforwardness. “Joy like a cave,” “illl love in
the clouted scene,” “the breast stored with seas,” “deep door,” “snared woods,” “fat streets,” “thin ways,”
“hair’s foot:” each is a compass-twirl of the wrist, each an instance of the ordinary made suddenly and
miraculously alien, conceptually and sonically. Because they are circumscribed, hemmed in by Thomas’
19. OED
20. An Evening with Dylan Thomas, Cademon TC 1157:2B, 33 rpm
9
“imposed, formal limits,” these constructions’ meanings do not simply proliferate, they permute, and to
say the poem drags us by our hair’s feet is to ignore the power of these permutations. Though constrained,
they lead us into the rich doubts and uncertainties of which Keats wrote.
iv. bridle, ladder, lever, timber
If Sidney’s and Thomas’ poetic progeny diverge notably in texture, they converge in their respect for form, by
virtue of which the quality of sprezzatura obtains to both. Indeed, that Castiglione applies it to any number of
different activities—painting, fencing, oratory, verse—links sprezzatura inextricably with the idea of form.
Form is absolutely necessary. It is impossible to be graceful without bounds. Sidney has the sonnet
and the alexandrine, Thomas his admixture of spondees and anapests, alliteration and rhyme. Notions of
“organic form,” such as espoused in Olson’s “Projective Verse,” have little bearing here, for, as we see in
Sidney, even the most rigidly constructed poems can take on a preternatural smoothness, the effort of their
creation being elided from their finished state. To believe in form as a purely intuitional matter and disavow
work and artifice is to misunderstand the muse’s guidance. It would certainly have seemed effortless and
“organic” had Giotto thoughtlessly scribbled a stick figure and handed it to the emissary, but not in the
praiseworthy sense. As Thomas says, we must apply our critical and intellectual powers to the raw material of inspiration, for what we see in our hearts is rarely of sufficient clarity. As John Hollander says, “In
art, freedom paradoxically manifests itself in the imagination’s unbridled propensity to design new bridles
for itself. Neither Pegasus nor the belated romantic Hippogryph which replaced him could have taken off
without the bidding of the bit.” 21 Who would, upon seeing a horse in flight, be transfixed by the gear that
controls it rather than the fact of its flying? Bit and bridle can, however, remind us of the mechanics that
support the miracle. At a basic level, form alerts us of the presence of an intelligence, and the stronger our
feeling that a poem has been shaped, the greater our tolerance will be for lacunæ in the straightforward
sense of it. Absent such shape, poems fall prey to imposed readings, which more often than not involve
standards reified out of theoretical discourse and not the words on the page. Such readings are like wax
wings glued to any horse’s torso: and remain solid only because they never approach the sun.
There is no one model for the construction of viable wings, but there are many creatures already in
flight. To understand form, one must know its history. Within any given instance of sprezztura a large body
of knowledge lies smoothly elided in a holistic whole. In a libel suit against the critic John Ruskin, the artist
James Whistler testified that, contra Ruskin’s allegations that the price of his work was out of all proportion
with the pace of its creation, he charged not for the period of time it took for him to complete a painting, but
for the knowledge that allowed him to do so within that period: he asked “200 guineas” not “for two days
work,” but “for the knowledge of a lifetime.” 22 So too is Giotto’s “O” a distillate. Even as he claims otherwise, Sidney brings to bear considerable knowledge derived from “others’ leaves,” and Thomas’ criticalintellectual abilities were likely founded on many of the same texts. A knowledge of history not only lends
a poem greater depth but also authority: “If you write in a free verse line, you better know why you do so.
Merely because its in vogue is not enough. Your line has to be as good as the traditional one, and you’d better have a reason for using it,” 23 writes Virginia’s own Charles Wright, adding “you cannot not know his-
21. John Hollander, Melodious Guile (Yale, 1988), p. 90
22. E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, pocket edition (Phaidon, 2006), p. 408
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tory.” 24 Feeling that this “why” has been sufficiently addressed is yoked to a perception of formal integrity
and carries with it the same potential for wilder flights of fancy. Only after hard labor can Sidney level his
decree, for you cannot dispatch with what you never possessed. At the end of his austerely logical Tractatus
Logico-Philisophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein claims that all the book’s propositions are useful only if one
gets beyond them. They constitute, in his terms, a ladder to be thrown away after it has been climbed.25 The
operative word in this case is after.
After the second World War, the French theologian and philosopher Simone Weil described contradiction as “a lever of transcendence.” 26 A possible, Zen-inflected definition of sprezzatura as “the affect of no
affect” makes manifest the tautness of the term, which, if it is in fact contradictory, is not, along the lines
of Weil’s belief, an aporia. Weil also held that pure attention was a form of prayer, an activity with similar
claims on the transcendental, and one with much poetic resonance. Since contradictions are easy enough
to concoct (contradictions are impossible to concoct), this second criterion of deep focus must be retained.
For it is only through it that genuinely meaningful contradictions—otherwise known as paradoxes— are
discovered, through attention to form, attention to history, attention to the details of the world. Good poems buttress Weil’s claim against Immanuel Kant’s dictum that “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no
straight thing was ever made” 27 because they are not straight lines but curves, asymptotes, tondi that shed
the unglamorous toil and flawed wood of their geneses. That we know their origins does not preclude us
from enticement at the hands of their disdaining otherness. Being more compressed, they are not lives, but
bridles, ladders, strange levers with which we bend our slow wits into perfect circles.
23. Charles Wright, “Improvisations on Form and Measure,” in Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977—1988,(University of Michigan
Press, 1988), p. 6
24. Ibid.
25. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (Routledge, 2001), p. 89; the central endeavor of the book is to describe the limits of language, to delimit what can be said, which, as it turns out, is very little: only scientific propositions, of which there are few in the book, are truly sensible according to the Tractatus.
26. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (Routeledge, 2006 ) p. 98
27. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1900—), vol. 8, p. 23,
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