New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  To think about the antagonism between Williams and Eliot and their conflicting aesthetics may be useful not only in studying their work but in helping a person clarify his or her own aesthetic values—siding with one or the other or arriving at some personal synthesis. But one’s understanding and evaluation will be skewed if their argument is divorced from a biographical and sociological context.

  Some Notes on Organic Form

  (1965)

  FOR ME, BACK OF the idea of organic form is the concept that there is a form in all thing (and in our experience) which the poet can discover and reveal. There are no doubt temperamental differences between poets who use prescribed forms and those who look for new ones—people who need a tight schedule to get anything done, and people who have to have a free hand—but the difference in their conception of “content” or “reality” is functionally more important. On the one hand is the idea that content, reality, experience, is essentially fluid and must be given form; on the other, this sense of seeking out inherent, though not immediately apparent, form. Gerard Manley Hopkins invented the word “inscape” to denote intrinsic form, the pattern of essential characteristics both in single objects and (what is more interesting) in objects in a state of relation to each other, and the word “instress” to denote the experiencing of the perception of inscape, the apperception of inscape. In thinking of the process of poetry as I know it, I extend the use of these words, which he seems to have used mainly in reference to sensory phenomena, to include intellectual and emotional experience as well; I would speak of the inscape of an experience (which might be composed of any and all of these elements, including the sensory) or of the inscape of a sequence or constellation of experiences.

  A partial definition, then, of organic poetry might be that it is a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man’s creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories. Such poetry is exploratory.

  How does one go about such a poetry? I think it’s like this: first there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech. Suppose there’s the sight of the sky through a dusty window, birds and clouds and bits of paper flying through the sky, the sound of music from his radio, feelings of anger and love and amusement roused by a letter just received, the memory of some long-past thought or event associated with what’s seen or heard or felt, and an idea, a concept, he has been pondering, each qualifying the other; together with what he knows about history; and what he has been dreaming—whether or not he remembers it—working in him. This is only a rough outline of a possible moment in a life. But the condition of being a poet is that periodically such a cross section, or constellation, of experiences (in which one or another element may predominate) demands, or wakes in him this demand: the poem. The beginning of the fulfillment of this demand is to contemplate, to meditate; words which connote a state in which the heat of feeling warms the intellect. To contemplate comes from templum, temple, a place, a space for observation, marked out by the augur. It means, not simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. And to meditate is “to keep the mind in a state of contemplation”; its synonym is “to muse,” and to muse comes from a word meaning “to stand with open mouth”—not so comical if we think of “inspiration”—to breathe in.

  So—as the poet stands open-mouthed in the temple of life, contemplating his experience, there come to him the first words of the poem: the words which are to be his way in to the poem, if there is to be a poem. The pressure of demand and the meditation on its elements culminate in a moment of vision, of crystallization, in which some inkling of the correspondence between those elements occurs; and it occurs as words. If he forces a beginning before this point, it won’t work. These words sometimes remain the first, sometimes in the completed poem their eventual place may be elsewhere, or they may turn out to have been only forerunners, which fulfilled their function in bringing him to the words which are the actual beginning of the poem. It is faithful attention to the experience from the first moment of crystallization that allows those first or those forerunning words to rise to the surface: and with that same fidelity of attention the poet, from that moment of being let in to the possibility of the poem, must follow through, letting the experience lead him through the world of the poem, its unique inscape revealing itself as he goes.

  During the writing of a poem the various elements of the poet’s being are in communion with each other, and heightened. Ear and eye, intellect and passion, interrelate more subtly than at other times; and the “checking for accuracy,” for precision of language, that must take place throughout the writing is not a matter of one element supervising the others but of intuitive interaction between all the elements involved.

  In the same way, content and form are in a state of dynamic interaction; the understanding of whether an experience is a linear sequence or a constellation raying out from and into a central focus or axis, for instance, is discoverable only in the work, not before it.

  Rhyme, chime, echo, reiteration: they not only serve to knit the elements of an experience but often are the very means, the sole means, by which the density of texture and the returning or circling of perception can be transmuted into language, apperceived. A may lead to E directly through B, C, and D: but if then there is the sharp remembrance or revisioning of A, this return must find its metric counterpart. It could do so by actual repetition of the words that spoke of A the first time (and if this return occurs more than once, one finds oneself with a refrain—not put there because one decided to write something with a refrain at the end of each stanza, but directly because of the demand of the content). Or it may be that since the return to A is now conditioned by the journey through B, C, and D, its words will not be a simple repetition but a variation … Again, if B and D are of a complementary nature, then their thought-or feeling-rhyme may find its corresponding word-rhyme. Corresponding images are a kind of nonaural rhyme. It usually happens that within the whole, that is between the point of crystallization that marks the beginning or onset of a poem and the point at which the intensity of contemplation has ceased, there are distinct units of awareness; and it is—for me anyway—these that indicate the duration of stanzas. Sometimes these units are of such equal duration that one gets a whole poem of, say, three-line stanzas, a regularity of pattern that looks, but is not, predetermined.

  When my son was eight or nine I watched him make a crayon drawing of a tournament. He was not interested in the forms as such, but was grappling with the need to speak in graphic terms, to say, “And a great crowd of people were watching the jousting knights.” There was a need to show the tiers of seats, all those people sitting in them. And out of the need arose a formal design that was beautiful—composed of the rows of shoulders and heads. It is in very much the same way that there can arise, out of fidelity to instress, a design that is the form of the poem—both its total form, its length and pace and tone, and the form of its parts (e.g., the rhythmic relationships of syllables within the line, and of line to line; the sonic relationships of vowels and consonants; the recurrence of images, the play of associations, etc.). “Form follows function” (Louis Sullivan).

  Frank Lloyd Wright in his autobiography wrote that the idea of organic architecture is that “the reality of the building lies in the space within it, to be lived in.” And he quotes Coleridge: “Such as the life is, such is the form.” (Emerson says in his essay “Poetry and Imagination,” “Ask the fact for the form.”) The Oxford English Dictionary quotes Huxley (Thomas, presumably) as stating that he used the word organic “almost as an equivalent for the word ‘living.’”

  In organic poetry the metric movement, the measure, is the direct expression of the movement of perception. And the sounds, acting together with th
e measure, are a kind of extended onomatopoeia—i.e., they imitate not the sounds of an experience (which may well be soundless, or to which sounds contribute only incidentally), but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture. The varying speed and gait of different strands of perception within an experience (I think of strands of seaweed moving within a wave) result in counterpointed measures.

  Thinking about how organic poetry differs from free verse, I wrote that “most free verse is failed organic poetry, that is, organic poetry from which the attention of the writer had been switched off too soon, before the intrinsic form of the experience had been revealed.” But Robert Duncan pointed out to me that there is a “free verse” of which this is not true, because it is written not with any desire to seek a form, indeed perhaps with the longing to avoid form (if that were possible) and to express inchoate emotion as purely as possible.* There is a contradiction here, however, because if, as I suppose, there is an inscape of emotion, of feeling, it is impossible to avoid presenting something of it if the rhythm or tone of the feeling is given voice in the poem. But perhaps the difference is this: that free verse isolates the “rightness” of each line or cadence—if it seems expressive, then never mind the relation of it to the next; while in organic poetry the peculiar rhythms of the parts are in some degree modified, if necessary, in order to discover the rhythm of the whole.

  But doesn’t the character of the whole depend on, arise out of, the character of the parts? It does; but it is like painting from nature: suppose you absolutely imitate, on the palette, the separate colors of the various objects you are going to paint; yet when they are closely juxtaposed in the actual painting, you may have to lighten, darken, cloud, or sharpen each color in order to produce an effect equivalent to what you see in nature. Air, light, dust, shadow, and distance have to be taken into account.

  Or one could put it this way: in organic poetry the form sense or “traffic sense,” as Stefan Wolpe speaks of it, is ever present along with (yes, paradoxically) fidelity to the revelations of meditation. The form sense is a sort of Stanislavsky of the imagination: putting a chair two feet downstage there, thickening a knot of bystanders upstage left, getting this actor to raise his voice a little and that actress to enter more slowly; all in the interest of a total form he intuits. Or it is a sort of helicopter scout flying over the field of the poem, taking aerial photos and reporting on the state of the forest and its creatures—or over the sea to watch for the schools of herring and direct the fishing fleet toward them.

  A manifestation of form sense is the sense the poet’s ear has of some rhythmic norm peculiar to a particular poem, from which the individual lines depart and to which they return. I heard Henry Cowell tell that the drone in Indian music is known as the horizon note. Al Kresch, the painter, sent me a quotation from Emerson: “The health of the eye demands a horizon.” This sense of the beat or pulse underlying the whole I think of as the horizon note of the poem. It interacts with the nuances or forces of feeling which determine emphasis on one word or another, and decides to a great extent what belongs to a given line. It relates the needs of that feeling-force which dominates the cadence to the needs of the surrounding parts and so to the whole.

  Duncan also pointed to what is perhaps a variety of organic poetry: the poetry of linguistic impulse. It seems to me that the absorption in language itself, the awareness of the world of multiple meaning revealed in sound, word, syntax, and the entering into this world in the poem, is as much an experience or constellation of perceptions as the instress of nonverbal sensuous and psychic events. What might make the poet of linguistic impetus appear to be on another tack entirely is that the demands of his realization may seem in opposition to truth as we think of it; that is, in terms of sensual logic. But the apparent distortion of experience in such a poem for the sake of verbal effects is actually a precise adherence to truth, since the experience itself was a verbal one.

  Form is never more than a revelation of content.

  “The law—one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception” (Edward Dahlberg, as quoted by Charles Olson in “Projective Verse,” Selected Writings). I’ve always taken this to mean, “no loading of the rifts with ore,” because there are to be no rifts. Yet alongside this truth is another truth (that I’ve learned from Duncan more than from anyone else)—that there must be a place in the poem for rifts too—(never to be stuffed with imported ore). Great gaps between perception and perception which must be leapt across if they are to be crossed at all.

  The X-factor, the magic, is when we come to those rifts and make those leaps. A religious devotion to the truth, to the splendor of the authentic, involves the writer in a process rewarding in itself; but when that devotion brings us to undreamed abysses and we find ourselves sailing slowly over them and landing on the other side—that’s ecstasy.

  * * *

  * See, for instance, some of the forgotten poets of the early 20s—also, some of Amy Lowell—Sandburg—John Gould Fletcher. Some Imagist poems were written in “free verse” in this sense, but by no means all.

  First published in Poetry, Vol. 106, No. 6, September 1965; reprinted in New Directions in Prose and Poetry 20, 1968.

  On the Need for New Terms

  (1986)

  ALL DISCUSSION OF CONTEMPORARY poetics is vitiated by the lack of a more precise terminology. I constantly hear poets, teachers, and students refer to “writing in forms” on the one hand, by which they mean the traditional forms, and to “free verse” on the other, a term utilized for every kind of poem that is not written in a traditional form. The logical implication of this usage is that the non-traditional is formless; whereas in fact a sense of form is vital to the creation of any work of art. “Free verse” is an inappropriate term: instead of suggesting the inventive development and exploration of new forms (which are typically not re-usable, because expressive of a particular unique Gestalt), it implies the rejection of every restriction. But the sense of form, of composition, balance, inner harmony, always necessitates certain restrictions—selectivity, precise choices in every area of the poem (whether in cadence and lineation, diction, stanza length, etc.)—which, for the poet using non-reusable forms, are voluntary, not imposed by the established rules of preconceived forms. The closest analogy is the laws of conscience contrasted with the laws of the state. (Obviously, the two often coincide—but woe betide anyone who assumes they are necessarily identical, and thus loses his conscience!) Just as “free verse” is a misnomer for nontraditional poetry directed by a scrupulous aesthetic conscience, so “forms,” unqualified by the word “traditional” or an equivalent, reflects a parallel misinterpretation of motive and practice: the logical implication is that only pre-decided forms partake of the qualities of form (such as balance, interior dynamic, auditory and intellectual shapelines, etc.) and that only their practitioners have a proper sense of composition. (It may even suggest that obeying the rules automatically imparts formal success.)

  A refined terminology would benefit both those whose preference and natural bent is for the traditional, or closed, modes, and those whose bent and preference is for exploratory or open modes. And it would be equally useful to readers, not only to writers and teachers. I am not, and never have been, trying to align people on one side of an “open v. closed” controversy; my concern is to clean up the terminology, get some decent ground rules for discussion.

  At the same time, of course, I would like people to better understand bow the kind of poetry I and many others write works, so that it will be beard better (out loud or with the inner voice). When Richard Wilbur, who has written some of the most beautiful, supremely elegant and pleasurable poems of our time, visited a writing workshop at Stanford a few years ago, he revealed very clearly that he simply did not understand the structure of those poems by students that were written in open forms: he read them aloud with no regard to linebreaks, to tonal differentiations indicated by indentations, or to other non-traditional
techniques; and so, though he sometimes picked out an image or a contextual approach for praise or blame, he missed the sounds and the rhythms entirely. Yet he has a most complete understanding of traditional prosody. I would like to see as much comprehension of the standards by which nontraditional forms can be evaluated—that is, of their formal qualities—as of those in traditional forms.

  The existing gap in technical understanding between traditionalists and explorers is damaging to poetry itself, because it precludes the full experience of a great many wonderful poems. A parallel phenomenon is the shocking inability of many students who have only read non-traditional poetry to scan traditional poetry properly. That evidence of aural insensitivity is something we all deplore; but when non-traditionally formed poems are equivalently mangled, it goes unrecognized and undeplored.

  The inability to scan traditional poems correctly is due to ignorance and laziness: the rules are fully available, and if an individual has no natural “ear” he or she can at least learn to read correctly. The inability to scan non-traditional forms is due sometimes to inflexibilities of expectation on the part of those who are skilled in traditional prosody, but more often to the refusal of the non-traditional practitioners to adopt and utilize a common terminology and a common recognition of the functions of the various techniques they use. Many imitate their contemporaries without thinking, without consideration for the roots and raisons d’etre of their methods. Like sloppy amateur carpenters who use tools at random, hit or miss, they don’t bother to find out what special properties their tools may have, what options their tool-chests offer. Knowing what the options are is not aesthetically prescriptive or partisan, but simply a basis for artistic action.