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Poetic Lines and Social Thought
Adam Neikirk
Abstract
This article draws connections between formal poetry and the capacity to imagine not just the actual world, but any possible world as essentially peopled and peopled with others: both human and nonhuman intelligences. Beginning with an anecdote from the fringes of science, the author goes on to identify the presence of social thought in Romantic literary worlds, citing canonical poems that rely on the recursion of metrical lines such as “Mont Blanc” (Percy Bysshe Shelley) and “Kubla Khan” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge). A theory of poetic lines is then proffered in which poetic invention is related strongly to the idea of the line as a self-sufficient way of ordering thought. From the kernel of the line, both lineation and versification are seen as irreducible to poetry as an aid to “translating” social imagination. In the second section, the concept of parsimoniousness as it relates to poetic reading is introduced. Parsimony, the quality of being readable, is related to the idea that poems are involved in forming thought, and formal poems form thought that is politically alternative to what one scholar of formalism calls ‘destituent theory.’ In the third section, a theory of surface reading of poetry is defended against the sense that poems should be obscure or difficult. The concept of a “compositional cue” in poetry is introduced. These are cues that simplify and yet deepen our reading of formal poetry and help to engage us in an automated cognition that forms us into fellow creators or inceptors of verse.
Key Words
Samuel Taylor Coleridge; imagination; formalism; formal poetry; lineation; parsimony; poetry; poetic lines; Romanticism; social thought; surface reading; verse; versification
1. Social thought and the “Ode to UMMO”
In his semi-biographical, pseudo-scientific book, The Invisible College, information scientist and UFO researcher Jaques Valée attempts to show that even without scientific evidence of cosmic visitations, human behavior around the world suggests a kind of concordance of psychic experiences marked by what Valée calls “high strangeness.”[1] People believe they are being visited by or otherwise experiencing oblique contact with nonhuman agents of undisclosed and mysterious origin. And as Valée relates, sometimes these communications come in an elaborate form and therefore prompt more complex social behavior. Valée mentions that in early January 1965, a writer and government official living in Madrid was contacted by members of a “race from planet UMMO,” who delivered detailed information about the history and social structure of their species. “We are a people older than yours, that has reached a level of civilization which is higher too,” the messages said. “We do not know money … consumer goods are practically impossible to price” due to a complete lack of scarcity. The missives also mention, among other things, that the people of UMMO are “deeply religious” and “possess scientific arguments” for the existence of the soul.[2]
During the 1970s, Valée says, these messages and the existence of the people of UMMO became somewhat popularized, resulting in several groups of scientists, researchers, and enthusiasts meeting to discuss hypotheses related to the physiology of the UMMO people, based on disclosed information, and the astrogeological verity of their planet and star, making what Valée calls “fanatical statements” on the idea of a human-UMMO connection that “resembled religious conviction” in tone and scope. In an aside tinged with humor and awe, Valée says, “One of them even read an ‘Ode to UMMO!’”[3] What interests me is that this aside about the poem, marked with an exclamation, represents the pinnacle of Valée’s reflection on the enthusiasm for the UMMO episode, as if to express the wish in poetry that humanity go among the stars, gain knowledge, or live peacefully beside an interstellar species from across the universe were simultaneously also the zenith of this kind of cultural interaction with nonhuman intelligence (NHI) and the point at which the proceedings become too private, or too ridiculous, to describe outside of the parenthesis.
Because my goal in this article is to argue that poetry’s formal features lead to what I am calling “social thought,” I felt that this anecdote about the ode to UMMO would be a fitting starting point. The conditions of its origination express social thought, despite us having no contemporary access to the exact social and cultural conditions that produced the “fascination” of which Valée tells. Even to name it an “ode” to anything, much less an alien species, seems to invite humor both because of its apparent enthusiasm and because the author is co-opting the practice of some bygone era when such odes were frequently written and recited (to express love, loyalty, and other social conceits). To explicate the connection between poetry’s formal features, especially lines, and the concept of social thought is my aim in this writing. The anecdote of the ode to UMMO expresses social thought because it shows several interrelated motions of human attention toward the world around us. The world is not defined except by our thoughts and actions, by which we might recognize others, think about them while they are absent, wonder who they are, imagine their reaction to the things we are seeing, and so forth. Social thought, one might say, is what peoples a world of our imagining, and we are always imagining the idea of the “real world” together. When one says, “Humans are social creatures,” I believe this refers to our capacity to imagine otherness as a fundamental feature of reality, not something merely contingent to the sort of lives we need to live. Also, our emotions directed toward others can be included under the umbrella of social thought. Feelings directed toward a sense of the other often form the wings that can carry a thought aloft into actions and expressions, so that there is also an aspect of social thought that implies a movement forward into action, that is, a feeling of concern. Therefore, the ode to UMMO is an expression of social thought, even if we can’t read it or judge its quality as poetry; it represents a form of human thinking about the world around us, extended to include beings of apparently nonhuman origin and composition.
If social thought goes beyond humanity, then poems written about beings from other worlds go beyond the concern with poetry as a human production of literary quality, recalling it as a kind of “fanatical statement,” a form of prophetic language given voice by seemingly transcendental longing. Valée’s language suggests that his attitude simultaneously is one of fascination and one of culturally-imposed authorial distance; he is more amazed to consider the writing of an ode than he is to recount the story of an alien encounter. In a book replete with strange anecdotes and notions, he rarely makes use of the exclamation point reserved for talking about the ode. The poet, then, with his fanatical ode directed toward nonexistent or nonhuman things, can seem as alien to us as the recipient of his sublime writings. Yet, in using his poem to address the concordance of minds or beings over against the collective dwelling of physical subjects, he (the poet) reifies a Romantic metaphysics, addressing what Percy Bysshe Shelley called the “everlasting universe of things” in his ode “Mont Blanc”:
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, . . .
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.[4]
The poem’s thematic and textual resemblance to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” only reinforces the idea that poetic lines cross boundaries to observe forms of social connection. The “sacred river” of “Kubla Khan,” which Coleridge calls “Alph,”
with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, . . .
And mid these dancing rocks for once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.[5]
The “sacred river” and “source of human thought” are in a sense the very act of our recognition that there is something mind-like about phenomena, that we encounter the universe both through and in our predisposition to assume mind-ness, and that the universe becomes mind-like because of our thoughts and actions. This Romantic conceit is not really bound to the historic period traditionally associated with British Romanticism (about 1770, it is said, to about 1850); or it could be said, conversely, that Romanticism itself represents a bundle of human tendencies that are perhaps ahistorical. What else was the “ode to UMMO” if not an expression of a Romantic desire that humans and nonhumans transcend their differences in recognition of an “everlasting universe” marked by an absence of boundaries?
Social thought is what recalls us to this conviction, often derided as naive (or simply Romantical), that there is, to quote Coleridge again, “one Life within us and abroad, / Which meets all motion and becomes its soul”[6]; the “soul” and “mind” being concepts somewhat interchangeable, and “Life” being that which “meets” motion, making it be “meet” or fit into or against the world it mirrors and describes. This is less a comment on the basicness of mind to the universe and more a way of beginning to think about what happens when we read poems, which are, when they are lineated, necessarily read line by line. Poetic “motions” are, I suggest, based on the simultaneous independence and interdependence of lines that occupy the same text. Lines are often self-sufficient entities; poetic forms, and sometimes traditions of writing poetry, are anchored in the wholeness of lines that cannot be logically subsumed. And poetry’s formal features—indeed, a poem’s formality as a concept that predisposes it to see “mind” in the world—hang on the use of lines, of lineation as an irreducible feature of this writing style, of versification—that is, the art of line-arrangement—as an emergent quality of lineation, and of social thought arising through and as the encounter with poetic lines as we are reading.
Poems are rather like “implicate orders”[7] of forms of social thought that we explicate in the act of reading, beholding above all else the essence of mind in the various shapes of description and lyrical expression. Shelley and Coleridge’s extreme musicality should be a clue to the subject matter of their poetry, and not merely an ornamentation that allows us to imbibe it with a sense of social separateness: this isn’t “high” but “deep” writing. Poetic cultures can easily become marginal, and students of poetry turn into specialists or novitiates. Coleridge wrote that “The poet … brings the whole soul of man into activity,”[8] an idea based in part on the Schellingian notion that, as James Dodd puts it, poetry represents “an original problem” that is lineated by “the resulting striving that is … [essentially] human.”[9] Versification encodes the desire to work out or move through a problem that in its complexity resembles the richness of social interaction, so that in essence lines of poetry become like persons at a dinner party who are engaged in lively conversation on a topic that each understands in part, but that none understand so exhaustively as to bring it to a decisive end. Hence, to understand a poem, one might say, all the lines need to be considered, but they do not need to form a path by which the author’s thought proceeds sequentially or even sententially.[10]
That a mind creates rhythms in descriptive words that can be learned by heart, recited, and imbued with social significance is the core of poetry’s translation in culture and in everyday use. Poems can be thought of as translations of the mind, not only of the author’s individual mind but also of “mindness” as such, which is connected to the situation we come to understand as the separation and recognition of other persons, a situation sometimes dramatized as an original intelligence that has been divided into discrete parts, as in Plato’s Symposium.
In Tolkien’s The Silmarillion legend, for example, it is often intimated that divine contact occurs between creatures and gods (or “Powers”) who have essentially poetic encounters.[11] Here, the word “encounters” should also make us think of Valée and the idea of a “strange” encounter with another kind of intelligence. In the follow up to her popular book, American Cosmic, the religious scholar D.W. Pasulka wrote Encounters in order to explicitly follow Valée’s advice to “talk to witnesses and to visit the sites” where people seem to have bumped up against the presence of mind-like entities, or what sometimes are called “nonhuman intelligences” (NHI).[12] My claim is that formal poetry derives much of its significance less from a language of attention or attention-shaping and more from the object of its attention, which is the phenomenon of mind.
By this dint, the formal features of poetry, which we usually think of as involving meter and rhyme, represent the presence of a living mind that we often presume to be human dwelling on the intersection of lived experience with the understanding of concepts’ ideal relationality. Anna Kornbluh thus axiomatically writes that “[l]aws for the making of life are foundational, but no foundational law lives.”[13] In poetry, therefore, the line becomes the living law. Peter Cheyne states, with a similar emphasis on poetic literature as the result of an ideal (not idealizing) process, that “positive, universal powers that resist definition . . . can be intuited . . . and intimated through poetic imagery.”[14] Poetic formality is not something frozen that is added to prefigured language, as many prosodists would be quick to also avow; neither are metrical forms so much about constraint and control, or bound to compose a contract with the reader who needs to be assured of an eventual return to prosaic thinking. While Coleridge said in a much-discussed remark on the cultural meaning of poetry that meter signifies the author’s intention “to use a language different from that of prose,” this does not mean that the formative use of meter in a poem like “Kubla Khan” is merely symbolic, as some scholars have argued.[15] Rather, Coleridge and Shelley’s meters are inseparable from the forms of the lines that make their poems musical and create the subject matter out of this combination of music with descriptions of things such as rivers, forests, underground oceans, and lonely mountains.
Description that is given to a line is description calculated to fill out a social role in a poem, where the line’s isolation is both pleasurable for us and happens to bring about the end of the reading experience, such as it were, because to reach the end of a poem one must therefore be willing to abandon lines into a collective sense of meaning that has already transpired. Meter is what mobilizes and encodes these descriptions into allusions to, among other things, the other lines in the same poem: a point that is trivially self-evident but often absent from critical accounts of formal poetry. This is true even as these lines affirm their individual character not only by the language that exists within them, but by the intelligence that they seem not only to anticipate but to posit as a fundamental, albeit perhaps distant or invisible, presence.[16] We can see this in many poems, but it is especially effective when it is combined with a metaphysical conceit through which is manifested the worry over false resemblances: as in Hartley Coleridge’s “Fairy Land,” a poem which is about the translucence of the real within the fictional stories of childhood.
I have loved sweet things, that are not non,
In frosty starlight, or the cold moonbeam.
I never thought they were; and therefore now
No doubt obscures the memory of my dream.
My Fairy Land was never upon earth,
Nor in the heaven to which I hoped to go; . . .[17]
A reader, even one who being a contemporary of the author might be conditioned to mentally parse the syntactical maneuvers and meta-logical leaps of poetry, might complain about the number of times the writing in this passage shifts between an affirmation of presence and one of absence. This “shimmering”[18] between affirmation and negation is, however, deeply elided in and through versification, so that one does not really find the passage difficult until one goes beyond what John Gibson calls “naive reading” in a book chapter on poetry and difficulty.[19] But it is precisely for this reason that I disagree with Gibson’s assertion—one that favors, I believe, modern poetry’s apparently deliberate rejection of form and the aesthetics of form—that “the loss of a surface that can be read naively … turns out to be no loss to poetry of any genuine sort at all.”[20] In the next section, I will try to show how and why I disagree with this idea, affirming that surfaces which “can” be read are not separable from the parsimoniousness of verse’s ability to give us thinkable and experiential concepts.
2. “Fairy Land”: poetic lines and parsimoniousness
Parsimoniousness means not only something that is clearly able to be read—that is, it can be naively understood—but also something that is able to be understood in the proportions germane to each of its components. Hartley Coleridge’s “Fairy Land” evinces parsimoniousness in its formal features. Lines of poetry in “Fairy Land” have proportion because they are calculable through allusion and repetition, not only as statements. These surface-level features are what create a sense that the poem flows together, a sense that it is made up of like thoughts. But, importantly, these elements of form do not guarantee an easy surface; ask any student in an undergraduate literature survey if they had any trouble reading Hartley Coleridge’s poetry, or if they had seen through to the play of thoughts that have prompted some commentators to describe him as a genius. Seeing through the surface of the poem to the “inside” is not only a false positing of a base/superstructure dynamic; it also fails to reify Gibson’s thesis concerning poetry that has a “genuine” character.
Rather, as I will attempt to explain below, formal features of poetry that give rise to what Richard Cureton has called “verse experience” connect language’s referential character to thought in new ways that go beyond sentential logic, instead resembling the logic of (S.T.) Coleridge’s “water-insect” that glides on the surface of a flowing rivulet.[21] This is logic that appears to fly against the grain of rule by the force of some other set of rules that we experience rather than directly understand. Not even the poet, as the ancients themselves were wont to point out, always understands the structure of a composition, but this does not mean the rule is not there. Some scholars are now attempting, as I am, to make arguments about form more complicated, attesting that the longstanding tradition in aesthetic critique of “elevat[ing] disruption and [the act of] unsettling” over against “form” has led to the conviction that “aesthetics amount[s] to the core of politics.”[22] Furthermore,
When kinetic design arrests in an order, that order equates to “the police.” Hence, disruption shimmers as a means that is its own end. Such centralization of the aesthetics proper to politics gives rise to a vision of politics as finally about disruption itself. … the exuberant energies of distributing sensation appear to exceed the determining forces that prevent aesthetic play from fully transforming political relations— … the domination of political assignations by the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.[23]
Speaking instead to the political potential of what she calls “projects of building,” Kornbluh affirms that “forming” (akin to the “shimmer” of disruption) “is a value unto itself: a value that animates literature, and a value that formalist literary critics can embrace as an alternative to destituent theory.” Speaking of poetry as comprising “versal parsimony” links it to the sense of “composed relations,” even if poems are not “institutions” or “states.”[24]
Of course, poems are also not only symbolic in terms of the distributing or composing power of institutions; they also actually attempt to compose relations as if they had the power of institutions (as Shelleyan “legislative” bodies—the poet’s legislation lives on, or rather for the first time, in their poems). Hartley Coleridge’s poems tend to be centered around time in a way that is purposefully offset, as if in the image of history the verse were seeking a new way of weighing and valuing the composed relations of the past and present as forms that structure human life. They also proceed by “linewise” steps (“I never thought they were; and therefore now / No doubt …”), as if it were not clear where the center of our focus should be—on the suspension of a past belief or the development of its absence in the present.
The difficulty of parsing his poem “Fairy Land”—a difficulty that piles up around the double negation in “No doubt obscures the memory of my dream”—is mirrored in the difficulty of understanding it in terms of what the philosopher James D. Madden calls “our default Goldilocks Ontology of proverbial mid-sized dried goods”;[25] that is, Hartley is dealing more in wet, dripping, hyper-sized concepts like dream, memory, starlight, doubt, and so forth, proceeding from the invisible or intangible “Fairy Land” itself, an institutionalizing vouch-safer of magical verse. In a realm of abstract thought, these concepts mesh with each other and remain borderless in the same way that sounds of words in a line of poetry could be read or heard as a single sound replete with structured gaps that we also experience. The idea of the line, recalling Kornbluh, and Jarvis,[26] again, is not a symbol of poetic culture, but an intercession of the fundamentally sociable reality in which we live. Furthermore, our sense that these concepts of starlight and so forth belong to the ruminations of a bygone verse culture is solidified in our conviction that words themselves represent separate, meaningful sounds and are not experienced aesthetically as manifold images that happen to speak in sound. There is a connection between sibilance as such, as the aestheticization of “likeness” itself, and liquidity of thought in Hartley’s writing that prompts an old-fashioned lover of verse to call him genial, while the lovers of “unsparing” poetry—the New Critics but not only the New Critics—dismiss him as a kind of repository of lost Romantic verse, someone outside of time who is ultimately unfashionable.
Versification can also be seen as encompassing the strategies that poets use to determine the order of lines, an order that is complex because of the imbrication of several kinds of order that we can both quantify and to which we tend to aesthetically respond. In this way, I would prefer to think of language not as poetry’s highest concern but as the aspect of the poem that continuously piques our interest in a natural way. By way of example, consider this stanza from Alice Oswald’s “Bike Ride on a Roman Road.” This stanza does not contain the poem’s final lines, but I would argue contains instead the climactic point of the poem in the hyper-metrical relation of its last two lines:
and my two eyes are floating in the fields,
my mouth is on a branch, my hair
is miles behind me making tributaries
and I have had my heart distracted out of me,
my skin is blowing slowly about without me[27]
These lines seem to enact a drama of metricality, namely, of the iambic pentameter form that is exemplified in the line “and my two eyes are floating in the field.” The second line in spondaic tetrameter (“my mouth is on a branch, my hair”) pauses as if to take a breath—the irregularity makes us trip a little—then moves onward, pronouncing the first of three feminine endings through the word “tributaries,” a sort of ending that with each reiteration becomes more prominent, distorting the structure of underlying stresses and also the sense of finality that accompanies a self-enclosing line; or rather, the disruption becomes more inventive, with the ending of the next line, “out of me,” forming a kind of triplet across the fifth foot, and “without me” returning to a traditional ending that sounds even stranger because of this line’s obliquely hyper-metrical relation to the previous one—that is, the word “without” sounds like it has been squashed like slowed time.
Moving from a kind of traditional poetical conceit of floating eyes in a field or line that only hints at what is to come, the stanza becomes—gradually, I would argue—overwhelmed with a kind of McIntyre-like interiority of its own music,[28] enacting its own values only after offering us several lines as footholds so that we can join in and share in the poet’s experience of versification as a force that seems to pull the reader (and writer) steadily away from the usual incentives to comprehension: namely, the clarity of a completed thought and the sense of closure that arrives at the end of a variegated journey through, in this case, fields, tree branches, and tributaries. The word “and” at the beginning of the first line of the pair—“and I have had my heart distracted out of me / my skin is blowing slowly about without me”—simultaneously disguises and highlights the fact that these lines are set against the previous three as representatives of a new metrical emphasis and the proliferation of internal rhymes (heart/out and blowing/slowly/about/without) and allusivity (“have had … heart”). The third line, a transitional line, also has these qualities in a more distant way: “miles” and “behind” rhyme or at least chime; and “making” rhymes distantly with the last two syllables of “tributaries.”
Versification contributes to a parsimonious reception of the same flow state that animated the poet who composed these lines. This is not a side effect of reading verse unless we first orient ourselves to a cultural role that poetry is supposed to play: one that capitalism “assigns” as distraction, and an idea that Oswald attempts to complete in her poem about a bike ride. We are made, whether or not we know it, more aware therefore of the structural similarities and differences of “things.” We attribute to such things, that is, the referents of the poetical text, new kinds of features: hands, the speaker’s mouth, the fields, the heart both in isolation and in motion, in “distracted” spaces and so forth. Such words and the identities they gain through the sequence of verse are not just ornaments of poetry but also exist within the larger, nonphysical space of our statements about ourselves, each other, our shared world—the whole array of ways in which it is possible to think and to imagine. Moreover, these new features are imported from a different kind of formal space, of a purely physical textuality.[29] Poetry of this sort seems to ask us to parse the physical world in terms not of a spiritually whole—in the Coleridgean sense of all parts being animated and put to equal use—mirroring world toward which we are made aware in reading, but rather to raise us up, as Heidegger says, into the “height” of the compositional features of language. From this height we see the politically impossible: how language, which is powerless in itself, would make a physical world if it could do more than gesture at objects with seemingly “more” physicality than the sound-producing images of letters, words and so forth. The shapes we encounter in poetry, which are so often built around the reality of the repeated line, and its repetition as a kind of becoming-real, borrow their substantiality from the non-present objects to which they must make continuous allusion, seeming for that reason to give themselves over into transparency, even ghostliness.
Brad Leithauser suggests in his overview of prosody, entitled Rhyme’s Rooms, that the “first message” of poetry is this: Slow down.[30] Versification can vary the speed at which we parse—meaning both read and comprehend, or again, re-comprehend—lines, so the message sent to us by poetry is partly a cultural injunctive. Syllables, for Leithauser, are elements that carry a cognitive load, even as they contribute to the journey of traversing a poem; and to encounter a rhyme, especially one that is well-removed, thirty, forty, or even fifty syllables away, is in some sense to struggle to think through those textual elements that have previously and recently come across the desk of our attention, as if they represented an efficiently inferior path, that we nevertheless already have walked on.[31] This is why I sometimes think of lines as resisting language; and parsimoniousness in poetry is, likewise, a quality of lines that cuts against the same quality in a selection of readable language. The parsimony of a line can and frequently does culminate in a rhyme that causes the intervening matter to seem as if it lacked or fought against the readability it had just (and automatically) participated in, in bringing us to that point. Hence it is even possible to wonder if poems suggest a kind of alternate parsimony, that is, an alternate way of thinking about the structure of the world to which their language alludes.
Certainly, they do not always recommend sentential logic. Looking at Oswald’s poem again, we could argue that it is intrinsic to the logic of a sentence to refer us to something useful: look there, at that field, look at that tree as we are biking past it. These things are over there, and they are also necessarily separate from us (meaning they could also pose some danger to us). But something different happens between simply looking at the selection of language in a poem, and reading through that poem, where versification arises as an invisible force that proceeds out of places that we—in doing prosodic analysis, especially—naturally struggle to pinpoint. Leithauser uses the idea of Funesians, a counterfactual group of people who are, in fact, perfect readers of poetry to suggest that typical humans run up against our cognitive limits in striving to read poems in the way we have been taught to think in and about language. Poems, then, push us past, or at least move us to confront, these limits when we write and read them; we “flow” into areas of new concern.
3. On compositional cues
Compositional cues in poetry can be formal features like rhyme and meter that cue us to the fact that the poem has been written in a purposive way meant to educe some kind of formation within us as we read. The rhyme brings the notice of two or more like sounds together, but also allows us the more profound realization that resemblances are not random, and the suspicion that randomness might after all simply be another kind of order that we don’t yet recognize. They can also be and frequently are cues to the poet who creates, in a sense, the content of what he or she has not yet written, by enabling reflection on formal features that have been given during the inception of a line of verse, or perhaps an idea about writing that gives some other kind of direction. Thus, poets respond to compositional cues as if they were the scripts that we use to simplify living and make it into a thinkable surface of activity: one has one’s morning routine, the same patterns of dressing, cleaning, and otherwise making ready, because of the necessity of society and the often-inevitable approach of others with whom we share the world.
The features I would like to focus on of this animation—animation versus automation, or rather, an animation due to automation, in the case of formal repetitiveness—relate to the subheadings I have used to organize this paper: social thought, poetic lines, parsimony, as modes of reading and perceiving, and the cues that structure the way poems proceed and turn back on themselves. More study is needed in these directions: how lines divide the poems in which they appear, rearing the heads of their lineation against the bare fact of reading as a procedural process, even as they compose this process. Also, how the automaticity of like sounds and similar groupings, that is, rhyme and meter, forms poems, as it were, organically in the Coleridgean sense.
Coleridgean organicism of poetry comes from within the poem, but the meaning of this fact for our social life is a research direction foreshortened by scholarly suspicions surrounding the Romanticist accusation of aesthetic retreat. As Kornbluh and others have suggested through their study of how form shapes realism, the formality of poetry is a tending-toward automation that gives us the sense of internal rhythm, as one aftereffect of reading, which is necessary to shape poems of our own; but also that the aftereffects of poems do not know they are supposed to be directed back into more and new poems (if they are, for example, in the working life of artists). They are “underdetermined” effects in that they have more than one use, but nevertheless are frequently channeled into the mechanical capacity for literary reproduction, being seen as opportunities to capitalize on poetic thought and the flow of an interior sense of rhythm, openness to language and other factors that are not necessarily encouraged to flow into the wider world.
In the past—I am thinking again of the Romantics—the justification of formal beauty’s tendency to assimilate us into technology tended to be that the truth of form was powerfully transcendent, and so the right attunement to nature, which has an intelligible form, could free us, at least by way of disposition, from the diminishing returns of social awareness. It is not this freeing of the reader of poetry that I wonder about, but rather that the sense of how we become free in so many cases—that is, of interpretation of these and similar kinds of formal poems—is a freeing-from social conditioning, when social conditioning is coded as insidious or mendacious. The conversation poems of Coleridge, for instance, differ from the traditional idea of the Romantic sublime by embracing, recommending, and also animating social life through verse; and the intervention of verse is coded into the poems as conversational intrusion, intrusive thoughts, daydreaming, asides, projections, and so forth, stimulated not by solitude but by high freedom in social selection as well as the intractably social nature of the poet’s mind.
Poetry allows us to rethink this either/or situation of our becoming-social; we write poems of intense confession to ourselves, but cannot separate them from the tradition of the poet as a public figure, even a public servant. The charge of obscurity that has been leveled against contemporary poetry by formalist writers such as Timothy Steele and Dana Gioia runs up against the conviction in the philosophy of poetry—or some corners of it anyway—that obscurity is the meaning of poetry: that we are meant to court poetry’s total linguistic content with a mind open to initiation, that poets are doing the right thing by denying us access to the surface of the world out of which they write, and that they give us this access almost in defiance of everything that our heap of accrued social notions has taught us about action (“poetry does nothing”), about speech, about meaning and meaningfulness, and so forth. This is an either/or situation that I would like to find a way out of, both theoretically and in my actual creative practice. It is a situation that poetry finds itself in, an awkward situation that pushes people toward a gulf of contradiction without productive resolution. That is, poems do not necessarily relate to the identification and resolution of social problems in the direct way we would like, but it might also do no good to write poems as if they ought to bear no resemblance to other kinds of directly socially conscious utterances.
One solution might lie in the direction of poetry’s genre. The power of poetry is that it allows us to experience artificial arrangements of language as if they were somehow related to the emotional life of the writer, and bidirectionally to the reader. This “somehow” is the point where perhaps analysis is abandoned for feeling and the response to poetic language arrangements is best viewed through the lens of poetic language arrangements. The game of poetry is, as I have suggested, that it forms us by way of its compositional cues: it both forms itself as it moves forward, with a relationship to the formal decisions of its own past, and it forms in the reader a relationship to this collection of cues and qualities. This means it forms its own language and forms some prelinguistic tendencies related to composition, which might not dispose us to write anything at all. While I think on one level all writing creates this response when it is read, poetry might have an advantage because its lineation and versification encourages us to see it as artifice. It encourages a modicum of distance even as it seems to sometimes relish in a distinct emotionality. But we tend to see poems as chances to engage ourselves in feeling rather than chances to examine the compositional arrays that give rise to the effects of feeling. While I am not suggesting that we abandon this cultural view of poetry as the form of expressing emotion, I believe that the various compositional elements of poems, the sheer vastness of combinations, recommends a rethinking of what its emotionality is and how it functions on the level of creating social cohesion.
What if, for that matter, poems were seen not as kinds of literary writing at all, but as recorded moments of emotional clarity, that is, of the clearing of emotion or its parsing into a product with a directly social role to play? A poem might be thought of differently if rather than an expression of the author’s “inner life,” it was seen as a tool either to create or undo some form of social conditioning. Romantic poetry and the legacy of academic reading would be in another either/or situation here. Complicating this shift in reading, at least partially, is that poems are made of lines that carry in themselves the germs of unwritten poems and compositional cues that can give rise to new social behaviors. By combining lines into longer statements of form, that is, into stanzas, verse paragraphs, and finally into entire poems, we disperse the uncanny power of the line as a self-referential object that can give birth to other lines, other poems, but also to things that are beyond both lines and poems.
Poems enact a kind of social injunction that gestures to the affect of society on the individual; even a poem that celebrates independence from society and the powerful combinatorial aspects of the imagination exists in the world as a social injunction given out of the partially imagined conditions of a counterfactual society.[32] The either/or situation is that we should not also simply allow poems to be collections of a special kind of medium that is itself the message: the medium of poetry is a form that both gives rise to reading comprehension and pushes against it, but that does not mean that any reader is free to simply comprehend the totality of what it is doing. Neither is obscurity and difficulty a satisfactory result of poetic reading. The medium of poetry is the message in part, but that medium represents a necessarily incomplete collection of narrative and formal cues. We cannot have both, but reading the poem in a certain way involves voluntary self-initiation into a scheme of living or thinking. Like any social activity, it is simultaneously resistant to essentialism and susceptible to a form of intensification that is determined by the nature of its participants. Human nature is a shifting nature in which verse willfully participates.
Adam Neikirk
adamneikirk@gmail.com
Adam Neikirk is a poet and scholar researching the politics of Romantic verse cultures. He received his Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Essex for a creative dissertation on the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in iambic pentameter. Recently, Adam completed an Early Career Fellowship at Wordsworth Grasmere that focused on understanding and teaching the verse-craft of William Wordsworth. He is the author of three poetry books and recently contributed to The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Adam lives in Massachusetts with his wife.
Published on August 28, 2025.
Cite this article: Adam Neikirk, “Poetic Lines and Social Thought,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed date.
Acknowledgement
I want to acknowledge the usefulness of reviews undertaken anonymously by reviewers for Contemporary Aesthetics and to thank them for their time in reading and commenting on my work.
Endnotes
[1] Jaques Valée, The Invisible College (E.F. Dutton & Co., 1975), 107-16. Kindle.
[2] Valée, The Invisible College, 100-2. Kindle.
[3] Valée, The Invisible College, 100-2. Kindle.
[4] Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni,” Poetry Foundation, accessed September 24, 2024, poetryfoundation.org/poems/45130/mont-blanc-lines-written-in-the-vale-of-chamouni, ll. 1-11.
[5] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” Poetry Foundation, accessed September 24, 2024, poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan, ll. 17-24.
[6] Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” Poetry Foundation, accessed September 24, 2024, poetryfoundation.org/poems/52301/the-eolian-harp, ll. 27-8.
[7] See David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 2005).
[8] Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton University Press, 1983), II: 15-6.
[9] James Dodd, “Philosophy and Art in Schelling’s ‘System des transzendentalen Idealismus,’” The Review of Metaphysics 52, no. 1 (1998): 81.
[10] In making this assertion, I both agree with and diverge from William Wenthe, who writes that “most fine poets intuitively understand the importance of the sentence” in their poems. See William Wenthe, “The Craft of Thought: The Sentence in Contemporary Poetry,” The Kenyon Review 30, no. 2 (2008): 149-71.
[11] See my “Tolkien and Coleridge: Act and Desire in The Silmarillion,” The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, eds. Julian Eilmann and Will Sherwood (Walking Tree Publishers, 2023), 263-89.
[12] D.W. Pasulka, Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2023), 4. While researchers like Valée and Pasulka are easily categorized as ufologists, their work makes clear that what they are really looking into is the changing focus on mind itself across human history and culture, and how this change creates what Pasulka calls “a rapidly growing spirituality” (1).
[13] Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago Press, 2019), 5.
[14] Peter Cheyne, Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2023), 38. Emphasis in original.
[15] See Simon Jarvis, “Thinking in verse,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, eds. James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 98.
[16] See Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton University Press, 2005); also my “Invisible Speakers: A Diagram of Self-Refraction in Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ Poetry of Childhood,” Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Prospect and Retrospect, eds. H.R. Stoneback, William Boyle, and Matthew Nickel (Des Hymnagistes Press, 2012), 170-80.
[17] Hartley Coleridge, “Fairy Land,” in Hartley Coleridge: Genius Disregarded, ed. Andrew Keanie (Greenwich Exchange, 2021), 55. See also my “Never/Nor: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Hartley Coleridge in Poetry’s Transfictional Worlds,” FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts 34 (2023), https://doi.org/10.2218/forum.1.9147.
[18] Cheyne notes, in Coleridge’s Contemporary Philosophy: “The shimmering of transcendence-in-immanence highlights the fragility of the experience” of what he calls an “extraordinary” experience. In Hartley Coleridge’s poem, what seems to shimmer is the possibility of the world he remembers being both real and fictional simultaneously. See Cheyne, Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2020), 56-7.
[19] John Gibson, “The Place of Poetry in Contemporary Aesthetics,” The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson (Oxford University Press, 2015), 10.
[20] Gibson, “The Place of Poetry in Contemporary Aesthetics,” 10.
[21] Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, I: 124. Cureton writes: “Verse rhythm is only a part of verse experience, but standing at its center, it exerts a wide influence. In fact, just as versification constrains verse language, … verse rhythm constrains verse experience, molding all of verse expression around a chosen temporality.” “Parsimoniousness” refers to the existence of moments, or even long periods of, sense and sensuousness arising together in verse experience both because of and in spite of the “wide influence” of the poet’s chosen temporality. See Richard Cureton, “Aspects of Verse Study: Linguistic Prosody, Versification, Rhythm, Verse Experience,” in Style 27, no. 4 (1993): 521-9.
[22] Kornbluh, The Order of Forms, 3.
[23] Kornbluh, The Order of Forms, 3.
[24] Kornbluch, The Order of Forms, 4.
[25] James D. Madden, Unidentified Flying Hyperobject (Ontocalypse Press, 2023), 109.
[26] See n13.
[27] Alice Oswald, “Bike Ride on a Roman Road,” The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), ll. 14-18.
[28] I am making a very loose allusion to the main thesis of After Virtue, where it is suggested that systems of morality grow out of small, self-sufficient communities.
[29] See Susan J. Wolfson, “Sounding Romantic: The Sound of Sound,” “Sounding of Things Done”: The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era (2008): “Reading poetry, too, is a sounding, … a reader is carried forward … this is a transformational trope: poetry is this very imagination of words as a path of sound through the air” (3).
[30] Brad Leithauser, Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 11.
[31] Brad Leithauser, Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry, 14-6.
[32] See my “Never/Nor: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Hartley Coleridge in Poetry’s Transfictional Worlds,” cited fully in n17 above.