Tools for Writing Classical Poetry—Classical Poets Live with Andrew Benson Brown

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Tools for Writing Classical Poetry

—adapted from the video

by Andrew Benson Brown

Do you want to be forgotten forever? Do you want to be obscure in the annals of history, like all of your ancestors probably are? Do you want to die without a single achievement to your name?

Of course not. So why are you still writing bad poetry?

I have never met a writer who doesn’t believe they’ll be remembered after their death. Everybody no matter how mediocre they are—everybody motivates themselves with dreams of posthumous glory.

From the bestselling hack to the unpublished author on the periphery of things, they all think people will be reading their books forever. In the case of authors who are currently famous, they believe their fame will endure. In almost all those cases, they’re not good and will be forgotten.

Will I be forgotten? Of course—and im the only writer who will admit that.

This video is longer than I intended it to be. I’m continuing with the trend of my first video that involves covering a lot of groundwork that I think is important for writing poetry well. And so this video does not cover rhyme and meter or actually any rules of poetry. But I’m going to be talking about some valuable lessons and tips that can still help you.

I’m also going to be making some arguments for why you should cultivate a more high-minded style; in the past, this was something that never would have had to be defended; but we’re not living in the past, we’re living in an era of decline.

Today I’m going to talk about a great writing tool. A good writer needs tools, you can’t just rely on your own brain all the time, no matter how smart you are. You need books and resources.

So you’re writing, and you’re racking your brain for just the right word. And you’re having trouble thinking of it. So you do what a lot of people do and you turn to a thesaurus.

Amateur writers rely on this thing kind of heavily, and it’s always evident when they do because they will use unusual words in the wrong context and its obvious they’ve been looking at a thesaurus.

But when done well, this can be useful when you’re looking for a different way to say something or you don’t want to be redundant.

What if I told you, though, that there is a better alternative to your standard thesaurus? In my own word hunting, I take it up a notch.

THIS is the historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. It has almost every word in the entire history of the English language going back to Old English. That’s almost 1 million words that have been used at some point over the last 1,000 years. It is a thesaurus on steroids. It took an entire team of scholars 40 years to complete this project, it’s amazing. It is the first resource of its kind, the first historical thesaurus for any language, it came out in 2009. I know a lot of writers, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who actively uses this, and most people have never even heard of it. It’s an obscure scholarly thing but it’s amazing and I cannot emphasize this enough—it is probably THE MOST USEFUL WORD TOOL THAT I’ve used for my writing projects, it’s great for beefing up your vocabulary.

Here’s the downside: It cost me $500 and probably you don’t have that kind of money. But luckily for you now there is a free online version of this. You can just google ‘historical thesaurus of English’ then it comes up, you can click on it. I have it bookmarked, of course.

So specifically I’m focusing here on using this to write poetry, but really it’s applicable to prose as well, to any form of imaginative writing.

Now obviously you’re writing in contemporary English so you don’t need to use words from Old or Middle English. Unless if you’re writing a specific genre of poetry. Like, historical poetry about characters who lived centuries ago. If you’re doing this, you need to acquaint yourself with the vocabulary of that time period and sprinkle words in your writing –not a lot, you don’t want to go over people’s heads, but just throw in an occasional word to give the flavor of the period. And this resource helps you do that in an easy way, because all the words have a range of dates associated with them, from when a word was first used in print, to when it fell out of common usage.

Another niche category of poetry this is useful for is nonsense poetry. If you’re making up words, like Lewis Carroll did in Jabberwocky, you can actually use this to do that: find a bizarre word, rearrange a few letters; or combine a few words to form a portmanteau. Or take an extinct, obscure word that has long fallen out of the spoken vocabulary and don’t change anything about it but just use it in a new way.

But we’re not doing either of those things here; we’re not writing a historical poem or a nonsense poem. Just a regular poem. But what’s interesting about the historical thesaurus that’s useful for this is when you get into modern times there’s a lot of fun slang words, and informal words for things that you’re not going to get just by doing a google search for basic synonyms.

So let’s keep it simple. Maybe you want to convey an image of love, and the first thing that comes to mind is ‘heart. So, because it’s a very common word, you get a lot of different categories and sub-categories of semantics, of meaning.

At the top you have the body, literally just the physical heart, the thing that’s in your chest cavity; but we’re going for a metaphor here so we need something less literal;

And here’s where you have to think about specific shades of meaning. But let’s say we’re looking for heart as a descriptor for love. So I’m just going to use the search function because I don’t feel like going through every category, so we type ‘love’ and oh look, we actually get five different categories. It’s never as simple as you think it is.

Let’s go with ‘amorous love,’ seat of love

Seat of love-heart – liver. Umm well, it was common to associate feelings of love with the liver in the Middle Ages, but we don’t think about the liver that way anymore, unless maybe you’re an alcoholic in love. And this is just one example of how if you’re just browsing this website, and have a sliver of imagination you’ll get a lot of really interesting ideas. Often the best discoveries, whether scientific or artistic, come while you’re just tinkering around with things, experimenting.

But anyway, we’re looking for another synonym for heart. Not liver.

Still looking at the heart as a descriptor for love, but we can see that the heart is not just the seat of love, but it’s the seat of courage, of feelings generally, of will, even of morality, of conscience. You could a write a poem about the different meanings of the heart. This resource really shows you the way a word is interconnected with all its various connotations.

Let’s look at just the general category for the noun ‘love.’ You see a lot of interesting words for every type of love in existence.

‘Over-lover’—used once in 1662

‘votary’—there’s a good one, a devotee of love is a ‘votary of love.’

And we see that in this category of the seat of the affections, heart is the only word listed.

So let’s go back and hit terms of endearment. You don’t want to use ‘sweetheart’—that’s boring. Honeycomb, still a bit cliche; Ladybird, that’s better. There’s just a ton of words in this category. You get a lot of slang terms, pussums. I like that.

If the word doesn’t have an end date after the dash it means it’s still in use, whereas if it does then it’s an archaic word. I’m not saying just blindly plug in weird words to your poems. But just because you’re not going to use all these words doesn’t mean they can’t be useful. Tolkien invented all of the names for places and characters in Middle Earth by studying medieval languages. Mordor, Morgoth, Sauron, Saruman – there’s a lot of family resemblances between some of these names. And that’s because he was using common root words for them. These names have meanings. Sauron means “the Abhorred,” or “the Abominable” in Elvish, for example.

Now you probably won’t invent your own language, but you should understand the roots of English; it will make you a better poet.

Once you find an interesting word in the historical thesaurus, you may have to look up its specific shade of meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary to make sure you’re not using it out of context. And you can also do this easily on the online OED, which is the companion website to this one. I also have a physical copy of the OED, by the way, very useful.

The poet W.H. Auden was a big reader of the OED, he had a complete set before it was available in the two-volume edition. He would often break it out at dinnertime so he could chew on words with his food.

He even once said that if marooned on a desert island, he would choose to have with him ‘a good dictionary’ in preference to ‘the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable  because a dictionary can be read in an infinite number of ways,’ while a novel can only be read one way.

Great poets have an affinity for linguistic creativity; the wider the range of your vocabulary, the more you can play around with words, invent new words, recombine old ones. Shakespeare and Milton were both famous for this. Paradise Lost is full of coinages.

And if you’re saying, oh ‘Paradise Lost,’ its so difficult to read, I hate it. Yeah well that’s why it’s still read today. Because it’s a sophisticated work of literature. And there is a necessary level of difficulty that comes with that.

Now there are poets who had simpler styles. Rumi, for example, is very popular today and he lived 800 years ago.

So I’m not saying that if you’re not trying to craft an intricately complex literary work, you’ll be forgotten. But you also have to remember that there are more authors today than there ever were in the past. In fact there are more authors alive right now than probably there ever were in all of history combined.

And the simpler your style, the more difficult it will be to distinguish you from other writers of our time. Look at instapoets. Remove their names from their poems and you won’t be able to tell them apart. They’re indistinguishable.

You don’t want to be indistinguishable; you want to stand out. And the best way to stand out is to increase the complexity in your work.

Now in my last tutorial video, ‘Secrets of Crafting Timeless Poetry,’ I said you want to keep your style simple and natural, and this might seem to contradict what I’m saying here. But not really; you can write something complex that seems simple and natural. And my example here again, is Tolkien. He invented this language and all these words, but it occurs in his fantasy world in a way that unfolds naturally, so you’re not really conscious of it. I would also add that, while a lot of people don’t like poetry, they tolerate it in Tolkien because the poems are sandwiched between prose.

Tolkien once used a great metaphor to describe this process, where he likened crafting a story to making a cauldron of soup. Essentially he says that while the cook has to be aware of all the different ingredients that go into the cauldron, and how they interact to shape the overall taste; the reader just wants to eat the tasty soup.

So as a writer you have to find a way to hide your ingredients in the soup to make them palatable.

Anyway, I hope you get the idea. I know that reading a dictionary or a big thesaurus is probably not your idea of fun. But if you’re a poet or a writer more generally, I would encourage you to go beyond the very simple minimalistic style that nearly everyone is doing today. Again, if you want to be remembered, you have to be original and to do that as a writer the most essential thing is having a broad vocabulary.

W.H. Auden would have killed to be able to sit down with the historical thesaurus of the O.E.D. at dinnertime with his Oxford fellows and nerd out. But this is something that wasn’t available to him; it is available to you. So why not use some of the amazing verbal tools at your disposal?

So in my last video, I said to keep it simple with your language. And it seems like I’m contradicting myself here, with advice to scale up your complexity. And I’m not trying to confuse you, just let me explain. Generally, simplicity is your friend. And what I mean by that is, don’t use unnecessary words when they’re not called for.

But this simplicity rule is kind of something that you tell beginners. You want to walk before you can run. Milton was cultivating an epic style, and that kind of writing is much more high-flown and baroque. The language is very sublime and grandiose.

Edmund Spenser, author of the Faerie Queene, looked to Middle English for inspiration, but he was writing a poem about knights in the middle ages, so that was an appropriate style for him.

And you want to find the style that is appropriate for the type of poetry and genre you’re trying to write. If you’re writing poems about everyday life in 2024, you’re not going to cultivate an epic sublime style. Even if you have grand ambitions, you should start small.

Its essential to lay your foundation.

Something I encounter that’s very common, is that people undertake literary projects without first mastering the basic elements of writing. They’re bad at grammar, they don’t know figures of speech. Their metaphor-making is clumsy.

With the audiobook revolution, a lot of people listen to audiobooks more than they physically read, and this is a good supplement to your studies. But just listening to audiobooks is not enough. You need to be reading physical books and staring at the words. There’s something you get out of looking at the page that you don’t get from hearing the words go through your head.

I’m saying something that should be obvious, but not many people today realize that they need to do this.

I am always reading manuscripts where the novelist or poet or whoever hasn’t mastered these basic elements. It’s a huge headache when you’re editing a manuscript riddled with grammar errors that the writer should know about but doesn’t.

So I’d recommend reading a basic writing book like ‘The Elements of Style’ by William Strunk and E.B. White—the author more famously known for writing Charlotte’s Web. The 4^th edition is only a hundred pages long.

Let’s talk about punctuation. Now in contemporary poetry there is heavy pressure to just not use any punctuation at all; and in prose it’s common to not see anything beyond the basic comma. And one side effect of minimalism is that people are no longer familiar with the subtleties of different punctuation marks: the difference between the comma and semicolon; the colon and the em dash (or long dash), and parentheses. Like, when should you use a parenthetical aside, and when should an aside be set off by two em dashes; or when should you use an em dash instead of a colon; or a semicolon instead of a comma.

I’ve said before that the reasons for minimalism are sometimes given to be political, like it promotes social equality. While I don’t doubt that these writers believe this, I think that’s ultimately a rationalization; when Hemingway and William Carlos Williams began popularizing minimalism, there were no political reasons behind it. The real cause is just declining literacy. People aren’t using complex punctuation because don’t know how; they inherited a growing literary trend from an earlier generation, and they use a political rationalization as an excuse for their incompetence.

A master poet who uses complex punctuation to brilliant effect is James Sale. A single sentence from his epic, The English Cantos, might contain a combination of colons, dashes, and semicolons. This is very advanced and obviously takes a lot of skill.

The long dash in particular, is an extremely versatile mark. As Strunk and White explain, it “sets off an abrupt break or interruption,” in a way that is “stronger than a colon, but more relaxed than parentheses.”

Some people don’t like Strunk and White because they interpret all grammar advice as commands that you need to follow to the letter all the time. But this isn’t the case. Every rule is just a rule of thumb.

If you don’t obtain a thorough understanding of sentence structure, when you’re writing poems using a strict meter like iambic pentameter it’s going to be harder to avoid the temptation to make syntactical inversions—that is, rearranging your word order in an awkward way to fit the meter, or to foist a particular end rhyme in place. And this is something I’m going to discuss in more detail a future video because these types of inversions are a very common problem I encounter when I read poetry manuscripts from amateur formal poets.

I’m going to suggest something else that is obvious. Stop watching TV so much. I know it’s hypocritical, because I’m talking into a screen right now, and you’re staring at the screen. Screens are a part of life today; authors have to be on social media platforms. But you need get off the screen and onto the page. The most common problem I find among aspiring writers is not a lack of talent; it’s a lack of discipline. And living in a culture where screens are everywhere makes it hard to cultivate discipline. If television is a problem for you, remove the temptation and get rid of it.

This is the complete opposite of the trendy, fun, thing involving going to coffee shops and hanging out with cool people reciting spoken-word poetry.

I’m telling you to do the complete opposite of that: I’m saying, ‘sit in a room reading big boring books’ – and if you’re a young person, the former option is a lot more tempting. Most of the people I know writing classical poetry are older. Often they’ll have been writing free verse for years before they finally conclude it’s a dead end and turn to formal verse. And maybe in their younger years they were wilder and more riotous, and now they are like the staid formal poets arguing for balance and proper grammar.

And it’s difficult to convince young people to take this road, which is by far the road less travelled, especially when none of their peers are.

Going to a poetry slam event is like being at a party. And being a classical poet is like being the lonely curmudgeon in the empty library, and you’re looking out the window at the people having fun, and you’re feeling all left out.

And nobody wants to miss out on life, you want to be where the action is. And I understand this. I’m not saying just sit in libraries all the time and never have a social life. But being a classical poet is not for the faint of heart. It does involve sacrifice in terms of effort and time commitment. It will alienate you from people who have ‘nice democratic’ opinions about not negatively judging anybody’s work as inferior.

But here’s the thing about exercising critical judgment: it isn’t nice, but judging people is how you have standards for things. It’s how you have moral standards in social life and society, and in art its how you have aesthetic standards. All art is not created equal. There are hierarchies of quality.

And it seems like Americans have a particularly hard time accepting this. Which is why free verse poetry as it developed in America with Walt Whitman is very different from European free verse poetry that developed under Friedrich Holderlin.

In America we have this idea that everything and everybody has to be equal. And equality of opportunity is certainly an idea that was essential to our founding.

But this idea should not apply to art. Whitmanesque free verse is just spontaneously scribbling down whatever comes into your head and thinking its just as good as everything else.

And you need to throw off this idea. That means undoing a lot of conditioning you’ve received over the years.

Alexis de Tocqueville thought that America would never produce great art because it’s too democratic, everyone is too practical and utilitarian, and egalitarian. Contrast this with aristocratic ages where artists have patronage and don’t have to worry about practical problems or being relatable, their concern was more achieving greatness and originality. And Tocqueville was technically wrong, but I think he was correct in spirit. There is great art here. But in the literary world these figures have by and large arisen by accident and had to struggle a lot in their lives; many of them felt out of place with the tenor of their times, and so they’d often turn to alcohol to cope with this. A disproportionate number of great American authors have been alcoholics.

Now fast forward to today, this impulse towards equality is now taken to an extreme by the literary establishment. In a way that I would argue is actually Un-American and not like it was in the past, it’s much more socialistic. It actually more closely resembles the literary scene in the USSR that Vladimir Nabokov satirizes at the beginning of his ‘lectures on Russian literature.’ Nabokov describes the typical plot of a state-sanctioned Russian novel and like, what you had to do to pass the censors. And what you had to do was basically, espouse the party creed in a sentimental and quote “hopelessly monotonous” way. You have the virtuous protagonist who is a champion of the working class, and the plot takes place on a model farm or factory or mine; and then you have the antagonist, a saboteur tampering with the plans of the Soviet undertaking; often this will take the form of a crime novel where the saboteur must be found; and you have the happy ending with the triumph of the state in the form of the working class hero.

The novels are very puritanical and non-controversial. And it’s just like, replace ‘working class hero’ with ‘trans person of color’ or some other character of intersectional status, and soviet literature is basically the same as the stuff being pushed by the mainstream literary establishment in America today.

A have a friend, a former academic, who told me a story about an English professor he knows at the University of Colorado who is teaching her students to scan texts for their diversity content. Are there any characters who are BIPOC or LGBTQ or some other acronym? And if yes, are these characters portrayed in a positive light? If the answer to either of these questions is ‘no,’ then the book is judged inadequate.

Now my friend, being of liberal inclination but not a maniac, confided to me that he was disturbed by what this radical professor was teaching her students. And he should be. Because what that English professor was teaching was no mere academic exercise, this is training to enter the corporate world. This is exactly how a lot of employees in the big publishing companies today operate. They are essentially like the Soviet censors. And this is not a fringe thing, this is mainstream.

Why is it that good art in socialist countries is virtually nonexistent? Except in cases like Boris Pasternak or Alexander Solzenytsin –who were butting heads with the regime. It’s because in those countries the artist is not allowed to write freely. You have to tow the party line, cheer on the dogmat. And this is the development we’re seeing in America.

Here’s an example. A lot of people will say, ‘hey, those romantic poets—they were great, such passion, such beauty in their verse. Let’s revive romanticism.’ So occasionally you have people who will be called romantic or neo-romantic poets, even though they lived in the 20^th century or are living now. My own style has been referred to by this term.

But nobody ever says—hey, whatever happened to Soviet Realism? Why doesn’t anybody write like that anymore? Or, remember all that great literature produced during Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Let’s bring that back. Nobody says that. Communist countries do not produce quality writers. And the literary establishment today in America is not favoring quality writers—in the MFA programs, in publishing, anywhere.

So the point of this digression is to make an argument for the case that: if you’re a real artist, that means having standards. Don’t buckle to mediocrity. Don’t praise stuff that isn’t good.

I would advise, for the most part, to avoid hanging around people and writers who are going to drag you down and help you improve your craft.

It’s best to try to find a writing community full of people who share your values and high standards. Because those people are going to help you get better. For the most part, this is going to be online.

As I’ve said: aim for beauty, aim for greatness. And that means doing a lot of hard, boring groundwork.

When you’re studying math or science, are you sitting around having socratic discussions, expressing your opinions on parabalas or the periodic table? No. You’re memorizing a lot of stuff, you’re doing exercises to apply principles. It’s not fun. Nobody signs up for a math class with the expectation that it’s going to be fun. And yet if you take an art or literature class or poetry workshop, there is that expectation. And yes, you’re reading entertaining stories, but you have to work at the basics too, so that you can appreciate Paradise Lost.

Since we’re not living in a time where students are taught literature in this rigorous way, you have to do it yourself. You have to be your own disciplinarian.

That’s why I say, read the Dictionary and thesaurus for vocabulary, grammar books for basic writing tips. Don’t let yourself off with the excuse that you don’t have time. If you don’t have time for this stuff, you shouldn’t have time to write a novel or a long poem.

I am not doing these tutorials for you to become some willy nilly poet just expressing yourself. That’s what most poetry teachers do today. You’re not going to create anything valuable that way. I want you to be a literary genius.

Now obviously there’s some natural talent and imagination that has to come along with that. But the thing about geniuses is—and I’m remembering something I once read in a Stephen Pinker book, I’m quoting him here–geniuses are wonks.

Mozart is the pinnacle of genius in music, right? He was a child prodigy, he great natural talent, yes. But here’s the thing. He started composing when he was like 5. But he didn’t actually write his first masterpiece until he was 18. That’s a long time to be writing mediocre stuff. And that’s an average period of development. You have to practice your craft for a long time and apprentice under masters before you yourself are a master.

Child prodigies—who also by the way have parents who are nurturing them and pushing them—just have a 20 year headstart on everybody else.

So if working hard at your poetry is something you’re prepared to undertake, I am willing to help guide you to, to the best of my ability. So if you have specific questions or suggestions about this and where to go, reach out and leave a comment. If you have ideas for specific video topics you’d like to see, please let me know. Please also let me know if this video was just way too long. I’m going to try to do some more short, punchy videos as this series goes on. But I crammed a lot into this here because, like the first video I did, I’m going over basic foundational issues. So future videos will contain less digressions.

And if you pursue this route, I can’t promise anything, but in the long run I think it will work out better for your legacy.

Before I go, one last thing. Since I didn’t give any tips specific to poetry, I will say one here.

I’m taking this, again, from James Sale’s Poetry Circle Newsletter, which I discussed in my first video and also have a link to in the description of this video. Last time I cited his thirteenth rule, ‘aim for beauty,’ and this time I’m going to cite his first rule. I’m jumping around a lot here. And his first rule is: write bad poetry.

I know I started this video asking, ‘why are you still writing bad poetry?’ And while you don’t want to do this forever, this is not the end goal, you will inevitably write bad poetry when you start out. I wrote bad poetry for years, everybody does it. Everybody begins in mediocrity. Even Shakespeare’s first few plays weren’t that great. Titus Andronicus is completely over the top.  You need to be practicing writing, and that involves writing stuff that’s mostly bad. So don’t be afraid to write a lot of bad poetry—using the writing tools I’ve described here. And that with that, I will leave you and say, until next time.

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Andrew Benson Brown has had poems and reviews published in a few journals. His epic-in-progress, Legends of Liberty, will chronicle the major events of the American Revolution if he lives to complete it. Though he writes history articles for American Essence magazine, he lists his primary occupation on official forms as ‘poet.’ He is, in other words, a vagabond.

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