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Andrew Benson Brown‘s epic-in-progress, Legends of Liberty, chronicles the major events of the American Revolution. He writes history articles for American Essence magazine and resides in Missouri. Watch his Classical Poets Live videos here.

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21 Responses

  1. Joseph S. Salemi

    Wow, this is one helluva informative video! It touches on a great many aspects of versifying in a clear and uncomplicated manner. It emphasizes the fact that rhythmic repetition is hard-wired into poetry, no matter what name you give to its varying styles and fashions. Frederick Turner has argued that this is due to the natural pulsation and throb of our heartbeat, but it could just as well be explained as the very normal pleasure that all human beings take in regularized sounds, movements, and patterns.

    The measured beat of a drum, the rhythms of a cadence-count in military drill, the sound of a churchbell tolling the hours, or even the pounding of the surf upon a beach — there’s a mysterious charm in the regularity of an expected pattern that is deeply satisfying.

    As usual, ABB has also created something visually delightful to support the factual information he has presented. The images are always surprising and unexpected by the viewer.

    Reply
  2. James Sale

    Brilliant analysis – my only carping criticism is that iambic does not go ‘up and down, and up and down’ but ‘down and up and down and up’ and this is of necessity with the English language: to take three grammatical reasons – article+monosyllabic noun (the book, a pen); pronoun + monosyllabic verb (I walk, you sleep etc); prepositions + noun/pronoun (at home, by me etc) But this is carping – a fabulous and counterintuitive account of something that should be of profound interest to all poets.

    Reply
  3. Paul A. Freeman

    Here are two poems on the same topic. The former, ‘Endurance’, you’ll find in the SCP annuls, the latter, ‘Ice Maiden’, not. Let me know your thoughts:

    Endurance

    Endurance! A three-masted barquentine
    has lain a century beneath the ice.
    In frigid-climed Antarctica she’s been
    athwart the ocean floor. She paid the price
    for Man’s relentless struggle to compete
    with elements that Nature brings to bear.
    For months she’d creaked and groaned as ice floes beat
    against her lumbered hull, to rend and tear
    until (a wreck already) she slipped down
    beneath the frozen landscape, cracked and crushed,
    without her polar expedition crown
    while stranded crewmen watched aghast and hushed.
    Near pristine, on the sea bed she’s at rest
    where ghostly-pale anemones infest.

    END

    Ice Maiden

    Polaris!
    A three-masted Barquentine,
    forsook the north-most star
    when Shackleton renamed her during the Great War
    (a war that was to end all wars)
    and took her South,
    a virgin bride,
    to Antarctica.

    Powered by wind and steam,
    wooden-hulled to resist the caress of the ice pack
    and the thundering hulks of icebergs
    she conveyed her crew –
    fleas on a dog –
    to explore the frigid continent.

    Battered by gales
    she sheltered in the lee of those burly bergs
    while round her the ocean froze
    closing in like a besieging army.

    Fore and aft,
    caught in a breathless bear hug
    she endured the crushing, the cracking, the creaking,
    her moans and groans lost to the flatness
    of an icebound wilderness.

    Under steam, no pell-mell run could break her through;
    nor could an axe-hewn channel bring into reach
    the succour of open water;
    so she endured.

    At last, with a heave, her ribs caved in,
    her masts collapsed;
    a wreck before she even sank,
    she slipped beneath the frozen landscape,
    used up after months adrift,
    worn out before her time.

    She lies there today,
    fifteen hundred fathoms down
    on the bed of a cold, dark sea –
    a corpse, all broken-boned,
    yet still pristinely beauteous;
    with breakfast plates strewn across her deck,
    her wheel set to spin as she goes about,
    her crew an army of sea stars and anemones,
    her stern emblazoned with the hard-earned name –
    Endurance!

    END

    Is the latter lyrical prose? If so, is that not another term for free verse?

    Reply
    • Priscilla King

      If it doesn’t have rhythm, rhyme, or at least some consistent pattern of assonance, I think “lyrical prose” or “expressive prose” is a more accurate name than “free verse.” Clearly I’m in a minority.

      Reply
      • Dan Davis

        I generally agree. There are free verse poems that have something holding them together, but if I am reading sentences with line breaks, I have a hard time calling that poetry.

  5. Margaret Coats

    Well done video, Andrew. Though you use it to reveal the “formal aspects of free verse,” the book by Rothman and Spear (along with other helpful volumes on the subject) addresses all of English verse. The items you discuss (parallelism, for example) appear in what we presently call “formal” verse as opposed to “free.” And some of them (parallelism and syllabics, for two I know well) themselves have many categories. There are as many kinds of parallelism in Hebrew poetry as kinds of meter most useful in describing English poetry. Therefore (as I believe you mean to indicate) knowing these “formal aspects” of verse is truly valuable for comprehending poetry of many kinds in many languages. I can’t name a single book that taught me more than others did, but I have a small shelf that I keep for occasional consultation. Not to mention the memories of teachers and practical experiences of reading. Good recommendation to study more!

    Reply
  6. Cynthia L Erlandson

    Off and on I’ve been perusing a book by Charles Baudelaire that I happened across, which includes both “The Flowers of Evil” (with which I was immediately — and am still — mesmerized), and many sections of what are called “Poems in Prose”. These are written out in paragraphs, not lined out like free verse. I am perplexed as to why they are called “poems in prose”; some of these are interesting and thought-provoking, but to me they sound something like diary entries. Can anyone here who is familiar with these, explain why they might in some sense be called poems?

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Cynthia, in college I had a poet-professor (now deceased) named Michael Benedikt. Do not confuse him with an architect by the same name with the same unusual spelling. In 1976 he produced a thick book called The Prose Poem: An International Anthology. It has translations of Baudelaire and others, plus original prose poems by Benedikt himself. I say all this to let you know that even someone so expert as he on the question you are asking could NOT explain what prose poems are. He had plenty of seminar time to do so. I recall mainly his repeated assertions that prose poems are NOT JUST “purple passages” (which is what his examples looked like to me). That is, they were presented typographically as prose, but had within a number of what we consider poetic techniques that made the narrative or description or discourse delightful in an interesting, artistic way. But an author could do the same with prose principally intended to inform or to persuade or to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to the reader. Despite Mr. Benedikt’s wide-ranging anthology of the supposed subgenre, there were no poems in it that I could name as deserving to be included in an anthology of good poetry. That means I don’t accept the proposed answer that “poetic techniques” can make prose into poetry, and have no further answer to propose!

      Reply
      • Cynthia L Erlandson

        Thank you, Margaret; this college experience of yours with this professor is very interesting. Thank you for sharing this. I guess I rather suspected that, if there were a definition of “prose poems”, I would still continue to be a doubter, and would rather that such pieces be given some other name (scenes? observations? meditations?) Baudelaire’s passages are interesting, sometimes quite fascinating; but most of them I wouldn’t even call “purple passages”. Perhaps the material in them could have been formed into poems if the author had wanted to do that.

  7. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Literary Model Proposal

    I have a proposal to revamp the spectrum of words regarding literary writing. This spectrum involves the appropriation of literary words already in use for a smooth transition to the “suggested” model.

    Cat. Name Type Characteristics
    I: Songs Songs Purposeful rhythmic modulation
    II: Poetry Poetry Rhythm and Rhyme
    III: Poesy Blank Verse Rhythm/No Rhyme
    IV: Prosody Free Verse Elevated writing by words/sound
    V: Prose Literary All other literature

    1. Singing is purposeful rhythmic raising and lowering of verbal sounds that includes music with or without lyrics, chants such as religious ones, and anything deemed melodious to the human ear or at least to some such as rap and hip hop.
    2. Poetry incorporates both rhythm and rhyme in a structured verse or verses with a relatively consistent discernable rhyme scheme. Formal Verse is a substitute name for poetry. Formal verse has a strict meter (rhythmic pattern) and rhyme scheme. It is distinct from blank verse (meter but no rhyme) and free verse (without meter or rhyme).
    3. Poesy is blank verse best defined as unrhymed lines normally in iambic pentameter though some variations also fit. Poesy may be presently defined as involving “properties of units of speech that are defined over groups of sounds…it is usual to treat a language’s characteristic rhythm as a part of its…phonology.” (Wikipedia)
    4. Prosody is free verse having no constraints of rhyme, rhythm, or metrical pattern. The word “Prosody” involves “properties of units of speech that are defined over groups of sounds…”
    5. Prose is well written material of literary quality.

    My Perspective: From my perspective, this proposal would determne the different literary structures in recognition of the importance of each type of writing. If one is worried about redefining the past, artificial intelligence would soon resolve that problem. Future scholars and authors would easily absorb the differences and write as they please benefitting by knowing they have a home category.

    Counter Arguments: I already know some of the counter arguments. 1.) We already have the categories called song, poetry, blank verse, free verse, and prose. Why rename them? The answer is because there is no clear delineation between poetry and the other categories and in my opinion there needs to be. 2.) What would one call them? Singer fro songs, Poet is clear for poetry and the rest could be called by what they write: Blank Verser and Free Verser. I tried to imagine using the words of other categories, but somehow things like Poesicer, Prosodicer and Proser did not have good euphony. 3.) But we have been calling blank verse and free verse “poetry” for centuries! Answer; Errors in judgment were made earlier that cascaded and remained uncorrected. The time has come for clarification. 4.) What should we call Shakespeare’s writings? Answer: Anything you want depending on the model for each literary technique employed.

    Reply
    • Susan Jarvis Bryant

      Roy, I appreciate the effort to bring clarity to the blurred lines between literary forms, but I think this proposal risks solving a problem that may not actually exist. Over the centuries, “poetry” has encompassed a vast range of forms and its richness lies in that flexibility. While formal distinctions like blank verse, free verse, and prose are already well understood and taught, rebranding them under new umbrella terms feels more confusing than clarifying.

      Language evolves naturally, and so does literary taxonomy. Instead of renaming or segmenting existing forms, it might be more productive to continue educating readers and writers about the formal and stylistic nuances already built into the tradition. I believe, the beauty of poetry is that it resists confinement. Surely the value of a poem doesn’t depend upon what shelf it sits on, but the experience it creates and the precision and effectiveness with which it uses language to do that.
      This is why I love ABB’s latest video. He explores the creative process. He plumbs the depths of meaning… but never tries to hammer poetry into a one-size-fits-all box.

      Roy, I see this proposal as an attempt to redefine “poetry” narrowly to separate what you see as “true” or “structured” art from forms that veer from your ideal. I happen to think blank verse is poetry, so even those who lean towards formalism will have a problem with this rigid list. In an age where poetry is already politicized and weaponized to the hilt, I think this divisive proposal is more harmful than helpful.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Susan, I agree most strongly. The last thing the world needs is more goddamned definitions and categorizations and pigeonholes. They are strangling us!

        Some time back, here at the SCP, there was a lengthy and acrimonious debate over what I called “definitionism.” It came about because some persons wanted (against all the past practice of English poets) to redefine meter as “exact” meter, which would be metrical patterns without any variations or substitutions at all.

        I fought hard against this notion, but I kept bumping up against a kind of puritanical, computer-nerd mentality that seemed to feel that there shouldn’t be any latitude in how an iambic-5 (or any other type of line) ought to be scanned, and if it didn’t scan exactly as the name of the line suggested it was “flawed” or “imperfect.”

        Blank verse has been accepted as poetry in the English tradition since the beginning of the 16th century. Some of our most important canonical works have been written in it. It does not rhyme, but neither did any Latin or Greek poetry! Demoting it with the title of “poesy” is gratuitous.

        I think we should recognize that “definitionism” is rooted in a Platonic need to see the world in terms of ideal patterns, instead of just accepting the organic reality that has grown up naturally around us by way of cherished traditions and cultural givens.

      • Roy Eugene Peterson

        Susan, this was just a proposal, but it does reflect my view of writing poetry. The categories do fit how we already view poetry anyway in which rhyming poetry is differentiated from blank verse and free verse. In essence, historically the categories are subsumed under the heading of “Poetry.” I follow and recommend Evan’s instructive writings.

    • Brian Yapko

      Roy, Susan and Joe. I happen to be a big fan of blank verse — a term which I consider something of a misnomer since it is anything but “blank.” I think assessing blank verse to be rhyming poetry’s ugly stepsister would be a massive mistake both artistically and historically. The vast majority of classical poetry has been written WITHOUT rhyme and NOT with. I have seen statistics that up to 75% of English poetry is comprised of blank verse and not the other way around. https://poemanalysis.com/best-poems/blank-verse/

      Here is my short list of blank verse pieces that I would never consider in any way inferior to rhyming poetry:

      “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats is in blank verse.
      So is William Wordsworth’s “Prelude” and his “Tintern Abbey.”
      So is Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” and his famous translation of Dante’s “Inferno.”
      So is John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
      And Christopher Marlowe’s “Faust”
      And John Dryden’s “All for Love”
      And every one of Shakespeare’s plays
      And “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s” by Robert Browning
      And “Fra Lippo Lippi” by Browning
      And “The Mending Wall” by Robert Frost
      And “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot
      And “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson
      And “Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
      And “Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
      “Alastor” by Percy Shelley
      “To Spring” by William Blake
      “Manfred” and “Darkness” by Lord Byron
      “Hyperion” and “This Living Hand” by John Keats

      The list of immortal poems goes on and on. I don’t think I would have the heart to tell Wordsworth, Yeats, Keats, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Longfellow, Byron and Browning that their work has been demoted.

      Reply
      • Roy Eugene Peterson

        Brian, John Milton would be a good place to start. I remember in high school having to read “Paradise Lost” and being angry it was called poetry. Most of the others wrote poems that are considered ones for the ages that rhyme and in my mind that makes them poets. You will note I mentioned Shakespeare in my proposal.

    • Roy Eugene Peterson

      Dr. Salemi, thank you for elucidating a prior “definitionism” debate sometime in the SCP past that may have been before my joining. Under #2 discussion, you will find I allowed for less than perfect rhyme and meter, by using the term, “relatively consistent”. I am not averse to continue using the differentiation of poetry, as I mentioned in responding to Susan, of rhyming poetry, blank verse, and free verse. I thought I could help clarify the entire genre not out of a “puritanical” compulsion, but in an effort simply to categorize literary effort.

      Reply
  8. Mike Bryant

    Roy, after thousands of years of poetry in thousands of languages following more thousands of rules, from ancient Chinese tonal masterpieces to Japanese haiku, from the parallelism of the Psalms to old English alliterative verse… it is probably a little late to redefine poetry.
    I think Evan has it just right. He knows that rhythm and rhyme echo in the hearts and minds of many cultures. Every English speaking poet does well to learn the basics of rhythm and rhyme in order to get better and better at poetry. SCP was set up as a learning place and I think every one of us still has plenty of learning to do.

    Reply
    • Mike Bryant

      ABB… great content thoughtfully and beautifully presented… as always!

      Reply
    • Roy Eugene Peterson

      Mike, I believe you are correct about redefining literary history.

      Reply

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