The Vehicle of Language

Tags:: Billy Collins,; literary criticism,; poetry

For any teacher of poetry with the slightest interest in reducing the often high-pitched level of student anxiety, one step would be to substitute for the nagging and ultimately pointless question, “What does this poem mean?” the more manageable question “Where does this poem go?” Tracking the ways a poem moves from beginning to end puts the emphasis on the poem’s tendency to travel imaginatively and thus to carry the reader in the vehicle of its language. Instead of asking what Matthew Arnold was “trying to say” in “Dover Beach”—as if he had failed—let us follow the poem’s steps as it finds its way from the tranquility of its beginning, “The sea is calm tonight,” to its climactic vision of the world as a frightening battlefield, a “darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

The imaginative journey of a good poem is the result of many contrivances ranging from rhetorical modulations to leaps of fanciful conjuring and sudden shifts in time and space—the kinds of hops that Emily Dickinson may indicate with the dash. The point can be extended to suggest that these maneuvers are really what distinguish poetry from other forms of literary expression. A negative way to account for the unrivaled degree of imaginative freedom in poetry is to point out its exemption from both the rules of nonfiction, which would include—a reader would hope—logic, credibility, sequence, even research, as well as the rules that guide traditional fiction such as plot development, verisimilitude, consistency of character, and the like. Poetry—thank the poetry gods—is not obliged to show how a character goes about overcoming a set of obstacles to achieve a worthwhile goal, to echo a standard definition of the story.

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Thanks for this essay. I found the shift of emphasis onto the poem's movement quite beautiful; a kind of Copernican revolution, you might say. Or to give a more concrete example -- the curious experience of freight trucks driving by on Greek highways, labeled "Metaphoras," i.e. shipping. I don't know enough about Ritsos to say whether this figures in his work...

What this shift reminds me of is a discussion I took part in (it was only a matter of time) on the subject of whether a person's character can fundamentally change: http://www.pandalous.com/nodes/can_ones_character_really .
It's in a different register and tone, of course, but one of the nicest points to come out of that discussion was, precisely, this issue of movement. And it's a nice exercise to read the many kinds of shifting, feinting, maneuvering you describe as possible descriptions of a personality's course through time: and surely we all know people like these examples you give, including those who mean well as they move from feeling to deep feeling.

Ultimately, what feels right to me about the shift to movement is that it dissolves, to a certain degree, the distance between the reader and the poem itself: the move towards understanding is brought into a certain resonance with the poem's own music. Something very interesting happens when a (student's) uncomprehending stare is broken by the introduction of time. I don't want to include too many links here (the hypertext imagination...), so will just mention the quote attributed, also on Pandalous, to Messaien: "Eternity is a single tone; split it in half and you have rhythm."

Posted by An appreciative reader on Mon 6 Jul 2009
Use.

Posted by Julie Freese on Mon 2 Aug 2010

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About the Author

Billy Collins served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate. His latest collection of poems is Ballistics. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College, CUNY.

At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless.