Тимоти Стил о метре

      Wikipedia:

 Timothy Steele is a United States poet and academic. Born in Burlington, Vermont in 1948, he is a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles.[1] Some of Steele's early verse appeared in X. J. Kennedy's Counter/Measures in the early seventies. He went on to become a figure in the New Formalism movement, and was an original faculty member of the West Chester University Poetry Conference on Form and Narrative in Poetry. He received the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award in 2004.
Steele is the author of five books of poetry, among them, Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (1986). His poetry is known as more strictly "formal" than the work of most fellow New Formalists in that he rarely uses inexact rhymes or metrical substitutions, and is sparing in his use of enjambment.[citation needed] He has also the author of two books on prosody; a more technical book, Missing Measures, and the more popular book All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing.[

Kevin Durkin. An Interview with Timothy Steele

Обратите внимание: в конце говорится о ВОЗВРАЩЕНИИ метрической поэзии в американские литературные журналы!

 Steele is also an exceptional critic. His study of the modern revolt against meter, "Missing Measures" met with more criticism than praise for exposing the misconceptions about meter that Pound and Eliot labored under, misconceptions that continue to haunt the art of poetry and have given rise not only to the ungainly free verse that overwhelms us today, but also to a growing tide of shoddy verse that passes for being metrical. Perceived by many as a threat to the status quo, "Missing Measures", has also been a rousing clarion call to a younger generation of poets interested in the history and practice of their art. "Missing Measures", and Steele's own poetry, are two of the most significant, if least acknowledged, reasons why metrical poetry has been making a comeback in American literary journals.

http://www.ablemuse.com/2k/kdurkin-steele.htm

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ОТЗЫВ НЕИЗВЕСТНОГО РЕЦЕНЗЕНТА О КНИГЕ

(В конце говорится, что свободный стих в американской поэзии до сих пор преобладает над метрическим, потому что "формалистам" не удается сочинять такие же "увлекающие" стихи).

Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter
February 11, 2009 · 3 Comments

Whatever else is said about Timothy Steele’s book, it is a learned book. He understands the conversation on poetry and on aesthetics that touches on poetry. You will find him discussing ancient conclusions about the practice of poetry and giving a pretty clear look into the aims and purposes the ancients had. You will find him sifting through the arguments of the Modernists and the Romantics, making his own arguments against Kant (persuasive) and Coleridge (not altogether compelling, but serviceable), summarizing, explaining, elucidating Thomas Mann, Walt Whitman and John Dryden. In short: as an introduction to the theory and aesthetics of poetry up to the present time, this book would work.

One of the things the book suffers from is a bit of pedantry. If it is thorough, it is thorough not always only as a means to clear and rigorous thinking but simply because, it appears, Steele is himself a thorough person. I do not know many academic persons, but it seems to me from what I have read that one of the failings many such persons have is that they are not thorough on principle, but thorough because of their temperament: they seem to have a constitutional inability to shift their attention from a thing until it has exhausted all possibility for attention regardless of its intrinsic interestingness. This is a great help to them in their research, but often clutters up their writing (and it is the same with some preachers and the sermons they preach).

Another thing the book suffers from is an absence of wit or any charm of style. Arguments are not carried only on the basis of logic. A dull argument will often leave people unmoved and a charming persuasion, even if the argument is bad, will tend to prevail. At one level it is shallow to judge a piece of writing merely on style. Yet it is well to remember that argument and persuasion ought to go together, though they often do not, and when the choice comes, it is desire that sits on the throne of the will. We human beings do not have overmuch desire for the truth, and a bald argument is hard to desire. There is much to be said for the way in which the argument is made, especially about whether the writer himself desires it or not. In a book attempting to persuade, style becomes rather crucial (especially when one things the same author wrote a book called All The Fun’s In How You Say A Thing —though the word Fun is telling; clearly Missing Measures was not written for fun).

Steele is one of the New Formalists. Among his accomplishments is the accomplishment of being a poet. In the sea of free verse that is modern poetical endeavor, the New Formalists write formal poetry which employs meter, rhyme and traditional forms. This book is the argument for it, a formidable argument for it, an ambitious argument for it—attempting to show that the moment of free verse is over (and perhaps it is), a learned argument for it, one with valuable insights and worth considering. In the end, however, even one who is sympathetic to its aims and understands the argument is left wondering why it does not persuade.

Though the style does not help the work along, however, it is not enough to overthrow the argument itself. It may be that Steele has notions of academic writing which favor an objective style in which the merit of the writing is based entirely on the truth of the premises and the soundness of the argument no matter how boring (I personally have a hard time believing the world is such a place as readily accommodates such notions, and reading some of the things he says at the end, I wonder if he doesn’t somehow agree with me). Kant seems to have gotten away with it, so why should not Steele? It does not appear he has—from my limited reading—and I think the style is a symptom of something else which is the problem.

The problem is that the argument does not tip the scale of possibility. One leaves the book with a great deal of understanding about the course of poetry as it flows down to our time, but one does not leave the book with any excitement about the possibilities for poetry as it continues flowing forward. One leaves the book wondering why so much effort was made to achieve a conclusion so modest. I had the same response to Adam Kirsch’s overview of modern poetry in light of the conclusion he drew in the final essay, which is very similar. There is something Aristotelian about it, some complacency of endeavor after such ambitious research. To paraphrase one of Brandoch Daha’s enlightening similes, it is as if in realizing they could never hit the sun, they argued just for shooting at a bush instead. Brandoch Daha points out that it is easier to aim at a bush, but that such shots never get very high. This lack of appeal is a problem for the New Formalists.

One of the weaknesses of Missing Measures is that while it is rich in interaction with the thoughts and ideas of poets, it very seldom interacts with their poetry itself. And this epitomizes the failure and mediocrity of these attempts. While the ideas are learned, while the arguments are generally sound, one has to wonder whether ideas and arguments exhaust the poetry of poets. One has to wonder whether the real dealing is sidetracked on theories that, however learned, imperfectly inform the practice of an art which depends as much or more on inspiration as it does on calculation and which has never been altogether satisfactorily reduced to an explanation.

It is worth observing that part of Steele’s argument is that in some ways the Modernists wrote better than they knew. He makes this point not only with regard to Pound, of whom it might be expected, but also with regard to Eliot. The Romantic revolution of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the Modernist revolution of Eliot and Pound came with arguments and disquisitions, but the revolutions were carried off—they triumphed—in the incarnation of poetry that was new, and yet compellingly poetic. Which is why one has to wonder why instead of examining the theory and aesthetic rationale of poetry, Steele does not offer us a book examining the works of Formalist Poets, helping us by way of criticism to understand its glories. Well, it is disingenuous to say that one wonders.

No doubt when it come to the theories and arguments of Modernism in many ways Steele has the mastery of them. It does appear from his book that in many ways the Modern masters wrote better than they knew. Reading Formalist attempts one wishes they wrote greater poetry than arguments. Romanticism triumphed in revolution. Classisism, as Jaques Barzun has pointed out, was responsible with its arid assumptions and hypocrisies for the Romantic revolt. It had inhuman notions of humanity, and eventually people turned on it for its complacency. Romanticism, you can be sure, is not without its dangers; but it is foolish to believe the alternative does not tend toward mediocrity and complacency. Of course, Classisism can hardly be expected even to meditate revolution with any consistency (alas!), but perhaps it can still benefit us by boring us into another revolt against it should apathy grant it ascendance.

Missing Measures does include one poem; it concludes the book. To read it one would think Steele’s argument could be summed up with saying: why don’t we just do what Robert Frost was doing? It is a fine question. Why don’t poets like Steele provide us with the sort of poetry Robert Frost did?

Nevertheless it is a worthwhile book that Steele has written. Learning is always valuable, and though learned persons are often frustrating because their thoroughness is sometimes petty and their cautions sometimes fosters timidity, we would not be without such persons—if for no other reason than to get the necessary work they do done!

I am not against defending and theorizing. I think the art has to be informed by clear thinking; but I do not believe calculation—as I have characterized thinking—does more than clarify what intuition or inspiration provides. Desire leads; thinking follows, sorting and clarifying. We do what we want, not what we think we ought to want. We ought to want the right things, certainly, and we must purify our desires and discipline them. But when it comes to the right things, we have to do more than think about them, we ought to want them. And if we want other people to have them, we ought to help them to want them.

If our various attempts at poetry, our conflicting theories and debates all have something of the truth (which must be conceded, but which never comes without dissatisfactions) it is because we have only so far only received intimations of that which we pursue: Real Poetry. It is not a cause for despair or relativism; after all, we recognize poetry in the alien Hebrew forms, in translations from Asian languages, in Greek and Roman and Italian, in the forms of English and the free verse of T.S. Eliot. All of these partake of the idea of poetry, but they do not exhaust all its possible instantiations. True, there are meters some languages prefer, there are forms that some languages favor, but it seems to me that the ultimate persuasion is the production of compelling poetry. And I think that is still why free verse prevails over formal poetry in our day. It is difficult to find that distinct but elusive music which sounds mysteriously in the best poetry and which speaks to the heart in modern attempts at formal verse.