# Poetic structure



## dihydrogen monoxide

Why is it that sentence structures, ie. word order that are found in poetry, grammatical in languages but unnatural in spoken language?


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## Hulalessar

The short answer is to make the words fit the meter.

The longer answer is that poetry is an art form which has its own rules. though they may differ according to time and place. In poetry every word can be considered a piece of a mosaic which is chosen carefully and put in the right place according to the effect you want to achieve. If poetry wanders too far from syntax though it risks being obscure -  which is only fine if you want to be obscure.


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## Penyafort

It is also interesting to know some of the differences among languages when counting those meters in poetry. 

For instance, in the Romance languages, the Alexandrine verse in Catalan, French and Occitan is made of 12 syllables divided by a caesura (6+6), while in Italian and Spanish it's got 14 syllabales (7+7). This is mainly due to differences in word length and this affects the way of counting syllables in verses.


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## Welsh_Sion

We also make use of 'unnatural' structures in poetry in order to affect such things as alliteration, assonance, rhyme, onomatopeia and in Welsh what we call _cynghanedd_ (a system of 'harmony', which is essentially unique to us - but you can write, usually very poor in meaning/sense however, _cynghanedd _in other languages.

Also in Welsh, 'clipped' forms of words (reducing syllables, say) and placing the adjective before the noun are also 'tricks' of the poet's craft in order to satisfy the constraints of so-called strict metre - in order to satisfy strict syllable counting rules per line and also the constraints of _cynghanedd_.

Note in Welsh that the sonnet is NOT considered a 'strict metre' form of poetry as it is not written in _cynghanedd_.


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## Treaty

Also, poets tend to muse with older stages of the language (like imitating the classical language used by preceding poets). In this sense, the 'unnatural' grammar and vocabulary might have been somewhat natural in an earlier point.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

However, in BCS which is free word order, the poetic word order is not unnatural. But usually, if a language has a sentence structure that sounds weird, it is usually written of as poetic in linguistics.


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## apmoy70

In Μodern Greek the most common poetic verse (since 10th c. CE) is made of 15 syllables known as _iambic decapentasyllabic verse_ (iambic because each syllable is composed of two feet, one unstressed followed by a stress called *«ἴαμβος» íămbŏs* --> _iambus, mocking verse (because iambic verse was first used by satirists)_: ws|ws|ws|ws||ws|ws|ws|ws|w (w=weak, s=strong, ||=caesura), and decapentasyllabic from dekapente=15 in Greek + syllable (7+8).
Like BCS, Greek has free word order, the poetic word order may change depending on the emphasis and the meaning the poet seeks to express.


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## Awwal12

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> However, in BCS which is free word order, the poetic word order is not unnatural. But usually, if a language has a sentence structure that sounds weird, it is usually written of as poetic in linguistics.


In Russian it isn't exactly unnatural (certainly nothing which could be compared to the Latin poetry, where they often utilized an almost random, highly unprojective word order), but the word orders which would be otherwise emphatic aren't actually percieved as such in poetry.
Consider:
Пришла, рассыпалась. *Клоками*
Повисла на суках дубов,
*Легла* волнистыми коврами
Среди полей, вокруг холмов,
*Брега* с недвижною рекою
Сковала пухлой пеленою,
Блеснул мороз, и *рады* мы
Проказам матушки-зимы.
(Alexander "Our Everything" Pushkin, a winter scene from Eugene Onegin)


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## ahvalj

Awwal12 said:


> In Russian it isn't exactly unnatural (certainly nothing which could be compared to the Latin poetry, where they often utilized an almost random, highly unprojective word order), but the word orders which would be otherwise emphatic aren't actually percieved as such in poetry.


_Там врагу заслон поставлен прочный_ ©
There — to the enemy — a barrier — has been put — firm
”A firm barrier has been put there against the enemy”.

_Я тебя в твоей не знала славе_ ©
I — you — in your — didn't know — glory
“I didn't know you in your glory”.


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## Quiviscumque

Penyafort said:


> It is also interesting to know some of the differences among languages when counting those meters in poetry.
> 
> For instance, in the Romance languages, the Alexandrine verse in Catalan, French and Occitan is made of 12 syllables divided by a caesura (6+6), while in Italian and Spanish it's got 14 syllabales (7+7). This is mainly due to differences in word length and this affects the way of counting syllables in verses.



Well, in practice you can get  the same number of syllabes, since French counts 6  syllabes to the last stress, and the same for Italian and Spanish. So, if you scan this verse following Spanish rules, you get 14:

Que- tou-jours,-  dans- vos- vers,  (6+1)// le- sens- cou- pant- les- mots (6+1)

And if you scan this verse following French rules, you get 12:

En- cier-ta- ca-te-dral  (6)// u-na- cam-pa-na ha-b-í-a (7 -1)


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## Quiviscumque

Hulalessar said:


> The short answer is to make the words fit the meter.
> 
> The longer answer is that poetry is an art form which has its own rules. though they may differ according to time and place. In poetry every word can be considered a piece of a mosaic which is chosen carefully and put in the right place according to the effect you want to achieve. If poetry wanders too far from syntax though it risks being obscure -  which is only fine if you want to be obscure.



To be pedantic, we can say that divergence from usual language has an "indexical" function (to point to the fact that we are uttering poetry) and an "iconic" function (to build well-sounding utterances).


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## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> (certainly nothing which could be compared to the Latin poetry, where they often utilized an almost random, highly unprojective word order)


A reader who's unable to read Russian with native-like fluency and therefore unable to grasp the stylistic, discourse prominence and artistic effects of the word orders employed in Russian poetry will say precisely the same thing about Russian poetry. I assure you that Classical Latin poetry is in no way more random than that of Russian in that both obey the (phono-)syntactic movement rules of their corresponding language and as such can be easily parsed back by the reader (I suppose a lack of this is what you meant with "unprojective"). Some of it stretches these rules relatively more for stylistic flourish - but this is neither random nor arbitrary, instead it's part of the contemporary stylistic taste and goes for both languages (including conscious imitations La<Gr and Ru<La). Medieval and New Latin poetry in particular can display levels of artifice I doubt are often parallelled elsewhere, but that is because some of it borders rather on being a scholastic exercise.

What is true however is that many "classicising" writers of, say, English, did seem to think of poetic syntax as arbitrary, and this way of thinking is reflected in their poetic output to the chagrin of many readers both modern and contemporary - Milton's "Paradise Lost" seems to be often cited as an early specimen in this regard. I suspect this is partly responsible for the (near-)death of modern English poetry - ultimately a language will not long tolerate arbitrary abuse promoted to poetic virtue. In fact it looks to me that what today is mislabelled as "poetry" in English is precisely a middle finger to that former fad, with the reversal taken to the extreme.


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## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> Some of it stretches these rules relatively more for stylistic flourish - but this is neither random nor arbitrary, instead it's part of the contemporary stylistic tastes and goes for both languages.


How about this academic example from Tibullus:
_Me tenet ignotis aegrum Phaeacia terris, abstineas avidas Mors modo nigra manus._
It's as unprojective as possible, literally all phrasal groups are utterly destroyed.


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## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> How about this academic example from Tibullus:
> _Me tenet ignotis aegrum Phaeacia terris, abstineas avidas Mors modo nigra manus._
> It's as unprojective as possible, literally all phrasal groups are utterly destroyed.


It's a bog-standard AB AB schema, without which an epigram is barely thinkable: _Me tenet ignotis _↑ | _aegrum Phaeacia terris_ ↓ || _abstineas avidas_ ↑ | _Mors modo nigra manus_ ↓. This tradition seems to be directly continued, albeit in a rudimentary form, by Russian lines like _Там врагу заслон поставлен прочный_ cited by ahvalj. By breaking up the phrasal groups of prose speech, poetic rhythm is created. This rhythm is iambic throught the whole epigram: the last word bears the phrase accent in each half-verse, and each latter half-verse has more words/is heavier than the first. This is parallelled in the intonation as well as in the semantic content - the last part always puts the foot down (thesis), so to speak. This effect is what the word order is there to achieve.


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## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> _Me tenet ignotis _↑ | _aegrum Phaeacia terris_ ↓ || _abstineas avidas_ ↑ | _Mors modo nigra manus_ ↓


"Mors nigra" is also dismembered by "modo" which isn't a part of the noun group but rather modifies "abstineas" (the finite verb).

Russian poetry isn't any less projective than colloquial Russian; it doesn't contain any dislocations which don't exist in the normal language. The only difference is that if some word order is marked in some way in normal Russian (and probably is limited by some narrow syntactical context), it may be basically unmarked in poetry. Cf. "там врагу заслон поставлен прочный" vs. "а заслон-то там врагу поставлен прочный" (emphasized rhematic adjective), "заслон врагу поставлен прочный, но..." (contrastive).


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## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> "Mors nigra" is also dismembered by "modo" which isn't a part of the noun group but rather modifies "abstineas" (the finite verb).


_modo_ is a sentence-enclitic and regularly occupies the second position after the first stressed phonetic word in an intonational phrase. Latin word order is highly dependent on phonetic prominence, more so than that of Russian, and this is exploited fully in poetry. It's not having things like this as part of one's language competence that makes it seem like a language's syntax is random.


> Russian poetry isn't any less projective than colloquial Russian; it doesn't contain any dislocations which don't exist in the normal language. The only difference is that if some word order is marked in some way in normal Russian (and probably is limited by some narrow syntactical context), it may be basically unmarked in poetry. Cf. "там врагу заслон поставлен прочный" vs. "а заслон-то там врагу поставлен прочный" (emphasized rhematic adjective), "заслон врагу поставлен прочный, но..." (contrastive).


The situation is precisely the same in Latin, as I've explained. What you call dislocations are derived by the same (phono-)syntactic movement rules in poetry as in colloquial speech. These rules may be bent somewhat for artistic effect in both languages, and in Russian there most certainly are surface word orders that are foreign to colloquial speech whatever the intonational/discourse emphasis, for example splitting a preposition-genitive noun phrase with another genitive, as in _от неба цвета_, which would leave the reader wondering whether it's "from the sky's colour" or "from the colour's sky", or indeed "from the sky the colour of..." even though it's naturally meronymic (or what is _do stalowego nieba próżni_?). Using any such wording in speech instantly screams "poetic excerpt", as there are no regular discourse conditions where this would be the unmarked word-order.


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## apmoy70

If you're interested in a specimen of _iambic dekapntasyllabic_ in MoGr, the poem by Vitsentzos Kornaros (1553-1613 or '14) Ἐρωτόκριτος-Erotokritos composed in the Cretan dialect, is a perfect one. Τhe following is an excerpt (the whole poem is more than 10,000 verses long) with English subtitles:


Tὰ 'μαθες Ἀρετοῦσα μου τὰ θλιβερὰ μαντάτα,
ὁ κύρης σου μ' ἐξόρισε 'ς τῆς ξενιτιᾶς τὴ στράτα;

Τέσσερεις μέρες μοναχὰ μοῦ 'δωκε ν' ἀνιμένω
κι' ἀπόι νὰ ξενητευτῷ πολλὰ μακριὰ νὰ πχηαίνῳ.

Καὶ πῶς νὰ σ' ἀποχωριστῷ, καὶ πῶς νὰ σοῦ μακρύνῳ,
καὶ πῶς νὰ ζήσῳ δίχως σου 'ς τὸν ξωρισμόν ἐκεῖνο;

Κατέχω το κι' ὁ κύρης σου γρήγορα σὲ παντρεύγει
Ῥηγόπουλο, Ἀφεντόπουλο, σὰν εἶσαι 'σὺ γυρεύγει.

Καὶ δὲ μπορεῖς ν' ἀντισταθῇς 'ς τὰ θέλουν οἱ γονεῖς σου
νικοῦν τηνε τὴ γνώμη σου κι' ἀλλάζει γὴ ὄρεξὶν σου.

Μιὰ χάρη Ἀφέντρα σοῦ ζητῶ κι' ἐκείνη θέλω μόνο
καὶ μετὰ 'κείνη ὁλόχαρος τὴ ζήση μου τελειώνω.

Ὅπου κι' ἀν πάγῳ κι' ἀν βρεθῷ, καὶ τόν καιρόν 'που ζήσῳ,
τάσσω σoυ ἄλλη νὰ μὴ δῷ, μηδὲ ν' ἀνατρανίσῳ.

Kι' ἀστάξω ὁ κακοῤῥίζικος, πώς δὲ σ' εἶδα ποτὲ μου,
μ' ἕνα κερίν ἀφτούμενον ἐκράτουν, κι' ἔσβησέ μου.

Καλλιὰ 'χω ἐσὲ μὲ Θάνατον, παρ' ἄλλη μὲ ζωὴ μου,
γιὰ 'σένα ἐγεννήθηκε 'στὸν κόσμον τὸ κορμὶ μου.


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## Hulalessar

Sobakus said:


> That is true however is that many "classicising" writers of, say, English, did seem to think of poetic syntax as arbitrary, and this way of thinking is reflected in their poetic output to the chagrin of many readers both modern and contemporary - Milton's "Paradise Lost" seems to be often cited as an early specimen in this regard. I suspect this is partly responsible for the (near-)death of modern English poetry - ultimately a language will not long tolerate arbitrary abuse promoted to poetic virtue. In fact it looks to me that what today is mislabelled as "poetry" in English is precisely a middle finger to that former fad, with the reversal taken to the extreme.



To misquote Mark Twain: "The reports of the death of English poetry are greatly exaggerated."

The first footnote to my edition of _Paradise Lost_ says: "The first sentence is typical of the style of _Paradise Lost_ - in syntax, vocabulary, in multiple-choice elusisveness, and in "the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another." [...] Where modern poetry aims to be colloquial, Milton stands on epic ceremony, aims for the exalted and magniloquent."

The syntax is though not arbitary, just more complicated than the average bit of prose. Just as in Latin, the elements may be organised to present the ideas in an order that the poet considers important. Poetry is not necessarily meant to be grasped on a first reading. Indeed, much great poetry goes beyond mere meaning in any ordinary sense. It approaches music in that it is "poetic" just as music is "musical". Any analysis can only be tautological or fanciful and that is what makes it sublime.


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## Sobakus

Hulalessar said:


> To misquote Mark Twain: "The reports of the death of English poetry are greatly exaggerated."


Oh, I'm not basing what I say on someone else's reports, but on constant observation and equally constant, even if gradually decreasing, bewilderment. These observations are of people who actually study Classical poetry calling absolutely non-metrical speech divided into lines on the basis of sense or plain length with the word "poetry", whether it be in their own language or in an attempt at Latin, in which case they sometimes preface it with "I can't write in a classical metre yet", which in the context is equivalent to someone saying "I can't sculpt yet, but here's my sculpture of a banana" - and presenting you with a banana.

   Note that I'm not singing the tiresome old song of "modern art is a joke" - I totally accept that entirely everyday objects can be made into art pieces as long as there's a purpose and an interpretation involved. Besides my knowledge of other languages typologically different from English (including Latin) theoretically puts me at a considerable advantage when faced with arcane syntax, which is why I enjoy some English verse whose syntactic coils strangle the natives. But when 90% of people refer to unmetrical speech divided into lines as "poetry", you have to accept that that's the new definition of poetry, while the old one is so alien to these 90% of people that they don't even comprehend it, otherwise they could see that the two are incompatible, just as sculpture and bananas are. Metrical speech is called "rap" or "lyrics" in today's English, while "poetry" is now characterised by nothing more than florid and expressively figurative language, matching the olden-day _artistic prose._

   This shift, I claim, is attributable to the gap that was purposefully created to distinguish "high" poetry from popular "doggerel", so that one is now incompatible with the natural syntax and metre of English speech, while another is fit for nothing but obscene limericks, so that both are now considered distasteful. Even plain old rhyme is perceived as bland and objectionable. This is something I had been trying to look past, not notice and/or rationalise in some way for a long time, but ultimately there's no escaping the obvious.


> The first footnote to my edition of _Paradise Lost_ says: "The first sentence is typical of the style of _Paradise Lost_ - in syntax, vocabulary, in multiple-choice elusisveness, and in "the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another." [...] Where modern poetry aims to be colloquial, Milton stands on epic ceremony, aims for the exalted and magniloquent."


I think this quite misses the point - have a look at this little write-up: Milton’s Latinisms by Zach Pickard.


> The syntax is though not arbitary, just more complicated than the average bit of prose.


At this point it seems fitting to introduce Milton's average bit of prose.


> Just as in Latin, the elements may be organised to present the ideas in an order that the poet considers important.


It's precisely that this is not how the English language organises words in a sentence. From _Gécseg, Z., & Kiefer, F. (2009). A new look at information structure in Hungarian_:

"the syntactic structure of English and standard French can adequately be described in terms of grammatical subject and grammatical predicate, whereas the syntactic structure of Hungarian (and possibly of Slavic) is based on logical subject and logical predicate, and that of colloquial French on topic and comment. This means that the typology proposed is based on three pairs of notions: (i) on the traditional notions of grammatical subject and grammatical predicate, (ii) on the notions of logical subject and logical predicate, and (iii) on the pragmatic notions of topic and comment."​
You will find some illustrations for Hungarian at wikipedia (albeit presented under an interpretation that the article I quoted disputes). This is not an opinion, but an empirical fact - if one tries to describe the syntactic structure of English in terms appropriate to Hungarian, they will fail. Latin might be either of the logical subject/predicate, or the topic/comment type, which means that the way its word order functions is extremely alien to English. Hell, it can be extremely alien to Russian, which is only slightly less inflected! Moreover, some of the most alien Latin turns of phrase belong precisely to the colloquial language (cf. the parallel situation in standard/colloquial French), where certain factors encourage one to use the full potential of a language's syntax to express ideas in the most efficient way. This may or may not be further exploited in poetry, but by itself syntactic complexity, or greater difference from a typologically different language such as English, does not make speech more poetic or sublime.

You can present sentences to an English, French, Hungarian or Japanese speaker and have them judge their grammaticality. You can elaborate their judgements in a theoretical framework, which will allow you to predict the natives' judgements, which in practice means that you can replicate them. You can adapt this framework to different stages of the language (the job of historical syntax), including based on such express judgements by Milton's (near-)contemporaries, and so assess the grammaticality of Milton's English. And if you do that, I for one have no doubts that most of his writings will be found to violate the basic syntax of any historical form of English, and it will be small wonder to be able to track these violations to grammatically valid models in Latin and possibly other foreign languages.


> Poetry is not necessarily meant to be grasped on a first reading. Indeed, much great poetry goes beyond mere meaning in any ordinary sense. It approaches music in that it is "poetic" just as music is "musical". Any analysis can only be tautological or fanciful and that is what makes it sublime.


I very much enjoy poetry that is sublime as regards its meaning and requires several readings and perhaps even a commentary to fully grasp. This however is wholly different from the objection I'm expressing: making violence to the syntax of a language in exchange for sublimity cookies and envious looks from the _volgus profānum_. You can get a sense for how topic-prominent languages convey thoughts from this blog post. Now imagine someone writing an epic poem in this kind of translationese. Would that be sublime, or laugheable? The beauty is in the eyes of tradition: Latin translationese is sublime because Latin was a high-status language; Singaporean English is an amusing argot to a westerner because Malay, Mandarin and Tamil are not. Now I'm wondering if there's a Singlish epic somewhere fit to crown this discussion.

I'll just reiterate that my purpose here is not to bash Milton (he's merely an example I can readily cite) or his tradition, but to establish it as a major cause behind the present state of English poetry. What I think about it is not as relevant as what the language community as a whole has decided it thinks about it.


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## jimquk

Regarding "the death of English poetry", I think it has been largely displaced by popular song. While much of it may be uninspiring, much is, in my opinion, poetic, using the standard techniques of rhyme, alliteration, juxtaposition, repetition, imagery, etc, to produce pleasing and memorable songs that people find meaningful. 

Critics will point out that a high proportion of popular music is fixated on slushy teenage love or bad boy antics, but high culture can be similarly mocked for an obsession with pastoralism or martial heroics.

I find it rather heartening that thousands of songwriters are working with their creative talents to give us new music every year, and that enough people appreciate this to make it a paying proposition, at least for some.

The contrast with the indifference to high culture could hardly be more striking - if it doesn't speak to people, and depends on the life support of subsidies, it deserves to die.


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## Hulalessar

To Sobakus

Poetry is perhaps one of those things which we think we can define, but when someone presents us with something which does not immediately strike as being poetry we may find it hard to say why. All we, or at least I, can end up saying is that some collections of words do not fall within the neat compass of either poetry or prose defined in some vaguely traditional way.

Anyway, this thread is about syntax. I do not think that we can complain about poetry which departs from expected syntax. Poetry aims to be different from ordinary discourse even if it uses so called ordinary language. You do not have to depart from natural syntax to be different but it is one way of being different. Regular metre is not a feature of everyday language even if every language has some sort of rhythm to it. Writing in iambics is just as unnatural as writing in convoluted syntax. A poet may consider it part of his armoury to fracture syntax. I said half-jokingly in post 2 that poets juggle with syntax to fit the metre, but I have little doubt that they also do so for purely poetic reasons and because they delight in it. Poetry transcends concepts such as "topic prominent".

Milton was imbued with Latin but his poetry is not translationese anymore than that of Virgil, Horace and Ovid, who worked to Greek models. Milton's poetry does not go to the same lengths as Latin poetry in juggling with word order. It may not follow the "logical" order of prose but it does not do things like separating adjectives from nouns. Old English and Old Norse poetry is just as convoluted as any Latin poetry and was not modelled on it. Milton's poetry would be just as convoluted if he had taken skaldic poetry as a model.


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## Sobakus

Of course we can complain about it - what do you mean? Too much of just about anything can be excessive. But I need to repeat again that these are not idle complaints. My assertion is that this sort of slavish and excessive imitation has been the death of English poetry. I don't present myself as a prophet of doom, but as a coroner pronouncing the cause of death.

Being different from ordinary discourse is not the aim of poetry any more than the point of painting or sculpture, or indeed of writing artistic literature, is being different from the thing they're trying to depict. Both realism and a pointed lack of it are valid means of artistic expression. This distorted understanding is precisely part of the problem that I've been pointing out. Poetry aims to be an artistic representation of the metres of ordinary speech. It's on its last legs because the agglomeration of restrictions that have been imposed on it have broken down that necessarily link between poetry and ordinary speech. This is precisely why poetry has retreated into music where no dead Victorian poet can glare at and pester it.

Writing in iambics in English is not unnatural at all. All language is rhythmically organised at every level - this is one of its fundamental properties, and it is precisely this property that makes poetry both possible and universal: cf. _Peña M. et al (‎2016) - Rhythm on Your Lips._ English is an iambic language through and through. Iambic pentameter is without question the classical metre that fits the English language best, and it's no mere coincidence that it's ended up being the metre par excellence. I even read a comment somewhere where a girl and her friend had read a bunch of Shakespeare and, to their professed annoyance, couldn't stop speaking in pentameter lines between themselves afterwards - she even provided examples.

I think you're really under the impression that poetry is something inherently unnatural and arbitrary, even as you deny my claim that it has been made so. It is not - it's grounded in concrete psycholinguistic phenomena and can be analysed in the same terms as all other language. Of course with a belief like that you should struggle to understand how there can be something wrong with, or an excess of, arbitrary artificiality. When you say "A poet may consider it part of his armoury to fracture syntax", you're plainly saying that poetic syntax is considered arbitrary by some poets. This was what I started my original remark with, and on this we fully agree. The core of my contention is that this belief and its imposition on the general population is incompatible with the survival of poetry, because poetry with no grounding in live speech cannot be an artistic representation of live speech, doesn't speak to people, and is destined to die.

Poetry might transcend some concepts, but it doesn't transcend grammar. The kind of agrammaticalty we're talking about, I suspect, is rooted in the methods of teaching Latin that were widespread then and remain even now, as something very similar occurs even in prose translations of the classics, to the extent that it's often easier to understand what the Latin says even as you're seeking aid from a translation. This is noted in a rather common adage that knowing Latin too well tends to adversely impact one's English. Incidentally, these methods themselves have lead to yet another death of Latin, but that's another story altogether.

When you equate Milton to the Latin poets, you again completely loose sight of the notion of degree. Translationese is not imitation - translationese is excessive imitation whose product ends up ungrammatical and/or unidiomatic. Imitation is integral to any tradition and in itself is not an evil. In fact our modern culture tends to view it much more negatively than they did in the antiquity, what with our notion of plagiarism. There are some Graecisms in Latin poetry for sure - and they instantly stand out to the reader as such, and are used sparingly for special effect. The requirements for familiarity with Greek while reading Latin are genre-specific and relate to culture and mythology instead of language, syntax and semantics.

Poetry being convoluted is not something I'm criticising. Poetry can be convoluted in various ways, and this is certainly part of its appeal. I'm criticising an over-reliance on agrammatical syntax that's down to excessive imitation and code-mixing, which is promoted to a defining aspect of good poetry, which leads to unattainable standards, an output that is frustrating and incomprehensible to the majority of readers whose brain hasn't been addled with Latin translation exercises, and ultimately to a break with linguistic reality. The Victorian society was characterised by many parallels to this which I'm sure everybody can conjure up themselves.

Besides the obvious impossibility of even assessing what Milton's poetry would have looked like had he not known Latin and had been instead simmering in skaldic poetry, this is entirely beside the point. Milton as an individual poet is beside the point. English poetry's collective deterioration and demise with the general population through artificially severing its vital link to ordinary speech on the one hand, and the demeaning treatment of popular poetry on the other hand, is what I'm calling attention to.


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## Hulalessar

To Sobakus

Some random obversations on your last post.

Of course you can complain! “You can’t complain” is just a turn of phrase. My point is that poets do all sorts of things to language and one of them is to depart from standard word order. “Fracturing syntax” is perhaps too strong a term.

Do I think that poetry is “inherently unnatural and arbitrary”? Yes and no. “Unnatural” and “arbitrary” are very tricky words.

Speech and writing are two are related but different things. How different can depend on the degree of diglossia present, but the difference I want to focus on is that very broadly writing comes in neat packages, but speech does not. All writing is to some degree artificial if it is compared to speech. By “artificial” I mean something like “consciously contructed”. Whilst poetry can be oral, what we are talking about in this thread is essentially a written form even if it takes into account elements proper to speech. So, in my view, poetry is artificial before it gets off the ground simply because it is writing. But even oral poetry is artificial because, even if composed in ordinary language, it is different from ordinary discourse. If it is not different from ordinary discourse then it is not anything.

The bricks of poetry are words. Whatever it is that people expect from a poem they expect words chosen and arranged in some way that differs from ordinary discourse. What they get differs according to language, time and place. Possible elements include: rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, metaphor, wordplay, flights of fancy...and non-standard word order.

Art forms proceed by action and reaction. Some poets will sum up an era whilst others want to rewrite the rules. Today’s iconoclast will be old hat tomorrow. You will find many definitions of poetry but none are complete. Since I am reluctant to define what a poem is I am reluctant to say that anything presented as a poem is not a poem because it does not conform to any idea I may have of what a poem is. I suppose I do have a limit. I cannot go far with those who assert: “I am an artist and anything I do is art”. You may be making some sort of a point if you cut snippets at random from newspapers, paste them on cardboard and declare you have created a work of art, but all you have done is made a point. Experiments are made which may or may not be successful. Art sometimes goes into cul-de-sacs from which it has to retreat.

I am not sure I can agree that all language is rhythmically organised at every level. For a start some languages, like French, lack any sort of emphasis on syllables whether it be stress or weight. Languages with stress do not have regular rhythm. No one speaks English in iambics. Indeed, any poem of length written in any metre risks metronomic monotony if the metre is not varied by some means such as extra-metrical syllables, reversal of feet or substitution.

French poetry is organised solely according to the number of syllables in a line and Japanese according to mora. Old English poetry was not metrical, but concerned only with the number of stresses in a line. The same goes for English nursery rhymes.

Analysis of any aspect of a poem can be no more than an intellectual exercise which results in a tautology. Appreciation of some poetry may increase with repeated reading and study, but a poem, like a piece of music, should be experienced rather than understood.

English poetry was not killed of by Milton. The following was written in the 19th century. It takes wing. It is ecstatic. It is sublime. It is pure poetry.


*The Windhover*

_To Christ our Lord_

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins


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## Quiviscumque

I am just a third-hand aficionado to Poetics. However, I must stand up for Milton. "Being different from ordinary discourse is not the aim of poetry"... or perhaps it is one of its aims. Just think about Pindar, or about Old Irish poetry: Watkins cites a Middle Irish treatise on grammar and poetics in which the "arcane language of poets" is recognized as one of the five varieties of the Gaelic tongue. 

Or, in my own language, think about Góngora's "Soledades" (by the way, the same poet was able to write plain "classical" Spanish verse and even popular ballads).

I wish a could read A N Toporov's papers; surely Sobakus can.


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