Form, of course, does not exist in a vacuum. It is not an abstraction. In thinking of form we should keep in mind the following matters that relate to its context:
- Poems are written by human beings and the form of a poem is an individual's attempt to deal with a specific problem, poetic and personal.
- Poems come out of a historical moment, and since they are written in language, the form is tied to the whole cultural context.
- Poems are read by human beings, which means that the reader, unlike a robot must be able to recognize the dramatic implications of the form.
From the preface of
Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, 3rd ed.
I found the above book, which I have wanted for many, many years (5 to be exact) in the 50 cent section of the Evanston Public Library. I love pillaging.
Similarly, I was reading an article on David Jones'
The Anathemata and thinking about the nature of poetry and poetic criticism. The Symbolists of the early 20th Century would have us believe that poetry brings to life the dualism inherent in all things; the physical and the spiritual; the natural and the transcendental; the utile and the artistic. This school of thought is often known by its catch phrase, "Art for Art's sake." In
After the New Criticism, Frank Lentricchia relegates to the New Critics a role of similar dualism. This common misconception is merely an age-old failure to understand the concept of incarnation. Rather than a gnostic separation of the material and the divine, the New Criticism would seek to show how the primary experience is deified in the poem by a re-structuring or re-making of the experience, in a sort of reverse incarnational activity. I may be entirely wrong, but my understanding of what little reading in
Understanding Poetry I have done leads me to believe that the Formal approach to a poem leads to an understanding of the poem that does not directly relate back to primary reality--not because it ignores primary reality, but because, in the case of the poem, what actually existed at the time of the poem has been transfigured and immortalized to such an extent that to read it in (or read into it) a static setting (temporally and otherwise) would eliminate its incarnational status in the same way as trying to define the very instant in which the sacrament of the Eucharist is complete is also self-defeating.
I do not know enough about these things to continue, so I will end with a quotation from Gregory Dix, an Anglican theologian:
The whole pre-Nicene church was obviously not just denying the evidence of its senses about the bread and wine in pursuit of a phrase when it spoke of the Eucharist as being in very fact that Body and Blood of Christ which was born and crucified for us. The explanation of its almost crudely "realistic" language lies, it seems to me, in two things. First, we have to take account of the clear understanding then general in a largely Greek-speaking church of the word anamnesis as meaning a "re-calling" or "re-presenting" of a thing in such a way that it is not so much regarded as being "absent," as itself presently operative by its effects.... Secondly, and perhaps chiefly, the explanation lies in the universal concentration of pre-Nicene ideas about the eucharist upon the whole rite of the eucharist as a single action, rather than upon the matter of the sacrament in itself, as modern Westerns tend to do.
The Shape of the Liturgy, Gregory Nix, 2nd ed., found in "Incarnation Reconsidered: The Poem as Sacramental Act in "The Anathemata" of David Jones", Kathleen Henderson Staudt,
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 26, No.1 (Spring, 1985), pp. 1-25
