On Formal Poetry: Beauty is the Ethics

Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky and Immortal Song

The Beauty of a Formal French Garden

Note: A shorter version of this article was published on my site and then substack. This is my latest, most complete version.

In our era of declining education and mass media we often don't have the knowledge of past forms to use as a foundation to create new forms today. This article draws attention to some very wise words by Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky, and expands on them, to suggest some ways forward today to combine our original engagement with our own time and place with the beauty inspired by an understanding of the forms of poetry. The good news is that the positive side of our predicament is that anyone with a passion and learn almost anything through rigorous study due to the best side of the internet, as opposed to the worst. I hope this article helps this process.

Song in the Sky and the Garden

This morning, to escape the tyranny of the screens, I took a little walk. After so many weeks of cloud, it was clear and cold, a mythic winter day of old. My narrow chain of brooding thoughts was overwhelmed by singing from the top of a naked Oak. I looked up and saw what I expected: the splash of read of a Cardinal. I listened a while as he sang with such lyricism that he temporarily brought spring three months early. I continued on my way, doing a roughly square tour of streets. When I was nearly home more singing arrived. This time, from my hunched over neighbour, now in her late 80’s. She was either calling out to something or someone real or imagined or singing a song. More particularly, she seemed to be singing the same word repeatedly in an incantatory sing-song voice. I know she is not long for this earth now, so hearing her singing is a particular pleasure.

Only when I returned to my house did I make or renew the connection in my mind between poetry and song. My favourite poetry not only has memorable words, but also a lyricism, based on structure. It is formal poetry. Now, why particular words and certain melodies should quicken the heartbeat is, no doubt, in part, a mystery. Here are a few lines that have this effect on me. From A.E. Housman:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / is hung with bloom along the bow.

Here is another by Housman from a late poem:

Their shoulders held the sky suspended; / They stood, and earth’s foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, / And saved the sum of things for pay.

As a man who loved men but could not live his love, and as a classics scholar who knew well the horrors of war, his poetry is an elegy for tragedy. Then, we have an early poem by Emily Dickinson,

Not one of all the purple host / Who took the flag to-day Can tell the definition / so clear, of victory As he, defeated, dying, / On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph / Break, agonized, and clear!

Then, to round out but a few examples, here are a few words from Shakespeare which always shine in memory:

These are the boughs that shake in the cold. Now how though pleasest, God, dispose the day.

And the whole of Sonnet 55, beginning:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of Princes shall outlive this powerful rhymeBut you shall shine more brightly in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmearedwith sluttish time….

One could continue indefinitely. These lines, and so many others, have lifted me out of the banality and tedium of a common day, a run of bad weather, or in one form of despair or another. Why and how did it do that to me? What was it? Not simply the moral, the emotion, or the thought. No, something more mysterious.

The quintessence of poetry, it seems, slips through the net of form, idea, or experience. Housman said poetry “sends a shiver down your spine.” Dickinson said she knows it’s poetry if “it takes my head off.” Poetry appears, alchemically, magically, in a certain run of words that are exhilarating all out of proportion to their content. They could never be rephrased with equal power. One wants to bow down, look up, to engrave those words on the soul, to live by and through them, and perhaps, later, to put them on a tombstone. That’s poetry, at least to me. I am aware that many people today see it differently. So, it might be useful to discuss my views in more detail. And here I descend from the poetic vision or dream to the rather rougher world of dialectic.

The Poem’s the Thing

Generally, what is considered good, true, or just, in a given society is a sort of tyranny without appeal. Here, the notion of “Progress” does us a disservice. We think that we are, by necessity, better than the past. Yet better technology does not mean we easily surpass the poetry in Dante’s Divine Commedia or the Indian classic, The Bhagavad Gita, to take two examples. We are often like fish who swim in the sea. If someone were to tell sea fish that they are in something called “the sea,” and there are many kinds of water, lakes, rivers, ponds, swamps, or big lakes, or that stars and mountains, suns and galaxies exist, they would find such things incomprehensible, and not only because they might not speak our languages.

Nonetheless, it may be of some extremely limited use, like some gadfly stinging a complacent beast, to point out a few stars, a mountain or two, and maybe even a stairway to the sun. Here is my outrageous, at least to our historical moment, premise: Beauty is the ethics of poetry.

There, it is out, and a thousand mis or under interpretations abound. However, they will continue to have the free play of continued illusion, delusion, or simply ignorance at a lack of opposition to their circling for a few more paragraphs. I have a few preparatory comments first to clear the way or path for our later, more important discussion. Let’s first briefly discuss what poetry is not. This is crucial because, in our era, a lot of not-poetry is out there, say on social media, masquerading as poetry and taking air from poets who, here and there, are not dead in spirit, mind, and song.

To understand what poetry “is”, we must begin by way of subtraction. First, the quality of a piece of writing purporting to be a poem must be sharply distinguished from its maker. The hard metaphysical fact is that the maker of a poem is irrelevant to the poem qua poem. Who made the poem is essential for the maker, their friends, and family, and to the valid political goal of making sure people from all groups have a chance to be recognized as poets where their poems as poems deserve such recognition.

However, in a larger sense, each poem stands, soars, or falls based on what it is, not who made it, like, if you’ll pardon the apparent incongruity - the space shuttle. If it flies well and lands safely, we don’t care who made it. Humans have always struggled with each other, individually or through partisan battles for power within or between cultures. Our battles today are often focused on new and old identities. Undoubtedly, some of these struggles are legitimate or just, as a new world is constantly struggling to be born. In fact, a particular document purporting to be a poem may have very just or valuable things to say. But this does not, in and of itself, add the weight of one atom to the question – yes, but is it poetry?

Secondly, a poem is not partisan politics advanced through language, however noble or awful the partisan may be. Undeniably, all poems are set in a particular political position, so to speak. Horace’s primary purpose was poetry, yet he didn’t want to alienate the Emperor, either, and must have in part approved of his policies for good government after so many destructive civil wars. Yet, he didn’t have a partisan political agenda either.

In fact, a poem, without trying to be, is, in its soaring sweep or butterfly grace, a mighty and gentle rebellion against all theorizing and partisans. It is a free, even wild act of the human spirit. It is not a shackled or chained act of someone who feels compelled to parrot everyday banalities. This is not to say that a poem must avoid the same material that politics treats, but it will do so following its own glancing, elliptical, sun and shadowed way, like a mountain stream descending from the pure source with the clearest water, so transparent, one sees clearly the world below.

Instead of bludgeoning power-seeking language of better and worse, of us and them – the generalizations of the hornet, we might have, for example, the human blood of suffering spoken in haunting lamentations. Paradoxically, if one has been historically oppressed, this is the best way to break through the callous indifference that is so common to the human being, to meet and commune with other minds – through sung humanity and longing. Axes work rather less well. Even a victory leads to more axe fights until all are dead except one bloody killer.

Thirdly, no theory gets a free pass, however fashionable or politically perfect it seems to be in a given place and time. I.e., Stalineque? Anti-communist, Marxist, old or new Socialism under other names…? This is so for a few reasons. To begin, as Goethe said, “All theory is gray, and green is the tree of life.” It is full-blooded life and memorably worded insight we want for joy or the sheer pleasure of it or to glimpse the invisible mountain we are all climbing and are often alienated from. Let’s face it, most of us are lost most of the time, and quiet desperation is usually uncomfortably close. What we don’t need are doctrines that one finds in the newspapers, journals, or on X, formerly known as Twitter, Instagram, or Tik Tok.

Lyricism is the Ethics of Language

So, shall we return to “Beauty is the ethics of poetry”? To begin our ascent to this idea, to show its power and universal, even timeless validity, allow me to start with an idea a long way up the mountain by Jewish-Soviet Nobel laureate for poetry, Joseph Brodsky: “Lyricism is the ethics of language.” It is not surprising that this line should be found in Brodsky’s essay, “The Child of Civilization,” about the poetry and struggles of Osip Mandelstam, the fine Jewish-Soviet era poet who was first exiled by Stalin for darning to write a poem against Stalin, then who died in a later purge, along with millions of others. It might be helpful to give a longer quotation to better understand the short one I have provided above. This quote begins with Brodsky quoting Mandelstam, then the rest is Brodsky:

“Power is repulsive, as are the barber’s fingers…” ...The iron broom that was walking across Russia could have missed him if he was merely a political poet or a lyrical poet spilling here and there into politics. After all, he got his warning and could have learned from that as many others did. Yet he didn’t because his instinct for self-preservation had long since yielded to his aesthetics. It was the immense intensity of lyricism in Mandelstam’s poetry which set him apart from his contemporaries and made him an orphan of his epoch, “homeless on an all-union scale.” For lyricism is the ethics of language and the superiority of this lyricism to anything that could be achieved within human interplay, of whatever denomination, is what makes for a work of art, and lets it survive. This is why the iron broom, whose purpose was the spiritual castration of the entire populace, couldn’t have missed him.”

One must add here that Mandelstam was a poet with a profound vision of cosmic justice. The notion that “lyricism is the ethics of language” does not mean that a passionate concern with justice is necessarily absent from the poem, though a poem might be about something else, like life, death, stones, or stealth. What it means at its heart is that a certain subtlety of music will not be sacrificed or debased at the altar of….anything at all.

No doubt, everyday language is always debased to some degree in its everyday practical use, as almost everyone is buying or selling something, a cup, car, doctrine, partisan project, or leader of one kind or another. Power in one way or another is trying to force its way…. I do not mean to say that buying and selling is intrinsically evil but that it is rarely the place for language that sings like a stream descending from the purest snows. Even in our private speech, we can fall back on cliched or hallmark words or even trite expressions surrounding us, like sleeping or noxious gas. In our public speech, rhetoric, bombast, and polemical writing of lower or higher quality is the norm.

Now, with the internet, we consume horrendously vast quantities of banal and atrocious writing along with visual images of the same quality. This is particularly true of the overwhelming amount of so-called poetry published online or in some theory-infested journals that wouldn’t know a pure free thought if it flashed in front of them out of the deepest night. The main reason for this is that many people who write poetry have never studied it and have no understanding of the use and meaning of its forms, to use to make new ones. To write a great poem takes as much skill with language as playing the violin. Now try just picking that one up and playing…

All too often, we think that having no form, writing paragraphs of prose, cutting the paragraphs up into stanzas, or doing it this way or that makes it poetry. And this stuff, complexity without art, gets published and is even, at times, fashionable. Such is our time. We think this stuff is great because we have collective amnesia. We often don’t read great writers but read their quotes on social media. Or, we dismiss them because their identity or culture is different from ours as if that could ever be their fault. This all being the case, how could one ever communicate higher things, thoughts, sentiments, and understandings that shine on the mountain and in daily use, here and there, in such a swirling pool of murk and slime one finds on our screens?

Finding the true, even if tragic, and singing it with pure notes is the eternal function of poetry. It lifts us out of the mire and helps us see and feel with clarity and sunlight, or doom, but a doom with light, a doom that teaches and says—this, everything may be tragic, but it all matters.

Let me return to my word “Beauty” and set it alongside Brodsky’s word “lyrical.” In the context of what he is saying, he is precisely right. Why do I then add the vague, much contested, and, in our fallen era, hated word “Beauty?” It has an awful aristocratic ring in a resolutely democratic, even socialistic, time. I will explain. The first critique of beauty is that it puts lipstick on a pig; it is a lie against the horrors or injustices of life. As one Canadian playwright was reputed to have said (I heard this second hand and cannot vouch for who said it), “We should take all ideas of beauty and throw them in the lake.” He felt morally and intellectually above such mundane and useless ideas.

I disagree. I would sharply distinguish “pretty” or to “prettify” and insist that what I am talking about, beauty in its absolute sense, is ontologically part of the universe. Meaning it is part of “what is.” What do I mean? Let’s turn briefly to Homer, not the very funny fellow on TV, but the other one. Anyone who has read the epic poems The Iliad or The Odyssey in English or struggled with Greek and paid attention knows a few things. Let me list them. Firstly, The Iliad contains much of the horror of the human condition, the injustice, the battles, and the unfairness of fate. The young men in WW1 who romanticized war and brought The Illiad with them to the trenches, tragically, had not read closely. War is correctly depicted as brutal, even if true heroism does exist. It is true that many things we see as evil are not treated as such in these great poems. This is to be expected, as each culture is different and has different values. But we can learn how our concerns might be treated as poetry...

What one does not realize at first during a light read of these poems for the pleasure in the story or the language is their structural power. In the dactylic hexameter meter used often in Ancient Greece and Rome particular in epic forms, the lines of poetry, every one, has both variety and unity, and moves across the page like a wildfire in the forest. In the same way, the books unfold with great movement and economy. Seemingly, nothing important is left out, and nothing extraneous is added. Again, we see a structure that is as clear and clean as an elegant and complex mathematical proof, a masterpiece by Leonardo De Vinci, or a Supreme Court Decision when everything unfolds correctly. What is another name for this fine structural power that contains both unity and variety, nothing in excess, with glimpses of pure vision, such as of the mountain heights set against the finest blue, or of some Platonic soul intoxicated by the true and good? We have a word for this: Beauty.

One might say all this is fine, but the word “beauty” is historically bound. Different eras and places have different views. And today, for political reasons, we often despise and want to do away with the word. So, how does your definition of beauty survive all this change?

Beauty cannot be defined; instead, it is a way to be climbed. If one looks back to the past or at many diverse cultures, one will find commonalities despite all differences. One is that human wisdom will be there. A second is that the heart of beauty is ontological and structural. While the structure of The Odyssey by Homer and Ulysses by Joyce are very different, they have profoundly linked unfolding episodes leading to an overall vision of radiance. And the other thing one finds, for example, in these two works, and in many others of epic or lyrical poetry, is the quality of the song.

Let me give another example. An everyday banality today is the saying, “Everything is art.” This, of course, means precisely nothing. If everything is art, the word art has no meaning; it literally adds nothing to “Everything.” Now, if we change the quote a little and say, “Everything is capable of being art,” then we have a saying that makes sense. Suppose someone tried to prove this article wrong. They were determined to make something profoundly ugly but make it properly. They took a miserable subject, say birdshit, mixed with paint, and made a great show of randomness, chaos, ugliness, and incoherence. Of course, their lack of structure would have to have some ordering principle to ensure that the broken elements align in the right (wrong?) way…. By the end of the project, they would find, horror of horrors, that they had created a new form of ….beauty!

Today, even that kind of creative destruction discovers, to its horror, that its beauty isn’t happening. Most of us have a profound amnesia. To attack and radically re-think past forms, you must know they exist and have studied them carefully. This, and everything else I am talking about, is either dead, dying, or hiding. We’re so lost we have no idea what we don’t know. We climb down in ditches or up on anthills and think our masterpieces are mountaintops. Also, we have lost the song in our ignorance, and perhaps theory infested and now AI and technological influenced fallen age. We don’t understand music or care about it as we rush through our digital days in front of computers, mouthing slogans we read here or there on the internet or social media. And even if we loved song, who would print it? Who would buy it in an economy with a glut of lots lousy poetry that speaks to its maker and few others from the same parish?

A lot of our poetry today is so inwardly personal, one-dimensionally political, or built with such shards that it is nearly incomprehensible or worse, manifestly banal. The other danger our time knows well is the glacial gaze, alienated from life, presuming to correct or judge it. Conversely, song lives life as incandescent and bursts with joy, sorrow, love, or tragedy. It does not stand aside from life but lives it. And when you have song and intellectual depth together, you are on high plateau’s indeed.

To me, the death of song symbolizes our loss of humanity. It is true, the books are there. Some poets today do write fine poetry, in metered or free lyrical forms. Can we find them in our digital maelstrom of horrendous volume? The greatest poets can save us from the disasters of our own time. They have a longer, higher, deeper, embodied human view and see with penetrating lucidity the dangers of technology to human life. They would be legislators for humankind if we could hear them. They were born with this or that identity, which they know and honour - but they also speak words that freely soar across boundaries and up to the heights of understanding. They are out there, somewhere. So, yes, poetry lives. Poems like wildflowers blow in immortal groves, far from powerful praise.