The Scandal of Form
POETRY NATION REVIEW 13 (June 1986), PP 79-80
Donald Wesling, The New Poetries: Poetic Form since Coleridge and Wordsworth
(New York: Associated University Presses, 1986)
This is ‘the second of three volumes on prosody’. When the first appeared, The Chances of
Rhyme, it was attacked in this magazine by Nicolas Tredell (PNR 24). To equate `rhyme' with
device', then to define the poetic modern in terms of the denial of rhyme: that seemed bad
enough. But to suggest that it all suddenly happened in or about 1795, Tredell found absurdly
reductive. Elsewhere, C. H. Sisson questioned the very enterprise of defining modernity (TLS, 12
September 1980). Every poet worth the name at every age had sought to liberate language from
‘the shadow of what has become too familiar’, without abandoning the responsibility to be at
some level intelligible. Further objecting to Wesling's virtual identification of modernity with the
invention of `sincerity', Sisson felt prompted to return to essentials, and offered his own
memorable definition of poetry: ‘a receptacle for sense which cannot be put into prose, and
which burdens the speaker until it is said’. In this light, he reminded the author of The Chances of
Rhyme that one could not talk glibly of poets looking around for an alternative ‘device’ with
which to unload the meaning: form and sense were always inseparable.
Professor Wesling (University of California) has noted these rebukes, but does not want to dwell
on them. True, his introduction to The New Poetries incorporates part of the article in which he
replied to Tredell and Sisson, whom he believed to represent a critical conspiracy against him
(PNR 40); but all personal controversy, indeed all names, have been removed. Here he settles
down, with exemplary disinterestedness, to articulate the ‘materialist poetics’ which that article
only announced.
His avowed concern now is more with the plurality of techniques which emerged from
Romanticism -- hence the 'Poetries' of his title -- than with one dramatic moment of prosodic
rupture. And far from ignoring the tension between restraint and novelty, the ‘New’ for Wesling
turns out to revolve around an old problem, here summarized as ‘the scandal of form’. None of
the poets, Romantic and post-Romantic, whom he commends would deny that ‘poetic form is
what constitutes the very literariness of literature’. Indeed, if ‘scandal’ means ‘a grossly
discreditable circumstance, a cause of stumbling, a snare’, he only uses the word provocatively as
‘a convention of mock-horror and hyperbole’. There is no final escape of measure and rule. That
said, the Romantics did liberate language, did elude the scandal, to an extent hitherto unknown.
Thus, though Wesling wants to emphasize the diversity of modern poetry, his dating of its
inception is the same. By 1795 ‘shape as superinduced’ was, in Coleridge's terminology, giving
way to ‘form as proceeding’. The restraint of rhyme began to be questioned in favour of a poetry
of utterance. The conventional reflection of a given world by a politely subordinate individual
was outmoded: what mattered now was the self-expressive creation of alternative worlds.
Where Johnson had defined (and reduced?) prosody as an aspect of grammar, grammar itself
became a medium manipulated by the poet for higher, visionary ends. Innovation, instead of
POETRY NATION REVIEW 13 (June 1986), PP 79-80
Donald Wesling, The New Poetries: Poetic Form since Coleridge and Wordsworth
(New York: Associated University Presses, 1986)
This is ‘the second of three volumes on prosody’. When the first appeared, The Chances of
Rhyme, it was attacked in this magazine by Nicolas Tredell (PNR 24). To equate `rhyme' with
device', then to define the poetic modern in terms of the denial of rhyme: that seemed bad
enough. But to suggest that it all suddenly happened in or about 1795, Tredell found absurdly
reductive. Elsewhere, C. H. Sisson questioned the very enterprise of defining modernity (TLS, 12
September 1980). Every poet worth the name at every age had sought to liberate language from
‘the shadow of what has become too familiar’, without abandoning the responsibility to be at
some level intelligible. Further objecting to Wesling's virtual identification of modernity with the
invention of `sincerity', Sisson felt prompted to return to essentials, and offered his own
memorable definition of poetry: ‘a receptacle for sense which cannot be put into prose, and
which burdens the speaker until it is said’. In this light, he reminded the author of The Chances of
Rhyme that one could not talk glibly of poets looking around for an alternative ‘device’ with
which to unload the meaning: form and sense were always inseparable.
Professor Wesling (University of California) has noted these rebukes, but does not want to dwell
on them. True, his introduction to The New Poetries incorporates part of the article in which he
replied to Tredell and Sisson, whom he believed to represent a critical conspiracy against him
(PNR 40); but all personal controversy, indeed all names, have been removed. Here he settles
down, with exemplary disinterestedness, to articulate the ‘materialist poetics’ which that article
only announced.
His avowed concern now is more with the plurality of techniques which emerged from
Romanticism -- hence the 'Poetries' of his title -- than with one dramatic moment of prosodic
rupture. And far from ignoring the tension between restraint and novelty, the ‘New’ for Wesling
turns out to revolve around an old problem, here summarized as ‘the scandal of form’. None of
the poets, Romantic and post-Romantic, whom he commends would deny that ‘poetic form is
what constitutes the very literariness of literature’. Indeed, if ‘scandal’ means ‘a grossly
discreditable circumstance, a cause of stumbling, a snare’, he only uses the word provocatively as
‘a convention of mock-horror and hyperbole’. There is no final escape of measure and rule. That
said, the Romantics did liberate language, did elude the scandal, to an extent hitherto unknown.
Thus, though Wesling wants to emphasize the diversity of modern poetry, his dating of its
inception is the same. By 1795 ‘shape as superinduced’ was, in Coleridge's terminology, giving
way to ‘form as proceeding’. The restraint of rhyme began to be questioned in favour of a poetry
of utterance. The conventional reflection of a given world by a politely subordinate individual
was outmoded: what mattered now was the self-expressive creation of alternative worlds.
Where Johnson had defined (and reduced?) prosody as an aspect of grammar, grammar itself
became a medium manipulated by the poet for higher, visionary ends. Innovation, instead of
