Your Children Must Learn to Write Verse!*
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According to Mr. Gwynne (of GwynneTeaching.com and the author of Gwynne’s Grammar), all schoolchildren in England, century after century, used to be taught how to write verse. Back then, writing verse was considered an elemental component of an elementary education
How many adults do you know today who can write verse? Allow me to answer that question for you. Most likely, none. At least, not classical verse, which is the topic under discussion in what follows.
Fundamental opening question: what exactly is real verse, classical verse?
Let us begin by looking at what of modern verse, more commonly known as "free verse," consists of, and, after that, do the same for traditional verse.
Free verse is when someone takes a thought and writes it in a style that may or may not offer a vague hint of traditional poetry, but pays no attention to the rules of traditional poetry, and in consequence is not, technically speaking, poetry at all.
Let's look at an example of free verse: this, from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
“Free verse proliferated in the twentieth century because it was “modernistic”, secular and easier to write; but it moved poetry closer and closer to prose until it reached the point when it was no longer possible to tell the difference when read aloud.”
Now, let me give you an example of traditional verse, in the first stanza of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
Whose woods these are,
I think I know,
His house is in
The village though
He will not see
Me sitting here,
To watch his woods
Fill up with snow.
Please read it two or three times out loud to get a sense of the feel of the poem. That done, now read a later "stanza" of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-
Please read that "poem" out loud two or three times too.
Notice that, in the genuine poem by Frost, there is an exactness in the number of units that each line is divided into. In consequence, the poem has a rhythm. By contrast, in Eliot's "poem" nothing is measured at all; there is no rhythm of any kind. It could perhaps be not unfairly described as a free-flowing regurgitation of thought.
In Eliot's "poem" each line simply has as many feet (units) as Eliot happened to feel like giving it. Far from there being any coherent structure to the “poem”, each "stanza" has an indeterminate number of lines broken up into lines at random – which, by any traditional definition or practice, simply is not poetry.
“Led mainly by Ezra Pound in the United States, and quickly followed by T. S. Eliot in England with “The Waste Land,” both meter and and rhyming were abandoned, first by very few and then by more and more until where we are today, when they are scarcely to be seen today in published poetry.”
In summary of the essential difference between classical poetry and modern poetry-so-called that we have arrived at: what is referred to as free verse is -- by contrast with traditional, true poetry -- in reality no different from prose. In no way, shape or form does modern so-called poetry bear any real resemblance to poetry as traditionally recognized over the past several thousand years dating back to Homer and before.
Please think about this, good readers. For centuries—no, for millennia—the term “poetry” was given to a particular type of writing that met certain exacting criteria; whereas, by contrast, as with so many things in our “brave new world,” we have kept the name, but completely lost its meaning.
Might you perhaps be wondering if I am exaggerating? Well, consider the modern Orwellian tendency of so many people in today’s world to adjust the meaning of terms to suit our version of reality.
Homeschooling no longer means schooling at home outside schooling institutions. Now included as constituents of homeschooling are charter schools and online virtual public schools. Parents who want to be called "homeschoolers" no longer need to do their own teaching of their children, and to do it at home, as traditional homeschoolers have always done in the past, but can now enroll their children in a school and still call themselves "homeschoolers."
A mother is now called a "primary care giver." Anyone who cares for the same child while the mother works is also called a primary care giver, even though he or she is not the mother. (The implication here is that anyone can fulfill a child's need for his mother, which is not true.)
Homosexuality, originally called “one of the four sins crying out to Heaven for vengeance” in traditional catechisms, more recently rated as “a carnal sin,” and then, more recently still, defined as a mental illness, is now considered to be nothing more than a lifestyle choice. Fundamentally it is not a choice of lifestyle, however. At root, it is a choice of sexual activity, full stop.
Words frame our realities, something it would behove us not to forget. We need to work diligently to preserve our language and thereby, ultimately, to preserve our reality, and poetry is one of the means by which we can do this. The words that make up a poem, however, must be more than free-flowing. They must be used with precision, in accordance with the rules governing poetry.
While it is true that words can change their meanings over time, nevertheless, if we are to preserve our perennial understanding of reality, a tree should always remain a tree and a rose should always remain a rose. When we state that a tree is no longer a tree and a rose no longer a rose, we have, whether intentionally or otherwise, altered our reality.
And when reality is altered in a way that decreases our intellectual powers and our heart-felt sensibilities, as the meaning of the word “poetry” has been altered in recent times, should we not oppose, even fight, the change?
Mr. Gwynne thinks that we should. According to Mr. Gwynne (in the U.S. edition of his book Gwynne’s Grammar):
In order to be categorized as verse,
(1) the verse has to be made up of lines, and each line has to have a fixed number of accents or stresses, and each accent has to have a fixed number of unstressed syllables, one or two, attached to it, and
(2) each line has to be divided into feet and each foot has to have a specific combination of accented – stressed -- syllables and unaccented syllables.
If it has a regular meter and regularly rhymes at various intervals, it is called "rhyming verse." If it has a regular meter but does not rhyme, it is called "blank verse." Verse of either kind is what verse has always been in the past and what it must always remain in future in order to be justifiably referred to as “verse.”
To determine if a piece of writing is truly a poem, rather than prose posing as a poem, the reader must be able to "scan" the poem. That is to say, the reader must be able to determine how many feet (see above) per line the poem has and where the accents/stresses in each foot are placed. There are various forms of meter, but, to write poetry, you must use with precision whatever meters you decide to use.
Composing a true poem demands that you choose words for each line (1) that fit your meter and (2) the stresses of which (in each word) fall on the correct syllable of whatever word is used in any particular place, and never on the wrong syllable. To do this successfully is genuinely demanding for the brain.
Robert Frost had to think hard and carefully about each line in the poem that he was composing; T. S. Eliot minimally so by comparison.
Adequately skilled poets know that they cannot just pick any word and put it anywhere in the sentence that seems fitting at first sight. Such poets know that each word must have a precise position in the sentence that “works” if the sentence is to succeed with its readers. They need to give careful thought to finding the exact word for in the line of the poem that it is needed for, and then to fit it in exactly the right place there.
Let us now have another look at that opening of the first stanza of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods…”:
Whose woods these are,
I think I know,
His house is in
The village though…
Can you “hear” that each line has four units, and that the accent is on the second and the fourth syllable in each line, creating a rhythm and natural flow to the line; so that it rolls comfortably off your tongue as you read it?
That of course is not mere accident, but exactly what Frost intended. The poem is regarded as a classic and has stood the test of time partly because it is a poem that follows traditional rules for verse. Following traditional rules of verse is an essential part of poetry that is genuinely glorious, as well as of poetry that is “merely” good poetry!
Now let us return to that first stanza of Eliot’s:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Line one has three feet; line two has three feet with a different rhythm; line three has two feet; line four has four feet; line five has three feet; line six has two and a half feet; line seven has three feet; line eight has three feet of a different form from those of line seven; line nine has four feet; line ten has two and a half feet.
If you were to look, stanza by stanza, through the whole "poem" (most of which I have not quoted), you would also find that each "stanza" has a different number of lines.
There is no flow or rhythm to Eliot’s words. There are some clever phrases, such as "We are the hollow men, We are the stuffed men,” but a clever phrase here and there is not sufficient to make genuine poetry.
Also, the stresses are out of joint and, as one reads through the “poem,” the sounds feel jerky to the ear. It may be considered good writing, though even that is arguable, but it is not poetry.
Poetry is a science as much as it is an art. There is both a mathematical and a grammatical element to it, and if either of those two elements is neglected, let alone if both of them are, a poem cannot be competent, let alone great. Meaningful, it might possibly be, but it cannot belong to the category of poem!
Let us look at two more stanza's, each by a different poet. Make your judgement as to which of them needed the greater intelligence and skill and intellectual prowess for its composition, and then move on to where I tell you who wrote them:
There is a change—and I am poor;
Your love hath been, nor long ago,
A fountain at my fond heart's door,
Whose only business was to flow;
And flow it did; not taking heed
Of its own bounty, or my need.
* * *
“I have a lover with hair that falls
like autumn leaves on my skin.
Water that rolls in smooth and cool
as anesthesia. Birds that carry
all my bullets into the barrel of the sun.”
If you said the last poem, well, perhaps. It was written by the upcoming, contemporary "poet," Brian Turner. Turner actually won some literary recognition for his poetry.
Now, may the real poet, out of the two of them, stand up. William Wordsworth: the first of the two verses above is from his poem “The Complaint.”
I rest my case.
Your children should learn to write verse for several reasons.
Learning to write good verse produces good writers.
It expands your vocabulary and your understanding of the precise meaning of words.
It helps to preserve the English language, the language of great writers such as George Gascoigne, William Shakespeare and John Milton.
Learning to write good verse compels the writer to learn how to turn a phrase well; a skill without which, if you do not master it, you can never be a great writer, and with which, if you do master it, could bring you into the catalogue of the most remembered writers of all time.
To turn a clever phrase -- to say things with an eloquence, a profundity and a beauty in a way no one has ever achieved with them before -- will improve even your prose one-hundred fold. Examples of such achievements:
"They were the best of times, they were the worse of times." -- Charles Dickens
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” – William Shakespeare
“Solitude sometimes is best society.” -- John Milton
*This blog post is a combined effort of both myself (Elizabeth) and Mr. Gwynne. While I wrote the article, Mr. Gwynne kindly edited it and thereby improved upon it significantly, to which I owe him many thanks.
