Bass Thoughts

You may have guessed already that I'm not an intellectual. Neither am I a specialist. I try to be a jack of all trades and master of none, and on my better days say I'm a Renaissance man, and on my worse, admit to possessing a lazy left brain. That's why the little things I discover please me so much.

You may have known this piece of information, but I just learned it. J.V. Cunningham is the fulcrum of 20th century formalist poetics, the pivot point between Yvor Winters and Timothy Steele. Winters was very much an influence on Cunningham; he helped the younger poet get into Stanford University. And one of Cunnigham's better students while teaching at Brandeis was Timothy Steele. Isn't this a delicious tidbit?

So here's a taste of Cunningham from his essay "The Problem of Form":

For this is the poet's Poetics: prose is written in sentences; poetry in sentences and lines. It is encoded not only in grammar, but also simultaneously in meter, for meter is the principle or set of principles, whatever they may be, that determines the line. And as we perceive of each sentence that it is grammatical or not, so the repetitive perception that the line is metrical or that it is not, that it exemplifies the rules or that it does not, is the metrical experience. It is the ground bass of all poetry.

Mr. Cunningham is logical to a fault I'd say, but that last point, that meter is the ground bass of all poetry, is a superb one, especially for someone, like myself, who requires a little music with his thought.

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Previous "Twentieth-Century American Poetics" postings:
-On the Other Side of the Line (Denise Levertov)
-That Line is Out of Focus (Denise Levertov)
-Buildings Built for Ghosts (Robert Creeley)