Part I: Statement in Poetry
Part II: External Evidence
Part III: Scansion
(This article should probably be first, not fourth, which is what happens when you embark on a series without any idea where you’re going.)

There are, fundamentally, two ways to read a poem: privately or publicly. A popular but bad poem best illustrates the difference. Since I have an especially persistent correspondent defending it, W.E. Henley’s “Invictus” will serve:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Let’s look at this poem closely. In the first stanza, why would night, a normal enough event, inspire the poet to give thanks for his unconquerable soul? The night may be metaphoric — one hopes so, since literal night is never black from pole to pole unless you’re sleeping in a tent — but still, one wonders, what is the trouble exactly?

In the second stanza we have the cliché “fell clutch.” “Winced nor” is both unnecessary and impossible to pronounce. Chance, not usually very thuggish, more a burglar than an armed robber, appears in the next line to do some bludgeoning, of all things. The last line is deservedly famous and is by far the best line in the poem.

The third stanza confronts us with “place of wrath and tears” as if the contemporaneous “vale of tears” weren’t bad enough. “[T]he Horror of the shade” or a phrase very like it appears in every third poem of the period.

The last stanza introduces the customary Heavenly machinery of gate, punishment and scroll. The poet, who is agnostic (“whatever gods may be”), imagines the afterlife as a possibility, and then asserts, curiously, in the famous close, that he is the master of his fate and captain of his soul regardless. Yet this surely depends on whether this imagined afterlife is real. I don’t think so, but the poet, on the evidence, isn’t sure.

“Invictus” is a bad poem, bad in detail and bad in execution, with one excellent and two other memorable lines. It is bad chiefly because motive is ill-adjusted to emotion. The poet is considerably wrought up about his unconquerable soul and defiant attitude, but he never provides a motive for this emotion, beyond some vague allusions to night, circumstance, chance, and the fact of his mortality. I am unconvinced by the phrase “the place of wrath and tears” that this world is so awful to inhabit. The reader who enjoys this poem supplies his own motive. Many readers are willing to do so, and the pleasure that they take in this poem is genuine. Popular poems are frequently on the “Invictus” model: they contain a couple of famous lines and a lot of unspecified motive for the reader to fill in. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” and MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” are all of this type.

The reader who enjoys this sort of poetry indulges in a private reading. He is interested in his own feelings, not what is written on the page. Those feelings may be profound, but they have nothing to do with the poem. Suppose the first time you kissed a girl was at a junior high school dance and the band was playing “Desperado.” Now “Desperado” is your favorite song, God help you, for reasons that have nothing to do with any actual merits it may possess. Same thing here.

When you insist on a public reading, on restricting yourself to what’s on the page, you sacrifice a certain amount of immediate warmth and sympathy, a visceral appreciation for poems like “Invictus,” for the ability to enter completely into greater minds than your own, operating at their peak. You sacrifice heat for cold. It’s worth it.

Over at Tightly Wound, in a post appealingly titled, “Note to Poets Everywhere — Basically, You Suck,” Big Arm Woman nominates William Carlos Williams as the all-time poetry villain. It’s a curious choice. I’d have to go with Milton myself, for throwing over the logical structure of the Renaissance, nearly single-handedly, in favor of sentimental associationism. Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” was a syllogism; less than fifty years later Milton is getting away with “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” collections of details loosely related to joy and melancholy, respectively. Milton also wrote a bizarre cognate of English, mixed with Latin, and, as Donald Sutherland says in Animal House, his jokes are terrible.

Williams, it is true, is usually a bore, though never as resounding a bore as Milton, and his slogan, “No ideas but in things,” indicates Williams’ distant acquaintance with the intellect. Nonetheless his talent was real, and his poems only superficially resemble the slack stuff that you find in the poetry journals nowadays. His best poem, I am sure, is “To a Dead Journalist”:

Behind that white brow
now the mind simply sleeps —
the eyes, closed, the
lips, the mouth,

the chin, no longer useful,
the prow of the nose.
But rumors of the news,
unrealizable,

cling still among those
silent, butted features, a
sort of wonder at
this scoop

come now, too late:
beneath the lucid ripples
to have found so monstrous
an obscurity.

Any mildly attentive reader can hear that the rhythms are of verse, not prose. The metaphor for the experience of recognizing death is better than anything outside of Emily Dickinson. The three near-spondees, ending with “too late,” cleave life and death absolutely.

Even the notorious red wheelbarrow:

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The first line is unforgivable, and the poem is tiny, but the miraculous “glazed” stamps the image in my mind indelibly. Nothing so well-executed is to be despised.

Big Arm Woman may object more to Williams’ influence than to Williams himself. There are writers — Wyndham Lewis calls them “literary barrens” — who are great themselves but disastrous as influences; Joyce is the best example. Except Williams wasn’t one of them. He was the opposite of an innovator: he adopted uncritically a literary movement (Imagism, the brainchild of Pound and H.D.) popular in his youth, never strayed, and brought it to its highest polish.

She mysteriously proceeds to plump for Whitman, who, um, sucks. He doesn’t even scan. Maybe it’s because he’s patriotic. He sounds patriotic, anyway, but Whitman is a transcendentalist. Remember Mikey in the Life cereal commercials, the kid who hates everything? Transcendentalists love everything, America included. It’s all part of the universal current:

One thought ever at the fore —
That in the Divine Ship, the World, breasting Time and Space,
All Peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same destination.

Bad as the verse is, the thought is worse, and both are characteristic.

Big Arm Woman points out that Whitman served as a nurse in the Civil War, which is supposed to make his war poetry, which she discreetly refrains from quoting, “haunting and moving in ways that Adrienne Rich should weep over.” Unfortunately his service failed to endow with him talent. The most haunting and moving novel I know about war is The Red Badge of Courage, written by a man who had never seen a shot fired. I have no use for Adrienne Rich either, but if any of Whitman’s war poetry is half as good as the Williams poem I’ve cited, I’ve yet to encounter it.