The Craft of Thought: The Sentence in Contemporary Poetry

Craft: in its original sense, the word meant strength; subsequent meanings included intellectual skill, artistry, deception, and sorcery. All of these meanings apply to poetry, and they ought to apply as well to that necessary engine of thinking in poems—the sentence. Yet for all that has been written in the last few decades about the writing of poetry, surprisingly little has been written about sentences. In guide books, textbooks, and collections of essays, the various categories and components of poems are given their due: image, which subsumes rhetorical categories of metaphor, metonymy (“concrete detail”) and simile; and line, which subsumes the discussion of free verse and meter; and poetic forms both free and formal—found poem, sonnet, list poem, villanelle, and so on. Even in the books whose authors aim for the most impartial and inclusive of stances, the sense that free verse and formal verse are two roads diverged remains explicitly implicit. And yet the crucial element of good sentence writing is seldom discussed, even though the crafting of effective sentences communes with all verse, both formal and free. The notable exception is Ellen Bryant Voigt, who has perceptively analyzed the possibilities of the sentence in shaping the structure of lyric poems in essays like “The Flexible Lyric” and “Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song.” To some degree, Voigt’s discussions, and my own, make explicit what is implicitly understood by many fine poets; and, as with a term such as “rhythm,” there is something in the way that sentences work upon us that remains, if apprehensible, not quite fully explainable. Nonetheless, I hope to carry the discussion further—to assert the foundational importance of skillful sentence-writing in lyric poetry, and to articulate some criteria by which we might consider the notion of “quality.”

If most fine poets intuitively understand the importance of the sentence, there are too many poet—and editors: for if we’re speaking of published poetry then what is the difference?—who fail to grasp the importance. The excesses of either mode—the “prosaic” formlessness of aggressively free verse; the look-at-me-I’m-rhyming preciousness of archly formal verse—are due largely, I’m convinced, to this failure. Certainly I am not original in making this point. In his 1913 article, “A Few Don’ts,” an exasperated Ezra Pound addressed the issue as follows: