An Anatomy of Abuses: Why Bad Poetry Is Bad

An Anatomy of Abuses: Why Bad Poetry is Bad

by John Bellairs

The Censer, The College of Saint Teresa
Winter 1965

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That marvelously uninspired poetry which tbe Sailor in The Four Men describes "not sloppy verse, not wasty, pappy verse, not verse blanchified, but strong, heavy, brown bad verse"is very seldom analyzed by serious critics. This is unfortunate, since a careful examination of the more spectacular examples of wretched verse can show us what it is we admire in good poetry. Not much can be gained, however, from a study of the more obvious poetic faults: badly chosen or ineptly handled subject matter, serious treatment of ludicrous things, sentimentality, banality, and what the editors of The Stuffed Owl call "obstipation, or constipation of the poetic faculty" are all abundantly present in the best bad verse, but they are obvious flaws which need not be created in a strictly stylistic analysis. Instead, I have limited myself to a study of the errors which result from the poet's misuse of language, rhetoric, metaphor, metrics, and ocher poetic devices. My aim is not merely to collect examples of bathos, bombast, and turgidity, but to define che nature of the stylistic flaws which create such ludicrous effects. The most basic errors in styles are found on the level of diction, or choice of words. Of these blunders, the most elementary are those caused by an imperfect grasp of the language. The Babu poet who wrote

Dust to dust, and ashes to ashes,

Into the tomb the Great Queen dashes.

obviously did not have much knowledge of the denotation of "dashes," much less of its connotations. A similar error caused James Hogg's interesting coinages in this couplet:

Bird of the wilderness,

Blithesome and cumberless.

The addition of the supposedly poetic and metrically helpful "-some" to "blithe" is merely a bit silly, but "cumberless" shows that the poet is ignorant of the most basic rule of word-coinage: the mere addition of a negative suffix does not give a word a whole new set of connotations. No woman would be pleased at being called "unfat" or "non-disgusting," and, similarly, no alteration of "cumbersome" can escape the basic flavor of the word.

Other poets are adept at using words with unfortunate connotations: when Mrs. Browning wrote of

Our Euripides, the human,

With his droppings of warm tears.

she was not aware that "droppings" is almost always connected with animal dung, especially that of birds. Again, Leigh Hunt might have carried off his panegyric on Lady Blessington if he had not finished by calling her

A Grace after dinner--a Venus grown fat.

A more subtle error of this kind is committed by Lord Tennyson in this line:

He suddenly dropt dead of heart-disease.

The introduction of the almost technical term "heart-disease" produces bathos, although it was unwise in the first place for the poet to insist on telling us the cause of death. Words connected with death are always tricky, as these lines prove:

And his sickly daughter, with frenzied pains,

Dragged from the fire his old remains.

The word "remains" is a funeral-parlor euphemism almost drained of human qualities; to call them "old remains" is to attempt to invest the coldly impersonal with personality. The whole phrase, oddly enough, suggests faintly the derogatory sense of "old," as in "the same old thing."

Euphemism is a common stylistic fault, and generally occurs when the poet feels ill at ease with his subject, or thinks it will not be properly "poetic" if dealt with on its own terms: Tennyson plainly felt that Enoch Arden's fishmongering had to be dressed up, so he made him a purveyor of "ocean-spoil." Augustan poets, with their very strict rules for poetic diction, loaded their lines with "verdant groves," "feathered tribes," and "spacious orbs" in an attempt to avoid banality, but often succeeded only in producing the clumsiest circumlocutions:

The star-surveying sage close to his eye

Applies the sight-invigorating tube.

When eighteenth-century diction is used to clothe really banal subject matter, the effect is even worse: Solyman Brown, who sings the praises of the dentist, calls teeth "ivory disks" and "Banks of snow"; John Armstrong, while versifying on gastric ills, honors Chesire cheese by calling it

...that which Cestria sends, tenacious paste

Of solid milk.

On cold showers, the same poet adds:

Against the rigours of a damp cold heaven

To fortify their bodies, some frequent

The gelid cistern...

This invented syntax combines with such words as "gelid" to give the passage an unintentional mock heroic effect. Pope could not have done better.

Similar to euphemism and circumlocution is polysyllabicity: besides being clumsy and often imprecise, long Latinate words are very often purged of all color and crispness, and in Alfred Austin's lines on the "umbrageous vicarage." The worst offenders in this area are Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Holley Chivers, contemporaries who probably borrowed words from one another. Each used exotic diction to convey a sense of the remote, the mystic, and the romantic; Poe's lush style is well known, and probably at its best (or worst) in Ulalume, where such words as "liquescent," "senescent," and scoriac" are common. Chivers, however, exceeds Poe in pomposity; it would be impossible to read the former's Rosalie Lee without a thesaurus:

Many mellow Cydonian suckets,

Sweet apples, anthosmial, divine,

From the ruby-rimmed beryline buckets,

Star-gemmed, lily-shaped, hyaline:

Like the sweet golden goblet found growing

On the wild emerald cucumber-tree

Rich, brilliant, like chrysoprase glowing,

Was my beautiful Rosalie Lee.

This typical Chiversian passage shows the faults inherent in such diction. The connotative power of words is crucially important in poetry, but these obscure terms are so little used that they have almost no connotations, no image-making power; they are merely surrounded by a vague, musty aura of erudition and pomposity. As descriptive terms, words like "reboantic" and "luminiferous" are worse than useless. Such monstrosities are actually only effective when used ironically, as in Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service.

Proper names, like pompous words, can work a poet's ruin; the following examples show that there are some names which were never meant for poetry:

Methinks of Friendship's frequent fate

I hear my FROGLEY'S voice complain.

...

I might comply-but how will Bloomer act,

When he becomes acquainted with the fact?

...

And I was ask'd and authorized to go

To seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co.

The last two sections are by Crabbe, who had a genius for such things. Poets who praised the Georges had similar troubles:

Through Earth's wide bound

Shall GEORGE resound,

My theme, my duty, and my choice.

Here the bathos comes, not from the name itself, but from the concept of the name "George" being shouted throughout the world; one thinks immediately of a mother calling her son to supper.

Rhetorical or syntactic faults, like bad diction, are common in poor poetry, since the way a poet uses phrases and sentences is at least as important as his choice of words. Poe has a wearisome way of repeating long passages, sometimes changing only one or two words:

Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride-

Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride.

This kind of echoing is, at best, a cheap trick, and when it becomes characteristic of an author's style, it bores. Furthermore, as we read more of Poe, we feel that this device is supposed to have a mystic and haunting effect, and this irritates us.

The exclamatory style of Edward Young is equally offensive. He sprays ejaculations, commands, and assorted hysterical shrieks through his poems like birdshot; unfortunately, he seldom has emotional content sufficient to raise his rhetoric above the level of bombastic ranting. This is typical:

What pow'rful charm

Can death disarm?

Your long, your iron slumbers break?

By Jove, by Fame,

By GEORGE'S name,

Awake! awake! awake! awake!

In such verse, everything, and therefore nothing, is emphasized.

Both laborious and telescoped phrasing can mar the rhetoric of a poem. Wordsworth commits the former error on two notable occasions:

A fly that up and down himself doth shove.

...

Once more the Ass, with motion dull,

Upon the pivot of his skull

Turned round his long left ear.

Much of the absurdity of the first example is due to the inept word "shove," but the whole phrase stretches a simple action into a fear of calisthenics. In the second case, the poet has described a simple motion in too great detail; seldom has it taken a donkey longer to move his ear.

Unnecessary additions are akin to prolixity, and are especially bad when they reduce the poem to banality:

In Rome too liberty once reign'd, in Rome

The female virtues were allow'd to bloom,

And bloom they did.

Wordsworth creates bathos by a needless and terse answer to a long and self-sufficient question:

-Hast thou then survived-

Mild offspring of infirm humanity,

Meek infant; among all forlornest things

The mosc forlorn-one life of chat bright star,

The second glory of the Heavens?--Thou hast.

On the other hand, brevity is not always the soul of wit. Writing on the world's reaction to the discovery of the compass, Waddington says:

But when thy trembling point vouchsafed to guide,

Astonish'd nations rush'd inro the tide.

The poet is saying that many countries, amazed by the compass, sent ships to sea. But, by leaving out significant detail, he presents the picture of dazed hordes dashing like lemmings into the ocean. Similarly, Wordsworth passes too quickly over the circumstances surrounding a child's death, thus giving the poem an unintended air of indifference:

Which [the child], after a short time, by some mistake

Or indiscretion of tbe Father, died.

In another too-brief passage, the undoing of Samson is telescoped into one short, ludicrous series of actions:

So Samson, when his hair was lost,

Met the Philistines to his cost,

Shook his huge limbs with vain surprise,

Made feeble flight, and lose his eyes.

Finally, in the field of rhetorical blunders, we have the phrase which is simply infelicitous; this sort of thing is easy to spot, but often damnably hard to analyze. Henry Kirke White's miserable ballad Gondoline is full of such "clinkers;" in his description of the witches and their cave, he says:

A burning cauldron scood in the midst,

The flame was fierce and high,

And all the cave so wide and long

Was plainly seen thereby.

The last line of this stanza is inept because of the passive verb and the flat, awkward adverb "thereby'"; this whole phrase, which smacks of bad legal prose, is especially unlit for the description of the witches, concluding one stanza by telling us that their "hair was stiff with blood" and beginning a fresh quatrain with:

Their hands were gory too ...

I cannot decide whether the use of "too" or the position of this line at the beginning of a new stanza produces the absurd effect, but this little addition to the previous description has a definitely prosy ring. Such a line might well be prefaced by a remark like, "Oh, I forgot to tell you .. . "

It is easier to spot the inadequacies of certain phrases which occur later in Gondoline:

And still mysterious sounds were heard

At intervals around

...

She plunged in, the torrent moaned

With its accustomed sound

"At intervals" is a quietly formal phrase peculiarly ill-suited to a supposedly vivid description of the mysterious cave; still, if one were to insist on keeping the sense of the passage, few substitutes would help, although "ever are anon" would fit the pseudo-archaisms of the poem. The second passage quoted here is marred by "accustomed sound," one of the flattest and palest descriptive terms imaginable. The fact that the river usually moans interests us not at all, and this "clinker," coming as it does at the dramatic climax of the poem (the maiden's suicide). brings the pretentious Gothic facade of the ballad down with a crash.

So far we have seen errors which might well have occurred in prose writing; however, if we consider metaphorical flaws, we are entering an area which has always been considered primarily the poet's. Aristotle says that the poet should have a good eye for metaphor; the eye of the bad poet is often a little bleary, as when the likeness drawn is technically or literally correct, but surrounded by unfortunate or ridiculous connotations:

Her smile was silent as the smile on corpses three hours old.

There is peace here, but of a rather ghastly sort.

The mixed metaphor is familiar to everyone, but the following one by a young Tradesman Poet is especially interesting because it involves the ruining of a symbol:

No more will I endure Love's pleasing pain,

Nor round my heart's leg tie his grilling chain

"Heart," when used as the standard symbol for the seat of the passions, never makes us think of that palpitating part of the body which has auricles and ventricles. Yet when the poet gives it an appendage, he not only mixes two stock metaphors, but presents a picture which is all the more ludicrous because we suddenly see the heart as a physical object, one on which a leg would look very silly.

Other metaphors try to do too much:

Hark! she bids all her friends adieu;

Some angels call her to the spheres;

Our eyes the radiant saint pursue

Through liquid telescopes of tears.

Here Dr. Watts is crying to combine the tear-filled eye of sorrow with the mind's eye which envisions the heavenward journey of the soul. But the grotesque image produced by the implied likeness between telescopes and tears spoils the figure, for all the poet's good intentions.

The conceit or extended metaphor, an ingenious device which is one of the marks of "metaphysical" poetic wit, is easily abused. A well-made conceit, such as the compasses figure in Donne's A Valediction: Forbidding Monrning succeeds because it maintains throughout a close and just correlation between the things being compared. Each new ramification of the compass-lovers simile reveals a new insight into human behavior; each movement of the compasses figures forth some special aspect of the complex relationship Donne is trying to explain. In the bad conceit, however, the gears do not always mesh. The unskilled poet m:iy start with a fairly good metaphor and extend it unril rhe resemblance drawn is no longer valid; if he persists, as Edward Young does in a piece addressed to Volraire, the effect is comic:

O! HOW disorder'd our machine,

When conrradicrions mix!

When Nature strikes no less than twelve,

And Folly points at six!

To mend the movements of your heart,

How great is my delight!

Gently to wind your morals up

And set your band aright!

This strange figure starts with a fairly valid and standard comparison between a machine (in this case a clock) and a human being. But the extension of the figure in the second two lines of the first quatrain is strained, because there is no clear correspondence between the pares of the clock referred to and the suppsoedly unbalanced person. Why should Nature "strike" and Folly "point"? Why use "twelve" and "six," instead of some other numbers? Furthermore, the figure is so fuzzy that we cannot tell exactly what is wrong with the "machine," or how this disorder applies to the man being reprimanded. Building on this tottering platform, Young absurdly gives the heart "movements," and provokes open laughter by comparing his friend's morals to the mainspring, which must be "wound up." Morals could be considered the mainsprings of men, but the winding action has no coumerpart in the human. Finally, the "hand" in the last line, although it introduces a pun proper to a conceit, only leads to complete

incoherence. What does it mean to set a man's hand "aright," as one would a clock's? Nothing.

Some conceits, though carefully worked out, fail because the comparison chosen in the first place is full of bad connotations. Then the extended likeness suffers, on a grander and more inglorious scale, the face of the already-quored metaphor which compared the lady's smile to that of a corpse. The Duchess of Newcastle was fond of such conceits, and in one poem gives Nature's recipe:

Life scums the cream of Beauty with Time's spoon,

And draws the claret-wine of Blushes soon;

Then boils it in a skillet clean of Youth,

And thicks it well with crumbled bread of Truth

This only gets her started, for she adds (among other things)

A handful of chaste Thoughts, double refined

Six spoonfuls of a noble and gentle Mind

But the greatest touch in the poem is the addition of "the eggs of fair and bashful Eyes." Everything after that is anticlimax.

Of all the mistakes which bad poets commit, the hardest to isolate and analyze are flaws in rhyme and meter. Such errors are almost always overlaid with, or inseparable from, other kinds of faults. For instance, in the lines

Will you oftly

Murmur softly?

the feminine rhyme would seem to be the source of the absurdity, but the silly coinage "oftly" must be considered. It is also possible that the effect would have been less comic if the lines had not been in trochic dimeter, a verse form which is not generally considered heroic. All three faults are here, but it is bard to evaluate the effects of each.

Feminine rhyme, as Samuel Butler's Hubidras shows, has long been regarded as proper only to burlesque. A feminine rhyme made with two monosyllables and a disyllabic word is always bad in a serious context. This is one of the main faults of these lines from Wordsworth's The Idiot Boy:

This piteous news so much it shocked her,

She quite forgot to send the Doccor.

More and worse examples of chis are found in Francis Mabony's infamous poem, The Bells of Shandon:

0, the bells of Shandon

Sound far more grand on

...

There's a bell in Moscow

While on tower and kiosk O

Mahony gives the effect of a poor hack frantically searching for rhymes.

The only other generalization that I think can be made about rhyme concerns the bad effect of long strings of rhyming lines. John Skelton handles this sort of thing well, but seems to restrict it to light verse; Poe, however, composed a serious poem with some parts in an A-B-A-A-A-A-B pattern. One stanza from this dreary piece will be enough to show the monotony:

And my lord he loves me well;

But when first he breathed his vow,

I felt my bosom swell-

For the words rang as a knell,

And the voice seemed his who fell

In the battle down the dell,

And who is happy now.

Naturally, with such short lines, the rattling rhymes are even more offensive, because closer together; but I think the repeated sound-pattern would be boring anyway.

Dogmatizng about rhyme·schemes is imprudent, but making hard and fast rules for good English meter is even more dangerous, because duration and even more elusive sound qualities have to be considered. As soon as we have decided that alternate hexameter and heptameter lines are only fit for doggerel, someone will point out Fulke Greville's fine poem, An Epitaph Upon the Right Honorable Sir Philip Sidney; the anapestic beat, a feature of much bad verse, is well handled in Bonnie Dundee, However, some meters are definitely inimical to good poetry, and one of these is the trochaic. This inflexible pattern, which is so foreign to speech rhythms, makes a walloping trip-hammer sound in such a poem as Hiawatha; unvaried iambics will not produce the same effect. Classical verse forms,

such as dactylic hexameter, also seem out of place in English poetry, and, for some odd reason, a trochée at the end of a line is invariably clumsy.

All the stylistic flaws that I have tried to classify are found, in combinations and varying degrees of concentration throughout the worse poetry. I suppose that, from the perverted viewpoint of the bad verse collector, the greatest triumphs of bathos are those which combine the abuses I have discussed with bad subject matter, thus encasing foolish thoughts in the only proper forms. Wordsworth, in one of his frequent lapses, does just this:

And thus continuing, she said,

"I had a son, who many a day

Sailed on the sea; but he is dead;

In Demark he was cast away;

And I have travelled far as Hull to see

What clothes he might have left, or other property."

The bathetic details of the last line are suitably expressed in an incoogrous hexameter line, which, with its final Pyrrhic foot, has a grace usually reserved for collapsing balloons. Furthermore, this fine example shows clearly a quality with which all stylistic flaws are buttressed; it is a property without which the minor poet and the occasionally rurgid great one could not function -- a completely inoperative sense of humor.