From Essays After Montaigne
...I am one of those whose opinion is, that divine Poesie doth no where fadge so well, and so effectually applaudeth, as in a youthfull, wanton, and unbridled subject.
James Merrill began the poem that over six years and 560 pages would become The Changing Light at Sandover, his epic of man, God, and love, with this qualification:
Admittedly I err by undertaking
This in its present form. The baldest prose
Reportage was called for, that would reach
The widest public in the shortest time.
Having read his poem a couple of times, I believe that he erred in believing he had erred. There's no other way he could have conveyed so much but through verse. He was, as Harold Bloom put it, "an absolute master of diction, metrics, and cognitive music." And verse, with its ambiguity and allusiveness, can suggest so much more of what's real (if not simple) than prose can. I want to believe that the truth will be found in overwhelming beauty, not in hackneyed, childish prose. Merrill delivers such beauty in abundance (even if he wasn't sure that he delivered the truth), from the expected (morning over Samos):
And still, at sea all night, we had a sense
Of sunrise, golden oil poured upon water,
Soothing its heave, letting the sleeper sense
What inborn, amniotic homing sense
Was ferrying him--now through the dream-fire
In which (it has been felt) each human sense
Burns, now through ship's radar's cool sixth sense,
Or mere unerring starlight--to an island.
Here we were. The twins of Sea and Land,
Up and about for hours--hues, cries, scents--
Had placed at eye level a single light
Croissant: the harbor glazed with warm pink light.
To the unexpected (his doubts about divine revelation received from a Ouija board):
Dear Wystan, VERY BEAUTIFUL all this
Warmed-up Milton, Dante, Genesis?
This great tradition that has come to grief
In volumes by Blavatsky and Gurdjieff?
Von and Torro in their Star Trek capes,
Atlantis, UFOs, God's chosen apes--?
Nobody can transfigure junk like that
Without first turning down the rheostat
To Allegory, in whose gloom the whole
Horror of Popthink fastens on the soul,
Harder to scrape off than bubblegum.
I challenge any prose stylist to put so much in so few lines.
I've read poets who have successfully rendered all manner of content in verse: structured tales from Homer and Virgil through Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare to Merrill himself; materialist ponderings from Lucretius to A. R. Ammons; the broken syntax of E. E. Cummings and the broken sense of John Ashbery; and so much more. I don't think that any content is inherently unfit for verse. In fact, if I had any metrical or musical sense at all, this Weblog would be in verse.
8:14:10 AM 
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