`A Tradition in English of Cadence'

The membrane between prose and poetry has always been porous in both directions. To my taste the “prose poem” is, except in Baudelaire’s hands, a pretentious, non-poetic cul-de-sac. Much contemporary American verse is another species of prose poem – unmusical, unrhythmic, unreadable. Self-consciously “poetic” prose, larded with precious purple patches, is likewise abominable. So, what can prose writers learn from poets, and what can poets learn from their prosaic cousins?

Basil Bunting on Poetry, edited by Peter Makin, collects lectures Bunting delivered at Newcastle University in 1969-71 and in 1974. The texts, drawn from recordings and photocopies of drafts, are fragmented but often eccentrically suggestive. Bunting, who in the preceding decade had returned to poetry with renewed vigor and produced Briggflatts, works from a tradition of his own – Wyatt, Wordsworth, Whitman, Pound, Zukofsky. For Bunting, poetry is music. As Makin says in the introduction:

“Bunting assumes that art is shape, not content. There is no excuse, of course, for decoration; it simply spoils shape. In this art, in the English language, rhythm is the most essential shapeable: and if the poet has the rhythm right, he probably needs nothing else to give main form to his poem.”

For the likes of Tony Hoagland and Franz Wright, among many others, Bunting’s words might as well be written in Linear B. In his lecture on Whitman, Bunting addresses English poetry’s musical debt to prose:

“…a tradition in English of cadence – a musical notation: plain song, where you have a lot of freedom until the `cadence.’

“This in prose – where it joins forces with Hebrew parallelism because of Coverdale’s psalms & Song of Songs.”

Further on he cites examples of “cadence” in English prose, including Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and Hydriotaphia, and Swift’s Tale of a Tub. To prose writers and thoughtful readers, Bunting’s insights are exhilarating. He proposes an alternative canon of musical English prose, to which I would add, off the top of my head, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Education, and much of Ruskin – Praeterita and parts of his Fors Clavigera. Elsewhere, Bunting writes:

“But Whitman brought something quite new to English poetry. I dont mean `free verse’, whatever that is. Lots of people had tried loose, unrhymed rhythms before him: Blake and Christopher Smart, Milton, the translators of the Psalms and Song of Songs. Some kinds of heavily rhythmed prose make an approach to poetry – Browne and Burton, Latymer [Hugh Latimer, 1485-1555, author of Sermons on the Card] and Cranmer [Thomas Cranmer, 1489-1556, oversaw the first Book of Common Prayer, 1549].”

To bolster Bunting, savor this sample, chosen at random from The Anatomy of Melancholy, the section titled “Simples purging Melancholy downward”:

“Stoechas, fumitory, dodder, herb mercury, roots of capers, genista or broom, pennyroyal and half-boiled cabbage, I find in this catalogue of purgers of black choler, origan, featherfew, ammoniac salt, saltpetre. But these are very gentle; alyppus, dragon root, centaury, ditany, colutea, which Fuchsius…and others take for senna, but most distinguish. Senna is in the middle of violent and gentle purgers downward, hot in the second degree, dry in the first.”