'Painstakingly Logical and Precise'

A thought that never occurred to me but feels self-evidently right: 

“In the course of a reading life, one often stumbles on excellent prose writers never before encountered; such discoveries, however, are less likely in poetry. First-rate poetry is a more manageable quantity. Unlike with prose, it is possible to read all, or virtually all, of the decent verse in the language.”

 

Perhaps it’s because poetry is somehow more vulnerable than prose, its form more essential to its nature. For attentive readers, bad verse immediately announces its wretchedness, whether from narcissism or a tin ear. The ability to write first-rate poetry is among the rarest of gifts.

 

The first virtue a reader finds in prose is clarity, which is not the same as Dick-and-Jane simplicity. It means no muddle, no ambiguity where none is intended. The writer knows what he wishes to say and says it without fumbling. One recalls Jonathan Swift’s diktat in “A Letter to a Young Clergyman” (1720): “Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style,” but adds:

 

“Professors in most arts and sciences are generally the worst qualified to explain their meanings to those who are not of their tribe: a common farmer shall make you understand in three words, that his foot is out of joint, or his collar-bone broken, wherein a surgeon, after a hundred terms of art, if you are not a scholar, shall leave you to seek. It is frequently the same case in law, physic, and even many of the meaner arts.”

 

There’s no all-purpose template for prose, whether workmanlike or excellent. One thinks of Edward Gibbon, William Hazlitt, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell, all masters of their craft, none of whom could be mistaken for the others. My friend Douglas Dalrymple, proprietor of the Loose Canon blog, recently wrote of his namesake, Theodore Dalrymple:

 

“Not only is his adopted surname my actual surname, and his natural conservatism cousin to my own – and not only is he worth admiring as perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose – but the man loves dogs.”

 

That too is good prose. The author of the passage at the top is the poet-critic David Yezzi, writing of another in his essay “The Seriousness of Yvor Winters.” It’s easy to quibble with Winters’ more eccentric judgments, some of which may have been issued as provocations, always a useful device in upsetting unexamined critical assumptions. Winters’ prose, like his poems, is masterful – forthright and plainspoken. In reference to “the greatest poems of the plain style,” Yezzi writes of Winters and his final book, Forms of Discovery (1967):

 

“Such poems, for Winters, are good because they display themes ‘broad, simple, and obvious, even tending toward the proverbial, but usually a theme of some importance; a feeling restrained to the minimum required by the subject; a rhetoric restrained to a similar minimum’ as opposed to the Petrarchan use of ‘rhetoric for its own sake.’ The argument of the poem is painstakingly logical and precise. The rhythm is restrained in its careful adherence to the metrical norm, a heavily stopped line, and a strong caesura.”