English Language and Literature ETDs

Publication Date

5-28-1964

Abstract

In his book, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957), T. S. Eliot says that the poet writing on poetry "has peculiar qualifications and peculiar limitations" because he is "always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind of poetry he wants to write" (p. 93). In my own case, any such qualifications and limitations derive from the beliefs I hold about lyric poetry. For many years, I have believed that poetry, whatever else it is, is predominantly lyrical. Almost certainly, I hold this belief because I can still remember the strong sense of exultation aroused in me by the first lyric poetry I ever read, and because this sense of exultation is evoked by an almost magical blending of sound and sense. While, therefore, I have never denied the importance in poetry of either imagery or meaning, I have always taken Eliot's phrase about using “the least wrong words" (op. cit., p. 1 7) to mean the way the poetry sounds: it is the music of the words--the sheer beauty of the sounds and rhythms--that constitute for me the most basic characteristic of poetry. I believe that the sounds of the words subtly reinforce the meanings of the words and intensify (if not almost wholly create) the emotional impact which the poem is designed to have upon the reader. I also believe that the degree of this impact in poetry is in direct proportion to the degree of lyricism involved. (Since the sounds of poetry should reinforce the meanings, cacaphony also has a valid use in poetry; the use of either cacaphony or euphony depends upon the subject concerned and the mood or effect which the poet wishes to obtain, but cacaphony, by definition, is not ordinarily technique proper to the lyric.) In my own writing, therefore, I have concentrated on using the most euphonious words I could find. There is, in the sounds and rhythms of poetry, a potential, almost magical, power of incantation, not obtainable in prose, that can evoke what Conrad (in his Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus) calls the "magic suggestiveness of music." I believe that lyricism is the one technique most responsible for eliciting this spell or enchantment of beauty and power that poetry can create. It is this "magic suggestiveness" for which I look in all poetry, which I hope to achieve in my own writing, and which is the principal component of my interest in, and dedication to, lyric poetry.

Degree Name

English

Level of Degree

Masters

Department Name

English

First Committee Member (Chair)

Cecil Vivian Wicker

Second Committee Member

George Warren Arms

Third Committee Member

Morris Freedman

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

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