[In the following essay, Richman deems Essay on Rime confused, unconvincing, and ultimately unsuccessful.]

The danger in Karl Shapiro's Essay On Rime is that the three arguments seem convincing. It seems that modern poetry does not exist; yet after reading this rule-making, one realizes that the poetry of Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Auden, Crane and Pound still exists large and strong even though Mr. Shapiro renounces it. The blame he laid on modern poetry, I am convinced, was not its but man's.

The Essay seems convincing because many of the observations, and particularly much of the appreciations, are good and significant. But Mr. Shapiro has made pretensions for this work which go beyond the organic need and seed of the type of essay he has written. And, though this is a difficult statement to phrase, the Essay On Rime is a poetics in the communication of which critics themselves have helped almost as much as if they had had a hand in the creation. Certain books fall fate to such rewriting and worthless praise: as a result the reading publics are convinced before they begin. For a book such as this one, which by its approach can be taken as canon law in criticism by the uncritical, its fate is the more vicious.

The Essay fails to be a significant evaluation of modern poetry because, after one discounts the sensitivity and knowledge and love Mr. Shapiro brings to his work, the three basic principles of criticism he uses are as false as the modern text on military science which deals only with Maginot Line warfare. Poetry has fought a different war in the twentieth century; in fact it came out of the fortress when Blake rushed out of the iron gates of the eighteenth century and sang. Thus, the simplicity with which Mr. Shapiro has reduced his analysis of the three confusions is the source of danger; it is a simplicity that has ignored, rather than explained away, the multiple complications in poetry today.

Mr. Shapiro is somewhat the neo-classic rule maker in his simplifications. In a language and in a literature that is truly classical, such an approach has much the more validity than that of the organic critic who tries to measure achievement with intention. Yet even Aristotle and Horace, within the formal limitations of their great classical languages, have the distinct disadvantage of saying, in total effect, that the principles of literature which the classics are written in are the only orthodox patterns for future writing. Since Aristotle's principle of the tragic flaw, written in his golden age, does not really apply to the Antigone or Oedipus of Sophocles, which Aristotle used as models for his rules, in effect, I am saying that each age must have in the grain of its literary principles, a creative criticism that exists contemporaneously with its creation and seeks to serve the poet in his working.

The modern critic, then, is most likely to succeed in giving a usable theory if he is in sympathy with the flow of poetry in his own day, and if he seeks to speculate on the perfect poetry that arises in that stream. Otherwise he makes two errors: he does not say that poetry has been sown with these seeds; that this flowering is limited organically by the elements and the seeds. Rather he is saying, in contradition to a certain botany in poetry, that the seeds ought to have been thus and the flower ought to have been so.

And Mr. Shapiro writes on how modern poetry has not grown.

The first of the three confusions which he mentions is that in prosody: he says quite arbitrarily that only two types of measure can be applied to English verse—the count of eye and the count of ear. What kind of rule-making is this? The poetry of Skelton, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Blake, Hopkins and Eliot proves that there is obviously a third type which is a simple combination of ear and eye count: it is everywhere in the middle comedies and the late tragedies of Shakespeare, in the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience of Blake, Ash Wednesday, or the Cantos. Mr. Shapiro surmises this but passes on. Perhaps the modern poet from Hopkins on is becoming so accustomed to both the count of eye and the count of ear that he subconsciously fuses one into the other in his writings of poetry.

Since the English language is the youngest, it absorbs more and copies more than any other. Thus a chance for alliteration and a chance for accent-count happens often in the age of Skelton or of Auden; and I do not think it is by ignorance or accident. In well over half of Milton's blank verse, speech accents fall in variations to the metric pattern for greater music alone. Or the influence of the French syllabic count has not confused the prosody of Marianne Moore's English. Or the word-making of Joyce: surely Finnegan 's Wake does not fail in its "prosody." Nor does Stevens in Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction.

Mr. Shapiro wondered why no great system of English prosody has been made. It seems entirely valid to say that there can be no such formal set of rules as the ear system or the eye system created, for these reasons: English is not a static language, English is not a classic language, (it passed through its "classical" period), and English has been affected either consciously by poets who have brought other prosodies to heel, such as Wyatt and Surrey copying Italians; or by Milton playing on his Latin organ, or by a poet's subconscious fusion of the ear and eye count; or by the slow process of the change in linguistics from its ancient womb to its present youth; or by alliteration, qualitative count, quantitative count, syllabic count and the variation of prose accents against metric stresses. And since rhythm has the poet's personal muscle as well as his adaptation of a pattern of vibrations (largely limited to combinations of two or three beats) in it, the range of prosody is extraordinarily exten sive.

Thus there are two possible answers to Mr. Shapiro. All English prosody is confused and the periods of greatest confusion are the sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Or if one tries to set down formal laws and finds modern poets outside the canon, he may call this a confusion. I believe it is sounder to approach prosody from other principles: specifically, the biology of the English line evolves from Beowulf and all indigenous rhythms of descending poets are set into counterpoint to the biological form; in poetry, new liberties must be taken in prosody and in language to make a new order; and forms have to be broken and remade. At last, craftsmen such as Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Auden and Tate need not be accused of confusion in prosody. I would guess so far as to say that English can never have formal laws written that will cover all the possibilities of prosody, because our language has great diversity. Shakespeare would have had to retire long before The Tempest if he had obeyed the rules of Sidney or Rymer. Or put it another way: the seventeenth century rewrote Shakespeare according to its laws and decorum, but we've lost those copies. My point is that.

For the confusion in language, Mr. Shapiro also desires the definitive set of rules, and he blames the poet today for not observing grammarian's rules. Although Mr. Shapiro does not make the careless error of saying that there is a special language for poetry, he comes near implying it. Charged language and language that has been beaten into submission by the poet's understanding and by his craft seem to me [to] be the raw materials of poetic language. As I fail to see how imagery can be legislated or language divorced from it, so I fail to see how language can be legislated or imagery divorced from it.

But for the explicit: the English language since it is not a classical language cannot be expected to fall into static or formalized idiom, rhetoric or syntax. On the contrary, as Otto Jespersen and other modern linguistic scientists have shown, the pattern of growth in the English language is toward greater diversity. This, I believe, is for the good of poetry; and since any language has its richness and its boundaries or limitations, the poet is ultimately freer in English than in any other language. Thus Joyce chose English rather than Gaelic or French from which to depart, as it were, giving the glands of the English language many injections to enlarge its growth, to speed up its growing diversity, and to expand it into the gesture of idea.

Finally, Mr. Shapiro feels that the modern poet tends too much and too unwisely to merge poetry with the language of common speech, thereby committing more confusions. This which Shapiro calls confusion is actually the highest and best personal use of language: it distinguished Shakespeare's poetry from Richard II on; it is the secret of Blake, of Eliot, Joyce, or Auden. Only Milton ignored the social idiom, using music instead. Their use of language is best, for it brings emotion and understanding to the closest idiom or diction for any man, contemporary to the poems, and to those who come afterwards. Archaism reverses this, and sends a reader backwards out of emotion into quaintness and into the archives. If any activity distinguishes modern poetry from its ancestors, it is the emphasis placed on what Eliot calls the "search for a proper modern colloquial idiom." Since language is a growing organism, this search is endless and will not be chained or changed by rules.

One word on Shapiro's analysis of rhetoric: he sees great discipline in the rhetoric of Ulysses. I would say that the same in Crane, Auden, Pound, Yeats and Eliot is responsible for their putting music into the common speech—an elaboration that requires a mastery of rhetoric, grammar, and a vocabulary of images and words, before the poet can order them into the tense and sensuous, lyric and dramatic music which poetry ultimately must become. Again rules cannot tell one how to achieve this order. If Mr. Shapiro were to reduce his hypothesis to its lowest denominator, he would probably say that the confusions in prosody and language are overshadowed by the confusions in belief, which probably even cause the former two confusions. It would seem that he mistakes the lack of belief which modern man can use, for the confused belief in the poets. Before the Industrial Revolution and scientific determinism destroyed what I perhaps dangerously call the popular belief of Western man in the myth of Christianity, such poets as Dante, Shakespeare, or Milton could set their work against the backdrop of the Christian Myth. None of these poets had to do what the modem poet had been forced to do. Once that belief became destroyed, the poet had to take on a new function: he had not only to make the poem; he had to make a myth which would reveal all of the anagogical and psychological counterpoints of the poem too. Spread throughout the creativity of their work, this function was accepted by Yeats, (Hardy before him), Joyce, Crane and Pound. It is still part of the writing of Eliot, Stevens, Auden, Lewis, Thomas, or any good poet.

This occupation does not reveal a confusion in the poets' beliefs. It is more sinister. In this Age man is confronted with resolving the duality between Love and Power. The maelstrom of systems and beliefs, that modern man has invented to dispel the evil and release the good, ranges in its turmoil from tired political mythology to revised Anglo-Catholic mythology. To be sure, there is great confusion in this Maelstrom. But the confusion is not one of bad poetry, futile metaphysics, or loose logic; rather it is a confusion in the yearning and searching of many men who have tried diverse ways to save mankind from incessant turmoil. That all—the poet, the philosopher, the divine, the statesman and the scientist—try to save and give us something in which to believe is some proof of the necessity and the seriousness in our time.

It is one of the simplest essences of art that there be a valid myth used. Further, the poet must believe it intensely and vigorously; and as a maker, he must master the craft to set down the belief and the intensity in a perfect order. Surely then, if there is no myth, the fault is not with the poet. Surely, if art needs a myth today, the poet will try to take on another burden and either seek an old myth not common in the elbow-rubbing with the men in his age; or like Joyce, who in Ulysses and Finnegan 's Wake made a myth out of common man, the procreative principle and the dark primordial unconsciousness of the race, the poet may state his purpose: "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Or like Pound, whose great newsreel of culture, history, economy, and polity is mythmaking, the poet may seek to make a socio-economic myth. Or like Stevens, whose ideas prove an order and whose poetry is knowledge, the poet may make of his supreme fiction a usable myth. If the myth and the poem are made in the same creation by the same maker, the poetry matters most. And it must be evaluated first. The myth which suits him might find no universal acceptance; but each of the works I mentioned above is right for many people. Then, it can be said that even though there is no one belief created and no one myth available, there is not confusion in the poets, but diversity. Or it can be said that the confusion is the Age of Love and Power. And the fault is not poetry's, but man's.

I would set against the Essay on Rime these principles for poetry:

"Whales, branded in the Arctic, are often found cruising in the Antarctic"—Palinurus.

"We are a part of all that went before"—Marx.

"The poet is a maker"—Aristotle.

"All true creation is a thing born out of nothing"—Paul Klee.

"Why not try to understand the singing of the birds "—Picasso.

"A poem is a new compound … it may tend to realise itself first as a particular rhythm and this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image"—Eliot.

"The liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain"—Joyce.

"Art is a habit of the mind"—an anonymous Medieval poet.