[In the following essay, Hass traces the development of poetic forms from the human hunger for repetition, for mother, and for myth, to its present use as an expression of the poet's personality.]

I've been trying to think about form in poetry and my mind keeps returning to a time in the country in New York when I was puzzled that my son Leif was getting up a little earlier every morning. I had to get up with him, so it exasperated me. I wondered about it until I slept in his bed one night. His window faced east. At six-thirty I woke to brilliant sunlight. The sun had risen.

Wonder and repetition. Another morning I was walking Kristin to her bus stop—a light blanket of snow after thaw, the air thick with the rusty croaking of blackbirds so that I remembered, in the interminable winter, the windy feel of June on that hill. Kristin, standing on a snowbank in the cold air, her eyes alert, her face rosy with cold and with some purity of expectation, was looking down the road. It was eight-fifteen. Her bus always arrived at eight-fifteen. She looked down the road and it was coming.

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little word in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served.

Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form. I think of our children when they first came home from the hospital, wide, staring eyes, wet mouths, fat, uncontrollable tongues. I thought they responded when I bent over their cribs because they were beginning to recognize me. Now I think it was because they were coming to recognize themselves. They were experiencing in the fluidity of things a certain orderliness: footsteps, a face, the smell of hair and tobacco, cooing syllables. One would gradually have the sense that looking-out-of-the-eyes was a point around which phenomena organized themselves; thinking this is going to happen and having it happen might be, then, the authentic source of the experience of being, of identity, that word which implies that a lot of different things are the same thing.

Being and being seen. R. D. Laing says somewhere that small children don't get up at night to see if you're there, they get up to see if they're there. It helps me to understand that my first delighted mistaking of the situation—they know who I am!—was natural because I had the same experience as my children. Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation.

And we have that experience mainly with our mothers. Its roots are in hunger. The infant wants to know that his hunger is going to be satisfied. He cries out, there is a stirring of sensations that begin to be a pattern, and he is fed. The lovely greed of babies: so that the later experience of cognition, of the apprehension of form, carries within it the experience of animal pleasure and the first caressing experience of human affection.

This is clearest in poems of disintegration and return. In Rimbaud's "The Drunken Boat," there is the power of the moment when, in the exhaustion of the impulse of flight, he says: "I dream of Europe and her ancient quays." And Roethke in "The Lost Son"—

The weeds whined,
The snakes cried,
The cows and briars
Said to me: Die

What a small song. What slow clouds. What dark water.
Hath the rain a father? All the caves are ice….

—returns: "A lively understandable spirit once entertained you." It feels like the first moment after a hard rain. And Pound: "Soshu churned in the sea." The return is so powerful we are cradled entirely in the form of things, as in that poem when Gary Snyder's mind leaps from his small fire in the mountains to the little fires of the summer stars:

But I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I'm thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry. Not tone, not imagery, however deep or subtle, not particular qualities of content. It is easiest to say what I mean by way of example, but almost all the bad examples seem unfair. This, from last night's reading. "The Sphinx's Riddle to Oedipus" by Randall Jarrell:

Not to have guessed is better: what is, ends,
But among fellows, with reluctance,
Clasped by the Woman-Breasted, Lion-Pawed.

To have clasped in one's own arms a mother,
To have killed with one's own hands a father
—Is not this, Lame One, to have been alone?

The seer is doomed for seeing; and to understand
Is to pluck out one's own eyes with one's own hands.
But speak: what has a woman's breasts, a lion's paws?

You stand at midday in the marketplace
Before your life: to see is to have spoken.
—Yet to see, Blind One, is to be alone.

The intentions of this poem are completely real. And I learn things from it: learn from its verbs why Oedipus blinds himself with Jocasta's clasp, for example. And I see that the sphinx is herself death. But the poem never quite occurs. It can't find its way to its rhythm. In the first line, in the fourth, in the sixth, in the seventh, in the ninth, Jarrell tries, each time in a different way, to find a rhythm. You can feel the poem groping for it, like someone trying to gain admittance to a dance and being each time rebuffed by centrifugal force because he has not got the feel of the center. The last stanza, in his craftsman's hands, gives the poem a structure, but I do not feel the presence of form. That's why the last line sounds portentous and hollow. He has not entered the dance. My guesses about the reasons for this have to do with my reading of the rest of Jarrell's work. He is sympathizing with Oedipus and that is a characteristic stance of his poems, to be slightly outside the process sympathizing with someone else, soldiers in the early work, lonely women in the later work. In this poem, he has found an interesting perception, an important perception, but the stance has thrown him off himself. He has not found for himself the form of being in the idea.

Criticism is not especially alert to this matter. It talks about a poet's ideas or themes or imagery and so it treats all the poems of Stevens or Williams equally when they are not equally poems. The result is the curiosity of a huge body of commentary which has very little to do with the art of poetry. And this spills over into university instruction—where, whether we like it or not, an awful lot of the reading and buying of poetry goes on. Students are trained to come away from that poem of Jarrell's thinking they have had an experience of poetry if they can write a four-page essay answering the question. "What has a woman's breasts, a lion's paws?" What gets lost is just the thing that makes art as humanly necessary as bread. Art is an activity of the spirit and when we lose track of what makes an art an art, we lose track of the spirit. It is the form of "Western Wind"—

Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

—that makes life seem lucky, and intense. It is the form of "The White Horse"—

The youth walks up to the white horse to put its halter on,
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.

—that makes it seem wonderful and solemn.

The connection between gazing and grazing in the Lawrence poem brings us back to the connection between form, being, and looking. The best account of this that I know is in the 1805 Prelude. Wordsworth writes:

Loth to coalesce

The phrase seems to speak particularly to the twentieth century, to our experience of fragmentation, of making form against all odds. It explains something of Picasso's cubist nudes which come to form in the insistence of some previous and violent dismemberment; it glosses Bergman's borrowings from Picasso in the haunting visualizations of films like Persona and the savage dismemberments of Sylvia Plath, the strange rachitic birds Charles Simic is likely to see arising from the shape of a fork. We have been obsessed with the difficulty of form, of any coherent sense of being, so one of the values of this passage is that it takes us back to a source:

It is this forming, this coming into existence of imagination as a shaping power, that "irradiates and exalts all being" and makes the forms of nature both an echo of that experience and a clue to the larger rhythms of a possible order in which the human mind shares or which it can make. This is also the force of that passage, early in the Cantos, when Pound reaches back through a scrap of Chaucer to the origins of poetry in European consciousness:

And I might just as well summon Stevens on "our old dependency of day and night," on the power of the knowledge that the world is out there:

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness …

It amazes me, the way Wordsworth has come to it:

From nature largely he receives; nor so
Is satisfied, but largely gives again,
For feeling has to him imparted strength,
And powerful in all sentiments of grief,
Of exultation, fear and joy, his mind,
Even as the agent of the one great mind,
Creates, creator and receiver both,
Working but in alliance with the works
Which it beholds—Such, verily, is the first
Poetic spirit of our human life …

though I have none of this assurance, either about the sources of the order of nature or about the absolute continuity between that first nurturing and the form-making activity of the mind. It seems to me, rather, that we make our forms because there is no absolute continuity, because those first assurances are broken. The mind, in the act of recovery, creates.

Louise Glück's "To My Mother" explores this territory and it registers a shock that Wordsworth doesn't:

It was better when we were
together in one body.
Thirty years. Screened
through the green glass
of your eye, moonlight
filtered into my bones
as we lay
in the big bed, in the dark,
waiting for my father.
Thirty years. He closed
your eyelids with
two kisses. And then spring
came and withdrew from me
the absolute
knowledge of the unborn,
leaving the brick stoop
where you stand, shading
your eyes, but it is
night, the moon
is stationed in the beech tree
round and white among
the small tin markers of the stars:
Thirty years. A marsh
grows up around the house.
Schools of spores circulate
behind the shades, drift through
gauze flutterings of vegetation.

The power of this poem has to do with the intensity of the sense of loss, the breaking of myth. The fabulous mother has become an ordinary woman on a brick stoop, squinting into the sun. And the assurance of natural process breaks down: day becomes night, the moon is stationed in the beech, the stars are tin. There is a strange veering definiteness to the syntax which moves us from a world of romance to a lost Chagall-like memory of it. The repeated phrase does not have the magic of recurrence; it is spoken with a kind of wonder, but it has the relentlessness of time, of the ways in which time excludes our own lives and deaths from the magic of recurrence. "It is spring!" she says, in another poem, "We are going to die!" But already something else is at work in the movement; the deliberate writing and the articulation of the syntax are making a form. When we come to the phrase, "A marsh grows up around the house," we feel both house and marsh, the formed and the unformed thing, with equal intensity. In the title of the book from which the poem comes, the nouns have been reversed to make an aesthetic commitment: The House on Marshland. The marsh, the shifting ground, gives the image a terrible pathos. This is a poem about growing up and it is the marsh, not the house, that grows up. The mind creates, Wordsworth says. The final image is a creation. It makes a form from all the pathos of loss and dispersal. Spores, gauze curtains, window, the vegetable world beyond the window are gathered into a seeing, into the one body of the poem.

One body: it's an illuminating metaphor, and so is the house, the human indwelling which art makes possible when it makes forms the imagination can inhabit. I don't think we have thought about the issue very well. What passes for discussion of it among younger poets has been an orgy of self-congratulation because they are not writing metrical poems. A marginal achievement, since many of us, not having worked at it, couldn't write them competently if we wanted to. The nature of the music of poetry has become an open question and music, the rhythm of poetry, is crucial to its form. Thinking about poetic form has also been complicated by the way we use the word. We speak of the sonnet as "a form," when no two sonnets, however similar their structures, have the same form.

The form of a poem exists in the relation between its music and its seeing; form is not the number or kind of restrictions, conscious or unconscious, many or few, with which a piece of writing begins. A sonnet imposes one set of restrictions and a poem by Robert Creeley with relatively short lines and three- or four-line stanzas imposes another. There are always restrictions because, as Creeley says, quoting Pound, "Verse consists of a constant and a variant." That is, the music of the poem as it develops imposes its own restrictions. That is how it comes to form. When Robert Duncan, in "A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar," comes upon all those trochees and dactyls in the names of the presidents—

Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower—
where among these does the power reside
that moves the heart? What flower of the nation
bride-sweet broke to the whole rapture?
Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson
hear the factories of human misery turning out commodities

—he has to go with it and then find his way out of that music, which he does, beautifully:

This is a matter of bodily rhythm and the mind's hunger for intelligible recurrence. It applies equally to all verbal music.

I don't think we are in a position yet to understand the reaction against metrical poetry that began in the middle of the nineteenth century. It's an astonishing psychological fact, as if a huge underpinning in the order of things had given way and where men had heard the power of incantatory repetition before, they now heard its monotony. Or worse. Frost's rhythms use meter in a way that is full of dark, uneasy irony:

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.

And irony, the stresses falling like chains clanking, is very often Robert Lowell's way with meter:

Our fathers made their world with sticks and stones
And fenced their gardens with the red man's bones.

The writing seems to accuse not only the fathers but the culture that produced meter and rhyme.

It has always interested me that, if you define meter as the constant, and the rhythmic play of different sounds through meter as the variant, then meter itself can never be heard. Every embodiment is a variation on the meter. One-TWO is a rhythmic variant on the pure iamb and three-FOUR is another. The pure iamb in fact can't be rendered; it only exists as a felt principle of order, beneath all possible embodiments, in the mind of the listener. It exists in silence, is invisible, unspeakable. An imagination of order. A music of the spheres.

Which is how the Renaissance conceived it. All through the Elizabethan period the dance of the order of things is associated with music. And this was the period of the other momentous event in the history of the sound of English-language poetry, the invention of the printing press. In the course of about a hundred years, the printing press tore the lyric poem away from music and left the poet with the sound of his own voice. I think that's why, in the freshness of those writers, in the satires of Wyatt, for example—

My mother's maids when they do sew and spin,
They sing a song made of the fieldish mouse …

or in a prayer in Ben Jonson—

Good and great God, can I not think on thee,
But it must straight my melancholy be …

—meter has the authority of a profound formal order. I think the human voice without music required it; otherwise it was just individual noise in the universe.

Herrick is a fascinating figure in this way. He seems to be a maker of Elizabethan songs, but really he was living by himself fifty years past that time in a country priory in Devonshire, making that music out of his own head. The public occasions of Campion—

When to her lute Corinna sings

—have become a private music in the mind, a small imagined ordering dance of things. Meter has replaced the lute and become a way of imagining experience, a private artistic vision. It has become form:

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks …

And meanwhile in London, Denham and Waller were tuning up the new, print-conscious and social sounds of the heroic couplet.

Another clue is the response to Wordsworth's poetry. When he sent one of his books to Charles James Fox, the leader of the liberal faction in Parliament, Fox wrote him a note saying he loved "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" but that he didn't like "Michael" and "The Brothers" because he felt "blank verse inappropriate for such simple subjects." You could write about working people in ballad meters, but not in the lofty overrun sound of blank verse. That was what bothered people about those poems. They democratized the imagination of spiritual order inside meter.

That's why it's a short leap from Wordsworth to Whitman—or one of the reasons why. It is why free verse appears as part of a consciously democratic poetic program. As long as the feudal class system was a series of mutual obligations, a viable economy, it seemed a natural principle of order. By the time of the French revolution, it had stopped working and society seemed class-ridden. So meter seemed class-ridden. Only it took someone as stubborn as Wordsworth to demonstrate it by introducing the Cumberland beggar to his readers in the spiritual dress of blank verse:

Once this gesture, or the swollen ankles of a shepherd, was included in the music of the spheres, that music had ceased to have the same function and the ear was prepared for the explosion of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":

I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float held forever in solution,
I too received identity by my body

And after this moment in the history of the race, in the history of the race's relation to the magic of language, the godhead was scattered and we were its fragments.

So Frost was wrong to say that free verse was like playing tennis without a net. The net was the insistence of the iamb. A lot of William Carlos Williams's individual perceptions are a form of iambic music, but he has rearranged them so that the eye breaks the iambic habit. The phrase—"a dust of snow in the wheeltracks"—becomes

a dust of
snow in
the wheeltracks

and people must have felt: "yes, that is what it is like; not one-TWO, one-TWO. A dust of / snow in / the wheeltracks. That is how perception is. It is that light and quick." The effect depends largely on traditional expectation. The reader had to be able to hear what he was not hearing. That's probably why Eliot and Pound were so alarmed when Amy Lowell moved in on imagism. Pound records the moment in one of his essays: "At a particular date in a particular room, two authors, neither engaged in picking one another's pocket, decided that the dilution of vers libre, Amygism, Lee Masterism, general floppiness, had gone too far and that some countercurrent must be set going. Parallel situation centuries ago in China. Remedy prescribed Emaux et Camées. (Or the Bay State Hymnbook). Rhyme and regular strophes. Results: poems in Mr. Eliot's second volume … also 'H. S. Mauberly.' Divergence later."

It does seem to be the case that the power of free verse has had something to do with its revolt against some alternative formal principle that feels fictitious. That was certainly part of the excitement of first reading Creeley and Ginsberg, Duncan and Dorn. They had come back, passionately, to the task of discovering forms of perception. In what Gary Snyder describes as "the spiritual loneliness of the nineteen-fifties," there were all these voices finding their way. And a decade later, when I read them, they still had that intensity.

Now, I think, free verse has lost its edge, become neutral, the given instument. An analogy occurs to me. Maybe it is a little farfetched. I'm thinking of balloon frame construction in housing. According to Gideon, it was invented by a man named George Washington Snow in the 1850s and 1860s, about the same time as Leaves of Grass. "In America materials were plentiful and skilled labor scarce; in Europe skilled labor was plentiful and materials scarce. It is this difference which accounts for the differences in the structure of American and European industry from the fifties on." The principle of the balloon frame was simply to replace the ancient method of mortise and tenon—heavy framing timbers carved at the joints so that they locked heavily together—with construction of a frame by using thin studs and nails. It made possible a light, quick, elegant construction with great formal variability and suppleness. For better or worse. "If it had not been for the balloon frame, Chicago and San Francisco could never have arisen, as they did, from little villages to great cities in a single year." The balloon frame, the clapboard house and the Windsor chair. American forms, and Leaves of Grass which abandoned the mortise and tenon of meter and rhyme. Suburban tracts and the proliferation of poetry magazines. The difference between a democratic society and a consumer society.

Stanley Plumly has written a very shrewd essay in which he argues that, in contemporary verse, tone has become important in the way that it is important in the dramatic monologues of Browning. Only the poems aren't dramatic monologues, they are spoken by the poets out of their own lives. That is, instead of being an instrument to establish person, tone has become an instrument to establish personality. And the establishment of distinctions of personality by peripheral means is just what consumer society is about. Instead of real differences emanating from the life of the spirit, we are offered specious symbols of it, fantasies of our separateness by way of brands of cigarettes, jogging shoes, exotic food. Once free verse has become neutral, there must be an enormous impulse to use it in this way, to establish tone rather than to make form. Because it has no specific character, we make a character in it. And metrical poetry is used in the same way. When it is strong, it becomes, as it did for Eliot and Pound in the twenties, a personal reaction against cultural formlessness. When it is graceful and elegant, it becomes, as it was in Herrick, a private fiction of civility with no particular relation to the actual social life we live.