Davie

Ah, Formalism. So nice and comfy. Arguments structured like we’re used to, with examples like we’re used to, and in the kind of language we’ve finally learned to manage after all these years of school. Davie is a welcome break from all this crazy-talk poet-scribblin’ (especially after Zukofsky!)

I’m not really interested in the grammarian vs. logician vs. poet argument, and I have no idea who Susanne Langer is, but I definitely agree with Davie that “syntax in poetry can be itself a source of poetic pleasure.” Usually it has to be pretty obvious for me to notice it, but I think syntactic play is in my top three or four favorite things about poetry.

Fenollosa-via-Pound and his ideas about syntax following experience fit nicely into Davie’s “subjective” category of syntax, that which follows the narrator’s order of thought. It also reminds me of some of the poetry we read in 341 last term, where poets were trying to express the “shape” of a thought before it becomes coherent.

I like Davie’s (rejected) idea of lumping “dramatic” syntax in with the subjective, because really there is no time when the poet isn’t writing from the point of view of a character. Even when we think we’re writing from our own point of view, most of the time it’s more like our idea of our “best self” that gets expressed; the face I imagine myself to have is not the face I see in the mirror (less freckles, different chin, smaller nose). The author is another character, and every character is the author.

“Objective” syntax is another place Fenollosa fits, although not completely (Fenollosa is concerned with how the world enters the mind, while objective syntax has to do with the order of things in the world and subjective syntax has to do with the order of things once they’re already in the mind). And to comment upon my comments on Fenollosa, YES! Sentences have plots! I totally made this up to talk about “Ozymandias” for a class a year or so ago but once again I find I’ve been beaten to it.

It’s funny how Davie’s categories seem so clear-cut in theory, but when you try to apply them—when you try to categorize poems according to their syntax—it all falls apart. The essential problem with Formalism, I suppose. Derrida was right. Still, Davie’s categories can be useful even if they’re not perfect.

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