On Sincerity in the Ironic Age

I have done a lot of thinking this past couple of years about sincerity and its role in poetry. Some of this has made it onto the blog in the past. But recently I have had newer thoughts, and I think it worthwhile to put fingers to keys again to try and define it a little.

Poetry must be sincere. That is not to say it must be factual; poems of the fantastic, the imagined, and the unreal have a place, and as I have suggested before, I believe that often the best poetry even about factual things has an element of imagination to it that makes it not entirely factual in the most prosaic sense. But poetry must be sincere; that is, it must engage seriously with its topic, it must care about what it has to say, and it must attempt to do justice to those things.

But wait. I should back up. Poetry should have a topic!

For me, poetry is a paradox. It is the intentional use of (frequent) complexity, (often) difficult language, and (always) stylized form to achieve clarity. That sounds more complex than I mean it, so I will try again: poetry uses complex means to make things simple. I have no love for "poetry" that seeks to be intentionally confusing, obfuscating, or simply amorphous. Poetry, at its best, has something to say, or at least something to talk about, and uses its nature as poetry to make that thing clearer, or at least better understood.

So yes, poetry should have a topic. Poetry should have a point - not a point as in a political message, necessarily, but a point, a reason for existing beyond its own mere narcissism. Ars gratia artis indeed, but art for the sake of what the art is, not art for the sake of merely making art. The point need not be anything major; I write poems to describe the weather, for goodness' sake, and you cannot get much more stereotypically minor. I write poems about writing poems! But there must be a there there.

In turn, I believe this means poetry must take a turn - an intentional, definite turn - towards sincerity and away from the ironic, meta, and post-meta ways of the world we live in. Poetry is (usually) shit when it tries to conform to that sort of thought process; poetry that tries to be post-post-post ends up childlike and silly, in the worst senses. Poetry should strive to be sincere, not necessarily in a stereotyped, "Victorian" sense of pathos, or a self-consciously post-ironic sense of "sincere," but simply sincere, honest, forthright. It is important to care, to be interested in the poem and in its subject, and to strive to put these things together in a meaningful way.

Introduction to the Sonnet IX: Rhyme Schemes

So I previously mentioned that a sonnet is a poem with a rhyme scheme. However, that definition is useless unless a rhyme scheme is in turn defined, which I intend to do here. I will begin by defining a rhyme scheme in general and then turn to rhyme schemes and the sonnet.

A rhyme scheme is any organization of the final sounds in a poem. Theoretically this includes rhyme schemes without any rhyme (Ezra Pound springs to mind) but as a practical matter there must be rhymes; and usually at least as many rhymed lines as unrhymed (ABCB is a common ballad rhyme scheme for instance, and the previous post mentioned the ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme of an English sonnet). A rhyme scheme expressed in this manner (with letters standing in for different rhyme sounds ending lines) is a useful tool for seeing how a poet has organized a poem, particulary as regards sound, flow, and interaction between lines.

Sonnets have certain traditional rhyme schemes (the Italian and English sonnet styles, with their 8/6 and 4/4/4/2 splits between similarly patterned sections are the two major ones) and certain conventions regarding what is and is not acceptable outside of those traditions. For instance, all the lines should rhyme with at least one other line; no ABCB unless there's another A and C rhyme in there later or earlier. Also, usually (but less rigorously), these rhymes should be close together; it is vanishingly rare to see more than 4 lines between a rhyme sound and its nearest rhyme, and most common to see 0, 1 or 2. Couplets (AA) are acceptable, triplets (AAA) rare and any longer string basically nonexistent; couplets are rarely followed by another couplet, unless locked into something like the Italian ABBAABBA. AABBCCDDEEFFGG is only arguably a sonnet; interlocking of rhymes is highly prized within the form, as it forces the poem's lines out of hermetically sealed little rhyme boxes into a larger poem-as-a-whole form. If one does flout that convention, enjambment is a practical necessity; seven heroic couplets do not a sonnet make. Finally, repetition of rhyme sounds is perfectly fine (as an "English" sonnet going ABABCDCDEAEADD) so long as it does not turn into long strings of the same sound (once more, no AAAA). Within these rules there is great flexibility, as I hope is demonstrated by at least some of the sonnets I post here.

What Is Not A Sonnet

To reiterate what a sonnet is: a fourteen line poem in meter and rhyme.

So this is not a sonnet:
Now when the time of fruit and grain is come,
When apples hang above the orchard wall,
And from a tangle by the roadside stream
A scent of wild grapes fills the racy air,
Comes Autumn with her sun-burnt caravan,
Like a long gypsy train with trappings gay
And tattered colors of the Orient,
Moving slow-footed through the dreamy hills.
The woods of Wilton, at her coming, wear
Tints of Bokhara and of Samarcand;
The maples glow with their Pompeian red,
The hickories with burnt Etruscan gold;
And while the crickets fife along her march,
Behind her banners burns the crimson sun.
--"Autumn" by Bliss Carman (The Atlantic Monthly, 1916).

It looks like a sonnet, oh yes it does; it wants so badly to look like a sonnet. Iambic pentameter! Quatrains, in sense if not in rhyme! A couplet with a little turn at the end, even if without rhyme again! Fourteen lines! But this is not a sonnet. It is a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter. It is a beautiful piece of poetry. But it is not a sonnet. It partakes somewhat of the nature of a sonnet, in that it puts one in mind of the sonnet form and so draws some power from the rejection of that form by the avoidance of what John Milton would have called "the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming," but by that very avoidance it carves out new genre territory for itself, and is not a sonnet. Sadly, not all beautiful poems are sonnets, even if they do have fourteen lines of iambic pentameter.

Introduction to the Sonnet I: Definition

Before diving into either the details of the sonnet as a form or the production of new sonnets, it is probably a good idea to have some handle on what a sonnet is.

At the most basic level, a sonnet is a poem consisting of fourteen lines.

Some critics would prefer to leave it at that: a sonnet is a fourteen-line poem, and any fourteen-line poem can be called a sonnet. But any historical examination from the 14th century on would reveal that sonnets share more than this single characteristic. The most obvious addition characteristics are rhyme and meter. A sonnet has some sort of rhyme scheme in which every line of the sonnet rhymes with at least one other line (see below), and all the lines are of the same length, in the same meter (see below). So we can add to our definition.

A sonnet is a poem consisting of fourteen rhymed lines in a consistent meter.

To a large extent, that completes our definition of the sonnet; if you have a poem that is fourteen lines long, with a recognizable rhyme scheme and a single consistent meter, you have a sonnet. Most sonnets have more in common than that, especially in English, but those are issues for another post.