Towards a Typology of Collaborative Poetry

 

The poems by Marcabrun and Ugo Catola and the first verses of the Minase renga of Sogi, Shohaku, and Socho are appended in both the original and in translation.  

 

     The very idea of poems with more than one author radically challenges the Romantic notion of individual genius.  In spite of the fact that art has as often been shaped by the beliefs and values most members of a culture share, many readers remain Romantic enough to view proper poetry as the product of a single person’s vision.  The artist is often imagined as a hero, the possessor of a titanic sensibility, striking out alone, innovative, ignoring established norms, and such a concept seems inimical to the compromise and negotiation that collaboration would entail.  And yet one hears that the great mythic texts on which the Kalevala was based were regularly performed by two poets, taking turns (albeit one with a secondary role), often while facing each other astride a log.  Seventy-two scholars wrote the Septuagint and forty-seven the King James Bible.  Collaboration may, as these examples imply, be deeply traditional, but it is equally likely to appear radically innovative.  A good number of modern ventures in collaborative poetry have occurred more or less under the aegis of the avant-garde: the exquisite corpses of the Surrealists, Ralentir Travaux (1930) by André Breton, Paul Éluard and René Char, and the chainpoems of the Japanese Vou group and Charles Henri Ford [1]. 

     Practices can differ widely.  Sometimes two writers present debate, taking different sides of an issue; sometimes they reinforce each other.  Some seek to meld their imaginations so that a single text represents not either or both, but a unique synthetic writer, called into existence for the project.  In some the linkages are more complex; for instance, one contribution may relate only to contiguous passages or all contributors may follow a predetermined pattern. 

     The simplest relation between multiple authors is contention, either in the form of an insult war or a debate.  The first of these possibilities was formalized among Germanic and Celtic peoples as the flyting (in Irish immarbág or iomarbháigh).  In perhaps the best-known of such works “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie” (ca. 1500) William Dunbar addresses his opponent with a veritable flood of invective, the direction of which is perfectly clear today on spite of archaic Scots dialect.

    

Mauch mutton, bit button, peeled glutton, heir to Hillhouse,

Rank beggar, oyster dredger, flay fleggar in the flet. flea                    catcher? in hall

Chitterling, rough rilling, lick shelling in the millhouse, rough            hide, husk-licker

Bard rehator, thief of nature, false traitor, fiend’s get,                         worthless poet

Filling of tauch, rak sauch, cry crauch, thou art o’erset! of                  tallow, stretched rope, surrender

Mutton driver, girnall ryver, yad swiver, foul fall thee! granary           robber, mare mounter

Heretic, lunatic, purspick, carling’s pett, old hag’s fart?

Rottin crok, dirtin dok, cry cok, or I shall quell thee! 

                                                                    (ll. 241-248)

 

Walter Kennedy responds in kind.

 

Dathan, devil’s son, and dragon despitous,

250 Abiron’s birth and bred with Belial,

Wod werewolf, worm, and scorpion venomous,

Lucifer’s lad, foul fiend’s face infernal,

Sodomite separate from saints celestial.

       (ll. 249-253)

 Very little distinguishes one stream of vituperation from the other.  Rather than an actual attack drawing attention to the opponent’s failings, the insults are generic, pure antagonistic energy, pyrotechnics, rhetoric for its own sake, enmity made recreation.  

     Though frequently scatological, such flytings amused the court of James IV.  Americans may well be reminded of the custom of playing the dozens. [2]  The game so permeated American culture that even in my benighted white suburb elementary school children used the line “your mother wears combat boots” with no suspicion of its origin or implications.  Like the flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, the insults traded among dozens players have ordinarily no relation to actual weaknesses of the individuals involved; both contestants are indulging in a competitive verbal game, performed in a social setting and encouraged by onlookers.

     While the classic form of the dozens persists, other genres of Black vernacular insult wars have emerged.  Only a few weeks ago the New York Times Magazine [3] featured a story on “battle rap,” calling it “an art form and a sport, as well as an industry.”  One participant is given an extended opportunity for boasting and insults before the other responds, followed by further rounds.  Sexual themes remain common, including impugning the other’s masculinity and bragging of one’s own.  Here is a sample from Caustic vs. Rone, the latter speaking first.

  

Your baby mom looks like a drag queen, I'll get your queen             dragged

Rip his beard off, do his Adam's apple like a speed bag

I don't care if Soul's punch was softer than a fucking bean bag

You got slapped and just stood there just like that shit was             freeze tag

 

A portion of Caustic’s comeback.

 

You know, that's a hard thing to live up to

But he makes up for it with a strong back rub and a solid "I             love you."

He be kissing that bitch on the mouth like it's the love of his             life

But deep down he knows he just ain't fucking her right

She's got the Black Snake Moan she likes a little mud in her             pipes  [4]

 

     In  other genres the contention is more substantial, and actual views are exchanged as in a débat, called in Occitanian a tenso or partimen, like that between the twelfth century poets Marcabrun and Ugo Catola on the nature of love [5].  The discussion is highly organized.  First Ugo (also called Uc) states the topic -- ”un vers d’amor” -- to which Marcabrun answers with a condemnation of “false love” (“faus’amistat”) involving deceit citing the example of the Eve and the Fall.  Ugo will hear nothing negative about love since it is love alone that “bore him and nurtured him” (“que d’amor fui naz e noiriz”).  The argument continues until in the end Ugo presents his clinching image which bears the undeniable evidence of lived experience.  “Marcubrun, when I am worn out and feeling low and my good friend receives me and kisses me, and I undress, I go from her healthy and healed.” [6]  Unconvinced, Marcabrun calls him an addict, like a drunk or a spendthrift.

     They are both right.  The poem presents a three-dimensional ambivalent picture of love.  The vulnerability entailed in the commitment of oneself to the other means that love must always involve risk as well as pleasure.  The point that might be developed in another work through the modulation of a single relationship or through the contrast of two successive loves is here presented in two voices. 

     In another tenso weaving two points of view Giraut de Bornelh  and Raimbaut d”Aurenga argue whether the obscure style (trobar clus) or a more light and transparent treatment (trobar leu) is preferable.  Raimbaut defends difficult verse, saying that fools will never have the taste to appreciate fine things.   For his part Giraut cannot understand why anyone would write anything that is not “light and popular” (“levet e venersal”).  The contention collapses, though, as they both declare their helplessness in the face of love.  Both in the end note the utter confusion wrought by passionate love, for Raimbaut a natural and noble pleasure (“un fin joi natural”) that leaves him feeling “knocked about” (“torbatz”), for Giraut passion leads to his wishing to cry out “God help me” (“Qu'eu voill dir a Deu mi coman").  The poem concludes with their affection for each other, a fellow-feeling based on both experiencing the same tumult of love, though expressed in different styles.

     Whereas the flytings, dozens, and battle raps are displays of bravura fighting for the pleasure of making the sparks fly, the Occitanian poems actually present two sides of an issue.  Neither speaker is necessarily the winner, as both positions are in part correct.  The complex picture that might in a novel be represented by several characters or by a succession of time is here two authors.  The poem produced by juxtaposing two points of view has the liveliness that is characteristic of disputation. 

     Perhaps the most sophisticated and conventional collaborative form is the Japanese renga.  The practice arose of improvising or capping verses and developed into a collective writing technique with extremely elaborate rules. [7]  In the mature era of the renga, when organized competitions were common, a poet had perhaps three minutes to improvise a stanza appropriate to the preceding passage and well-integrated with the tradition. 

     Renga composition is shaped by system of intricate rules that here can only be suggested.  Indeed, an intimate acquaintance with Japanese poetry is required even to understand renga’s place.  The poets’ choice of words is restricted to the lexicon of the classical poetic tradition which stresses elegance and refinement (ga).  Thus each term carries significant literary associations, with the subtlest of variation and virtually no content arises directly from lived experience.  The genre is poetry about poetry. 

     The season must be established in the first verse while (In a hundred verse renga) one quarter of the following verses must have the word flower (hana) and one quarter the word moon (tsuki).  (In the flower verses writers often defer to their superiors.)  Topics are divided into seventeen categories (luminous things, living things, rising things, Buddhism, etc.) with some (such as mountains, shores, and dwellings) then further divided between essence (tai) and attribute (yū).  Certain words may be used only once in the hundred verses while others are restricted to a specific occurrence.  Usually, elements in common must be well separated; for instance, verses on human relations must be separated by two verses while those of reminiscences must have three.  Certain series, though, must be continued for three to five verses.   

     Of course, students of oral literature understand that such demanding requirements, while they seem to make the poet’s task more difficult, in fact enable improvisation.  The conventions are so rigorous that, even in the practice of experts, the verses are often imperfect and are edited by the poem’s recorder to conform to the rules.  The product is primarily structural in its appeal, rather like a Bach fugue, directing attention to the variegated play of the chain of verses, always unpredictable since each related only to the line immediately preceding and following.  Thus, with every new stanza a new linkage is established and an old one abandoned.

     According to Jin'Ichi this procedure renders the subject entirely irrelevant: “the essence of renga is the essentially meaningless pattern of images.” [8]  For one critic, this form is emptied of content and thus conveys a Buddhist sense of “impermanence” and “nonself.” [9]

     Among the most celebrated renga sequences is the fifteenth century Minase Sangin Hyakuin by Sogi, and his students Shohaku and Socho.  The master’s opening verses seem a sketch from nature, noting the early spring season with the mention of mist, while snow persists on the mountainside.   In fact even in this first few lines there is no solitary author; the entire project is bound in convention and intertextuality.  The poets are visiting the shrine for the twelfth century Emperor Gotoba and their renga is in fact an offering presented as part of the memorial observances on the anniversary of the death of this ruler who was also a poet. 

     The opening lines by Sogi quote one of Gotoba’s poems.

 

SogiI look over the misty base

of the mountain where

the Minase River runs through —

Why did they say the evening

was best in autumn?

 Sogi, then, was not merely describing the scene before his eyes.  Rather he was paying homage to a predecessor by assenting to Gotoba’s claim that nights are loveliest in autumn.  Even before the second voice the reader is in the midst of collaboration. 

     Shohaku’s lines abandon the allusion, but mention the river which Gotoba had not, and extend the reference of the world’s regreening by imagining the warmer downstream town where the plum blossoms are already blooming, again reinforcing the theme of springtime’s beauty. In the next link Socho picks up the reference to the river, adding the element of the willow branches stirred by the breeze.  Sogi’s next contribution adds the boat and the dawn of day; the evening with which the series opened is gone, as is the snow, the mountain, the village, and the plums.  

     Perhaps this superficial glance, founded on translations, can suggest something of the dynamism of the renga form.  Decentered, always shifting and changing, tracing the connections between all things while preserving the apparent randomness of phenomena, such poetry seems profoundly Buddhist.  For all its contrivance it reflects the elusiveness of mental life, the fluid characteristics of consciousness as experienced, and in this sense is more “realistic” than more straightforward utterances. 

     The permutations of authorship of collaborative works transform and proliferate as do all conventions.  The first authors in examples here cited, Dunbar, Kennedy, Caustic, and Rone followed a pattern of ludic mutual ridicule, a purely aesthetic simulation of a contest for dominance resembling the aggressive posturing of male sexual displays among many species. There followed Marcabrun and Ugo Catola who presented their topic dialectically, foregrounding the unique capacity of poetic discourse to accommodate ambiguity and self-contradiction.  Then in the renga of Sogi, Shohaku, and Socho a more complex use for collaboration emerged, the virtuoso construction of a tracery of cause and effect, the earlier portions of which fade to invisibility as each new link is added. 

     Numerous other possibilities exist either in fact or potentially.  The process of oral literature is particularly collective, but all literature has sources and influences.  Some modern authors have preferred to work as one with a unified product like Louis and Celia Zukowsky sometimes did or Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have done in Exquisite Politics (1997), Oyl (2000) and Little Novels (2002) [10].  The contributions can be entirely separate as when a group of poets write on a given theme. 

     The Romantic view of composition led Edward Young to argue in the eighteenth century that “originals can arise from Genius only,” and the genius is not essentially a scholar, but rather a “divinely-inspired Enthusiast,” who may provide readers access to his own consciousness, “a fertile and pleasant field, pleasant as Elysium, and fertile as Tempe; it enjoys a perpetual Spring.”  Young finds allusive or learned poetry to be of only secondary value as it necessarily dilutes the power of individual vision.  Yet no work is independent of its predecessors, nor is any work univocal except the briefest and simplest.  There is even then an irreducible second layer as the persona is shaped by the author.  Further, poetry excels at conveying ambiguity and ambivalence.  To W. E. B. DuBois the Black writer was not confused by  “double consciousness,” but rather was allowed more insight and precision.  Collaboration is simply a technical means to guarantee that the incongruities and self-contradictions that we experience daily find concrete form on the written page.  In the end the various sorts of ways that writers interact in collaborative forms only foreground the tensions inherent in any human interaction, indeed, even within a single mind.

 

  

1.  John Berryman’s review in the Kenyon Review III, 3 (Summer 1941) found the “chainpoems” entirely unsuccessful, “excruciating” and “painful.”

 

2.  The pioneering study of the dozens was published by John Dollard, “The Dozens: dialectic of insult,” American Imago, 1(1), 1939.  An excellent later survey with a good sample of collected verses is found in Roger D. Abrahams, "Playing the Dozens" The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 75, No. 297, Symposium on Obscenity in Folklore (Jul. - Sep., 1962).  Amuzie Chimezie provides a convincing link to African practice as well as critiquing his predecessors with some asperity in “The Dozens: An African-Heritage Theory,” Journal of Black Studies Vol. 6, No. 4 (Jun., 1976).

 

3.  Ben Barzilai, “The Fierce, Flourishing World of Battle Rap,” New York Times Magazine, June 14, 2023.

 

4.  These and other lyrics are available at https://battlerap.com/lyrics/2016/09/28063-caustic-vs-rone.

 

5.  The poem acknowledges its genre by the use of the word tenson in l. 11, its occurrence presaged by the verb partiram in l. 3.

 

6.  Marcabrun, quant sui las e·m duoill,

E ma bon'amia m'acuoill

Ab un baisar, quant me despuoill,

M'en vau sans e saus e garitz. (ll. 49-52)

 

7.  Poetic improvisation has its own history.  Fude ( 賦得)or composition of poems on assigned topics was a recreation in China and became during the Tang Dynasty a part of the civil service examinations.

 

8.  See Konishi Jin'Ichi (tr. And introduced by Karen Brazell and Lewis Cook), “The Art of Renga,” The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1975).  His exposition is the basis for this description. 

9.  David Landis Barnhill, “Renga: The Literary Embodiment of Impermanence and Nonself,” available at https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Literary-Embodiment-of-Impermanence-and-Nonself-Barnhill/4c618825d256d06d9a6a0685fc8aafc06565a6c0.

 

10.  See also the recent anthology edited by Dean Rader and Simone Muench They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing.  Parallels such as the work of Gilbert and George exist in visual art.

 

11.  Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759).

Amics Marchabrun, car digam

Un vers d'Amor, que per cor am

Q'a l'hora qe nos partiram

En sia loing lo chanz auziz.

 

Ugo Catola, er fazam,

Mas de faus' amistat me clam,

Q'anc pos la serps baisset lo ram

No foron tant enganairiz.                            8

 

Marcabrun, ço no m'es pas bon

Qe d'Amor digaz si ben non!

Per zo·us en mou e[u] la tenson,

Qe d'Amor fui naz e noiriz.

 

Catola, non entenz razon,

Non saps d'Amor cum trais Samson?

Vos cuidaz e'ill autre bricon

Qe tot sia vers quant vos diz.                    16

 

Marcabrun, no·s troban auctor

De Sanso·l fort e de sa'uxor

Q'ela n'avia ostat s'amor

A l'ora que ce fo deliz.

 

Catola, qar a sordejor

La det e la tolc al meillor,

Lo dia perdet sa valor,

Qe'l seus fo per l'estraing traiz.                 24

 

Marcabrun, si cum declinaz

Qu'Amors si' ab engan mesclaz,

Dunc es lo almosna pechaz,

La cima devers la raiz

 

Catola, l'Amors dont parlaz

Camja cubertament los daz,

Aprop lo bon lanz vos gardaz,

Co diz Salomons e Daviz.                             32

 

Marcabrun, amistaz dechai,

Car a trobat Joven savai!

Eu n'ai al cor ir' et esclai,

Qar l'en a levaz tan laiz criz.

 

Catola, Ovides mostra chai

E l'ambladura o retrai

Que non soana brun ni bai,

Anz se trai plus aus achaiz.                         40

 

Marchabrun, anc non cuit t'ames

L'Amors, ves cui es tant engres,

Ni no fo anc res meinz prezes

D'aitals joglars esbaluiz.

 

Catola, anc de ren non fo pres

Un pas, que tost no s'en loignes,

Et enquer s'en loingna ades,

E fera, tro seaz feniz.                                    44

 

Marcabrun, quant sui las e·m duoill,

E ma bon'amia m'acuoill

Ab un baisar, quant me despuoill,

M'en vau sans e saus e garitz.

 

Catola, per amor deu truoill

Tressaill l'avers al fol lo suoill,

E puois mostra la via a l'uoill

Aprop los autres escharniz.                           48

 

Marcabru, my friend, let's compose

a love poem, for I've set my heart to that,

by the time we part,

its tune be heard far away.

 

Uc Catola, let's do it

but I accuse you of false friendship

for, ever since the serpent lowered the branch [to Eve],

there haven't been as many deceitful women. 

 

Marcabru, it doesn't please me

that you say anything but good about Love!

I begin this tenso

because Love gave me life and raised me.

 

Catola, you don't listen to reason.

Don't you know how Love betrayed Samson?

You and the other suckers,

do you think that everything [love] tells you is true?

 

Marcabru, we do not find people who say,

about the strong Samson and his wife,

that she had removed her Love

at the time his life ran out.

 

Catola it's to the worst

she gave [her love] and took it away from the best

and lost her worth the day

her husband was betrayed for the foreigner.          

 

Marcabru, since you imply

that Love is mixed with deception,

is almsgiving sin

and the top below the root?

 

Catola, the Love you talk about

secretly changes the dice.

Stop after a good roll,

say Solomon and David.

 

Marcabru, Friendship decays

because it has found Youth uncouth!

I have anger and revulsion in my heart

because it has caused such ugly cries.

 

Catola, Ovid shows here,

and the look of things confirms it,

tha [Love] does not discriminate against brown or bay,

but appeals mostly to degenerates.

 

Marcabru, I do not think you ever loved

Love, towards which you are so vehement,

nor that it ever esteemed anything less

than certain brainless jesters.

 

Catola, Love never took

a step [towards me] without fleeing right away,

and it still tirelessly flees

and will do so till it is undone.

 

Marcabru when I'm tired and sad

and my good friend greets me

with a kiss while I take off my clothes,

I go away well, and safe, and cured.

 

Catola, out of love of the wine-press,

money makes the fool cross the threshold

and then shows the eye the way

towards the other laughable people.

 

 

  

The Minase Sangin Hyakuin by Sogi, Shohaku, and Socho

 

 

雪ながら山もとかすむ夕かな　　　　宗祇

Yuki nagara yama-moto kasumu yube kana

 

As it snows the base

of the mountain is misty

this evening (Sogi)

 

行く水とほく梅にほふ里　　　　　　肖柏

Yuku mizu toku ume niou sato

 

Far in the way the water goes

a plum-blossom-smelling hamlet (Shohaku)

 

川かぜに一むら柳春みえて　　　　　宗長

Kawakaze ni hitomura yanagi haru miete

 

The wind from the river

sways weeping willows

now it’s spring (Socho)

 

舟さすおとはしるき明がた　　　　　宗祇

Fune sasu oto wa shiruki akegata

 

The pole of a boat makes

a clear sound at dawn (Sogi)

A Lost World of Allusion

The poem “Phyllida and Corydon” is appended to this essay.

Just as our every utterance Is a recombination based on an inventory of possibilities formed of all the speech we have heard, every literary text arises from the vast database of all preceding texts. Unlike the largely self-contained messages of non-aesthetic discourse, the interconnections in poetry, fiction, and drama – allusions, sources, and influences – enrich meaning, creating outgoing waves of significance the critic may pursue very nearly without limit. Though sometimes such intertextuality functions as display or ornament, it also allows for the expression of subtle and complex thought, including that which seems paradoxical, ambivalent, or mysterious, the very sort of material which aesthetic texts can uniquely well express. In the current era, unlike previous periods, even educated people are often incompetent at decoding relevant sources and influences and understanding the implications of devices such as quotation, allusion, homage, and parody. The loss of this secondary elaboration of meaning has impoverished the semantic field of virtually all poetry, but the principle applies in particular to poetry of the past, and most of all to highly conventional works.

Nicholas Breton’s poem “Phyllida and Corydon” is an example of a work that would mean far less to the average reader today than when it was composed due to the loss of the ability to perceive its intertextual relations. Breton was a popular poet and fiction writer in the Elizabethan Age, but his works were rapidly forgotten thereafter. (Often authors of what might be generally if informally regarded as the second rank -- such ratings are never demonstrable -- demonstrate more clearly than the geniuses of an age the taste of the time.) The poet’s practice reflects the norms of his period. Socially positioned in the haute bourgeoisie with a family that was affluent, though not aristocratic, he had an eye toward pleasing the taste of the nobility. [1] He strove to suit, however, not only courtiers but the general reader of the day for whom he wrote numerous religious works, a substantial body of poetry, and twenty-two prose publications.

On the rare occasions when Breton is remembered today, it is usually because of his love lyrics, especially those in the pastoral style, several of which have been set to music. Breton’s pastoral lyric “Phyllida and Corydon” has impeccable courtly credentials, having been originally presented as part of an “Honourable Entertainment Given to the Queen’s Majesty in Progress at Elvetham in Hampshire, by the Right Honourable the Earl of Hertford in 1591.” [2] Thus the reader may expect courtly and learned associations as well as popular ones.

With three explicit mentions of the month of May in the opening stanza, Breton invokes some of the oldest memories of humankind. Surely festivals celebrating the return of warm weather have been celebrated in the northern hemisphere since palaeolithic times. Breton was certainly aware of the rural maypoles in his own day as well as the medieval reverdie tradition. This sophisticated lyric thus has exceedingly deep archaic roots expressing delight at the marvelous fruitfulness of the earth and associating it with romance between a man and a woman.

Literary allusions in the poem are broad and deep. Corydon’s name is derived from the Greek for lark, a bird with significant associations in poetry. The lark is often praised in poetry for the beauty of its soaring flight and complex song, [3] which during the Middle Ages had appeared in both devotional religious poetry and secular love lyrics. Though Breton is unlikely to have been familiar with this specific poem, Bernart de Ventadorn’s “Can vei la lauzeta mover” (“When I see the lark beat his wings”) can represent the bird’s medieval connotations. In Bernart the persona’s lovelorn depression is contrasted with the high-flying bird, rising and falling “per la doussor c’al cor li val” (“for the sweetness that comes to its heart”).

The primary role of Corydon’s name, however is simply to establish a link to the pastoral tradition. As a pastoral name, Corydon has a most distinguished pedigree, appearing in Theocritus and Vergil as well as in Spenser. [4] Pastoralism, since Theocritus wrote in Alexandria, has been an urban, one might say artificial and “romantic,” view of rural characters. Identifying lovers with shepherds and other country folk and conflating their passion with the general regeneration of life to which people have paid homage throughout history. In the Middle Ages the Classical pastoral tradition survived and developed into the pastourelle. [5] While the peasants danced around country maypoles, their social betters amused themselves by imitation in a quaintly cute and modish manner typified by Marie Antoinette going about her Hameau in an elegantly contrived shepherdess costume.

Phyllida is no less burdened with association. The name, a variation of Phyllis, meaning “greenery” or “covered with leaves” is like Corydon a conventional pastoral name, appearing in Vergil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid, as well as in the medieval Carmina Burana, . [6] The story in Ovid of her betrayal by Demophon pointedly reinforces the reservations of the woman in Breton.

There is no end to tracing the expanding circles of meaning, but I will conclude here with one comment on what seems a meaningful lexical choice. The second stanza opens with a vague declaration: “Much ado there was.” Modern readers will associate the word with Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in which the primary association of the word is all the fuss that arises about love-making. Here “ado” is euphemistic, similar perhaps to the modern expression “a little something something,” with a similarly jocular tone.

Among the semantic elements introduced by intertextual processes is the fundamental assent to life that marks the welcoming of spring and the delights of love in a cyclically renewed world in the references to May Day, reinforced by both names (birds and plants being part of nature) which also link this poem to the pastoral tradition, thereby suggesting its sophisticated literariness. Further Corydon is associated with earlier examples of love longing and Phyllida with betrayal, while I read “ado” as contributing to a sly high-spirited sexuality. The smooth meters and melodious rhymes reinforce the playful, joyful aspect of love.

Even a college textbook would probably provide notes on very few of these associations, yet the original audience might reasonably be expected to appreciate them to one degree or another. Furthermore, the very literary conventions that might irritate a twenty-first century reader delighted the listener in 1591. In addition to their semantic contribution, the intertextuality is decorative, providing a polished surface that invokes the authority of the Greek and Latin classics as well as secular popular custom and prior uses of the language. Readers enjoy their own competence in a relish of the familiar while the allusions render the themes more precisely, expressing at once the urgency of desire and the prudential reservations about risking oneself in love, the push and pull of ego out of which human relations are woven.

The ability of an audience to respond to such clues, to understand, though perhaps unconsciously, the connotations of every part of the poem is here a major portion of it signification. A reader, having recovered at least a part of this largely lost world of allusion, may return to the poem with greater appreciation of the joys and dangers of love and of the unique ability of the literary text to embody the contradictions of the most deeply human of experiences.


1. His stepfather was the poet and critic George Gascoigne who composed a great body of work, including extravagant rhetorical paeans to Queen Elizabeth.

2. It was then entitled “The Ploughman’s Song,” but when published in England’s Helicon, 1600, it was called “Phillida and Corydon.”

3. As Eliot correctly maintained in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” each new contribution to the ocean of words affects all earlier works. A brief mention of a few poems employing lark imagery that follow Breton’s may be suggestive. The name appears also in the popular collection The Passionate Pilgrim published shortly after “Phyllida and Corydon.” In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, published almost ten years after Breton’s poem, the lark is a figure of joyous flight to heights of sublimity, and in Milton’s “L’Allegro” the lark’s role is similar. For Milton the bird is the first of a catalogue of “unreprovéd pleasures free.” In Shelley’s “To a Skylark” the bird is the image of the poet. For Hopkins in “The Sea and the Skylark” the sense of jouissance associated with the lark is spiritual. In “the Caged Skylark” the bird represents the human soul.

4. Theocritus Idyll IV, Vergil Eclogues II, Spenser The Fairie Queen Bk. VI, Canto X.

5. Though early pastourelles typically concern the encounter of a country woman with a knight, the genre came to include many narratives in which both man and woman were rural folk. In Occitan the parallel convention is called pastorelas. In another development of medieval pastoralism Neidhart von Reuental wrote what critics call höfische Dorfpoesie (“courtly village poetry”).

6. Vergil in Eclogues 3, 5, 7, and 10; Horace Odes 2.4 and 4.11; Propertius IV.8; Ovid Heroides II; in the Carmina Burana “Phyllis and Flora.”



Phyllida and Corydon

In the merry month of May,
In a morn by break of day,
With a troop of damsels playing
Forth I rode, forsooth, a-maying,
When anon by a woodside,
Where as May was in his pride,
I espied, all alone,
Phyllida and Corydon.

Much ado there was, God wot!
He would love, and she would not:
She said, never man was true;
He says, none was false to you.
He said, he had loved her long:
She says, Love should have no wrong.

Corydon would kiss her then,
She says, maids must kiss no men,
Till they do for good and all.
Then she made the shepherd call
All the heavens to witness, truth
Never loved a truer youth.
Thus with many a pretty oath,
Yea, and nay, and faith and troth!--
Such as silly shepherds use
When they will not love abuse;
Love, which had been long deluded,
Was with kisses sweet concluded:
And Phyllida, with garlands gay,
Was made the lady of the May.

The Archaeology of Gray’s “The Progress of Poetry”

     One thinks casually of eighteenth-century Augustan literature as highly formal and conventional, its values derived from that age of Roman antiquity which was already belatedly looking backward toward the Greek. The learned classical references that ornament the poetry of the period may seem to be decorative only, signs of allegiance to the lofty standards of the ancient masters, a sort of pretty upper-class language that operated almost like slang, to indicate in shorthand fashion a background and values shared by many European intellectuals. Though Gray’s “The Progress of Poetry” contains numerous references that could be described in this way, there is a deeper, more archaic layer of mythology in his account. Embodying many traits of the nascent Romantic movement and familiar (as very few in earlier eras had been) with the oral poetries of traditional societies, Gray uses mythology in a passionate, intuitive, and personal way at the same time that he observes the usage accepted, even required, from poets in his day. While the conventional allusions support the straightforward burden of the poem as an account of poetry’s history from Classical times through the Middle Ages up to his own day, indeed to himself, this deeper personal level of mythology suggests an altogether different theme.
     Gray was an excellent Classical scholar, spending much of his life as a fellow at Cambridge. His familiarity with both Greek and Latin literature was far beyond that required to make the gestures toward antiquity that were de rigeur in his day. Such references as those in the opening stanza of “The Progress of Poetry” to the Aeolian lyre and to Helicon are as graceful and informative, if as lacking in originality, as the many similar allusions in other authors. The first of these images has a specific meaning significant in Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” but here it is largely conventional, signifying little more than poetry in general. Using such terms at the outset of a poem establishes the writer’s bona fides as a scholar qualified to compose poetry.
     Yet Gray is clearly, with Thomson, Collins, and Cowper, a precursor of Romanticism. The very fact of his imitating Pindar, rather than, like Samuel Johnson, Horace, is evidence for the revaluation taking place. Pindar’s poems are more open in form and associative in logic, spraying mythological names with abandon and daring the reader to keep up. His awareness, imperfect as it may have been, of the pre-Christian oral poetry Celtic, Norwegian, and Welsh, as well as from Lapland and America distinguishes him from earlier critics who would have felt such “primitive” poetry to be necessarily inferior. Further, his sympathetic ear equates with poetry the sounds of awakening nature, the “thousand rills,” the “laughing flowers,” the whole “rich stream of music,” he can hear “rebellow to the roar.” Thus the whole generative engine of nature is incorporated into his own verses.
     Somewhat optimistically Gray notes the power of art to make life livable, banishing “sullen Cares.” In a clear expression of the Romantic politics of radical dissent, he claims that poetry is associated with “Freedom’s holy flame,” ignoring the centuries-long association of art with the ruling class.
     In spite of such sympathetic approaches to Romantic ideals, Gray was criticized by Wordsworth in the seminal statement of Romantic poetic theory, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, for his inauthentic “curiously elaborate” language distant from that of ordinary prose in his “Sonnet” on the death of Richard West, surely one of Gray’s most strongly-felt compositions. While there is little doubt that Gray’s emotion was genuine and profound, the poem’s use of Apollo is as wholly conventional.
     The same vaguely unfocused generative powers of nature that fail to console the grieving poet underlie his excited joy at the beginning of “The Progress of Poetry,” where the transference of energy in the poem is originally felt in the flow of poetry itself, which is likened to the fructifying streams. In later stanzas the same redemptive force is attributed to Aphrodite by (stanza I.3), then to the Muse (II, 2), and finally to the figure of Fancy (III, 3). The successive appearance of these representations of the divine female support the concluding image of the poet as Pindar in the form of a “Theban Eagle,” soaring to the empyrean.
     Classed as one of the “graveyard poets,” Gray’s outlook was indeed melancholy. Apart from the loss of innocence of which he complains in his Eton College ode, “The Progress of Poetry” contains a catalogue of causes of suffering “Labour, and Penury, the racks of Pain” culminating in “Death” and conquerable only by the Muse which is able to banish “Night, and all her sickly dews.”
     Gray used the conventional images of Classical learning, invoking the goddess as an ally against these universal threats to mankind, but in his mind the goddess also assumed a very individual meaning. His muse was a lover but also a maternal figure protecting him from meanness and vice. Though she is associated with nature’s reverdie, she also protects against the uncontrolled passions. In his "Hymn to Ignorance" he appeals to the goddess of not-knowing, feeling he would be far happier with less insight and regretting that he “forsook” her “fond embrace.”
     In his “Ode to Spring” Venus’ powers are inadequate to do more than provide a temporary respite from cares; in the end the poet feels himself to be “a solitary fly.” Most pointedly, in the “Ode to Adversity” he praises adversity, particularized as “Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty,” as a “rigid nurse” who teaches “Virtue” and cultivates philosophy by teaching the poet “to love and to forgive.” Though “wit” had been the byword of Pope’s generation, according to the “Hymn to Ignorance” he feels “filial reverence” for the protective value of lack of knowledge, looking with nostalgia on earlier eras when the whole world was ruled by ignorance, undeceived by “Wit’s delusive ray” which may tempt people into transgression. In “The Progress of Poetry,” art is a firewall against “frantic Passions.” For Gray the divine female, though associated with fertility and love, is paradoxically an aid in self-control. While he is attracted to the Romantic values of imagination and emotion, he is cautious and seeks to moderate these potentially explosive forces. In Gray’s greatest poems, this mythology is highly ambivalent.
     At the end of “The Progress of Poetry” the persona takes flight like an eagle, an image familiar from Pindar, imitated by Bacchylides and Horace, and thus wholly acceptable as a routine ornament. The image of the high-flying poet is, of course, far more archaic than those writers. The notion of a poet/seer flying into the air to attain wisdom is one of the most common shamanistic tropes. Gray may have been wholly unaware of these archaic usages, but he reenacts them for the eighteenth century in his odes.
     Thus he sprinkles Classical allusion over the surface of his verse like a baker adding roses of icing to a cake, but, at the same time, at a subterranean level, he expresses his moral and existential anxieties and his hope for the liberation of poetic flight into the sublime. As psychological facts these tensions imply his own mental distress and internal division, while intellectually, they suggest the conflicts associated with his writing just on the brink of Romanticism. Perhaps such ambivalence is a factor in his extraordinarily small oeuvre which amounted during his lifetime to only thirteen poems, less than a thousand lines in total. If so, the poems he did write may be all the more dense and significant, precise and beautiful, for the ambiguity they suggest, more worthy perhaps than a few thousand lines of a lesser writer’s wholly conventional verse. Though Gray turned down the position of Poet Laureate, he had in his own day and has today far more readers than Colley Cibber who held the honor for decades or William Whitehead who succeeded him.

Allusion

     I have placed this in the theory category because it concerns the use of allusion in all literature and uses as evidence examples from an ancient text from Rome and modern ones from England and the USA. I realize I have constructed a somewhat discursive argument. Perhaps some readers will find relish the casual rolling motion with which I turn from one topic to another. I have long felt that literary scholars, who of all people are aware that form is indeed content, are far too slavish followers of a single highly standardized pattern in their own essays.
     Though many before me have noted the links from Horace to Dowson to Porter, I believe my use of them to make a point about allusion is original.



     Horace is a great poet of self-contradiction. He can write convincingly on behalf of voluptuary pastimes as well as of frugal sobriety; he is at once a man of patriotic idealism and a slavish sycophant; a common-sense Everyman of conventional opinions one moment, he is a decadent aesthete the next. The opening ode in his fourth book which begins “Intermissa, Venus” seems a sincere and moving statement of middle-aged erotic ambivalence until one notes Suetonius’ comment that he returned to the form after having taken leave of it only at the command of Augustus. (Indeed, some critics view the entire fourth book as an artifice to contain the poems praising the reign of the emperor whom the poet once opposed on the battlefield.)
     The persona begs Venus for relief, pleading age (he is fifty) and suggests she settle on a younger, more appropriate man to afflict with love, perhaps a certain Paulus Maximus. Should he find erotic success, this man will surely make her a worthy sacrifice – which the poet then describes in such extraordinary sensual terms – evoking visions of flutes, lyre, and pan-pipes and a chorus of dancing boys and girls -- that the poet finds himself aroused in spite of his intentions. As if to convince himself he declares he no longer takes pleasure in amours, “nec femina nec puer,” not even in drinking. Yet this very claim leads instantly to a tear at the thought of his frustrated love for Ligurinus which so affects him that he claims to be stricken silent, though the poem works its way without pause. The piece ends with a poignant image of the poet’s one-time lover receding in a dream, pursued across the Campus Martius, over streams, always just beyond reach, an eloquent image for desire.
     This scenario is beautiful and moving in itself, far more of course in Horace’s ever-so-artfully chosen words than in paraphrase, but the modern reader is likely to miss a significant element in the author’s intention. Even many who can read the Latin are unskilled in meter. Classical verse forms are difficult for English speakers to appreciate. The very use of quantitative meters and the rich variety of available patterns, each of them flexible in prescribed ways, produce effects virtually impossible to reproduce in translation. The reading of a really accomplished classicist who can melodiously respect vowel quantity in Greek or Latin lyric poetry while also observing accent and pitch in a fluid and expressive flow of words is very rare and very beautiful, a phenomenon, like a string quartet well-played by a one-man band.
     Still, the modern reader can scarcely doubt the importance in Horace’s own judgment of his use of particular meters. To support his claim to lasting fame the sole specific Horace offers (in 3.30) is that he, in the words of Pound’s translation, "first brought Aeolic song to Italian fashion" (“princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos deduxisse modos”), in other words, he imported Greek metrical patterns adapting them for the Latin language.
     The place of Greece as a source for Roman science, philosophy, and art was acknowledged, paralleling in some ways the role of China for Japan, though one might also cite the importation of Continental verse forms to England by Chaucer. The neoteroi of Catullus’ generation admired the Alexandrian Greeks, and Horace himself spent time in Athens doing advanced studies. So the initial meaning of a poet’s using Greek meters would be simply to identify himself as a savant. Horace’s use of the term Aeolian points directly to the work of Alkaios and Sappho, and there can be little doubt that the Latin poet intended for associations from the earlier writers to be part of his own effects. His use of Greek prosody constituted an allusion, implying that his own words could be fully understood only in connection with theirs. Commentators have long noted specific parallels with the two Lesbian poets, but in the broadest sense it is surely their passionate expression of love is their primary association.
     Just as Doric was associated with choral odes in Greek and the Epic literary dialect with Homeric or mock-Homeric content, the use of Aeolic carried erotic connotations. Horace, writing in Latin, could not use these Greek dialects but he could use the earlier poets’ meters. Many of his odes are in Sapphics and Alkaics, while “Intermissa, Venus” is in Asklepiadics, another pattern rich in choriambs. While most of the poetry of Asklepiades is lost, enough remains to suggest its likely character. Two versions by the Imagist poet Edwin A. Storer will provide a sample of Asklepiades’ tone. [1]


The Crown of Spring

     Sweet for the thirsty in summer is snow to drink; sweet for sailors after winter’s storms to see the crown of spring, but sweeter still when beneath one cloak two lovers lie, giving their thanks to Kypris.

At the Porch

     It is winter and the night is long. The Pleiades have travelled half their span, and I am passing by this door all wet with the rain.
     Suffering from her treachery, I long for her.
     O Kypris, it is not love you have sent me; it is some cruel shaft tipped with flame.

     It is clear that the meter for Horace was a significant allusion, a sign of the sort of verse he meant to compose, a code that has in modern times become obscure except to specialists. This is, of course, unsurprising, considering that Latin has been little spoken for a millennium and a half and that English speakers are not generally conscious of vowel quantity, but the fact is that most modern readers of English poetry are nearly equally deaf to the associations of poetic forms in their own language. People accustomed to the most casual and colloquial free verse have for the most part lost the ability to catch allusions in prosody apart from the very simplest. Tetrameters are likely to be perceived as more natural than pentameters and the sonnet remains recognizable, but the associations of most meters and stanza forms are lost on the general reader, resulting in a significantly impoverished reception of texts both old and new.
     The fin de siècle British writer Ernest Dowson uses a line from Horace’s ode as the title of his “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae,” though his meter is not English, Greek, or Latin, but rather French Alexandrines. In Horace the line “I am not as I was under the rule of the good Cynara” is nostalgic, referring to the speaker’s advancing age which, he says, has rendered him a poor candidate for Venus’ attentions. For Dowson on the other hand Cynara is his current courtly beloved, unattainable and perfect, of whom he thinks while having sex with a prostitute. [2] Like most love songs, this is a lack-love song. To be sure, the speaker has the kisses of a “bought red mouth,” but he is “desolate,” “sick,” and haunted by desire even as he calls “for madder music and for stronger wine.”
     The basis for the allusion, the similarity of the two Cynaras, is simply their unavailability. Whereas Horace had initially complained only of the universal decline that comes with age, Dowson possesses only too much vital energy, finding that no matter how “riotously” he flings roses, he cannot banish the shadow of the one he truly loves. The memory of Horace then simultaneously reinforces the fundamental feeling, the pain of the lover’s absence, and, by the contrast between the ancient and the modern poet, heightens for Dowson’s reader the lurid dramatic situation of Dowson’s persona. To the reader familiar with Horace, the allusion first engages by what is shared by the two unsatisfied lovers, but its effect is then complicated and enriched by their differences. Allusion quite commonly has an ironic intent, and the bathetic fall from ancient ideals to a reduced modernity is familiar from countless twentieth century works of which Joyce’s Ulysses is perhaps the most prominent example. Here, as in a great many instances, the allusive reference suggests an entire complex of relationships, some direct, some inverted, some otherwise skewed.
     A far greater gap than that between the lyrics of Horace and Dowson is that between Dowson and Cole Porter who appropriated Dowson’s chorus line that ends each stanza “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion” for his song from Kiss me, Kate “Always True to You in My Fashion.” Here Lois seeks to reassure her lover Bill, uneasy about her liaisons with sugar daddies, a full dozen of whom are detailed. The list retains the listener’s interest as it ranges from the expected (“a big tycoon in steel,” “an oilman known as ‘Tex’”) to the unlikely (“a wealthy Hindu priest”) and the edgy (“a madman known as Mack”), and concluding with a real person, Clark Gable. The tone is entirely flippant, but the singer proclaims her loyalty to her Bill, asking

How in hell can you be jealous
When you know, baby, I'm your slave?
I'm just mad for you
And I'll always be

     Porter’s playful amorality has nothing whatever in common with Dowson’s tortured and obsessive love. Indeed, for those familiar with the earlier poem, the allusion only enhances the libertine freedom of Porter’s high-spirited lyric. Further, one may safely assume that most listeners will be innocent of any knowledge of Dowson. In spite of this, his poem has left its traces by providing Porter’s starting point, and it underlies the thematic impulse of the lyrics.
     The song’s other allusions, mentions of Schlitz beer, Cadillac cars, and a “vet” (the show was staged in 1948), as well as the reference to Clark Gable, serve to provide a patina of contemporary relevance, a kind of sparkling topicality, that invites the Broadway audience members to believe that the song is about their own lives. This is not so very different from Horace’s references to Venus and Cupid as well as Cynara, Ligurinus, and Paulus Maximus, the last three of whom are thought to be historical figures.
     Allusion, like other rhetorical figures, [3] characterizes the aesthetic text. The study of rhetoric in this sense was for centuries the heart of literary theory and the foundation of practical criticism. In general such figures permit the expression of new thought and content that could not be formulated in ordinary transparent prose as well as aspiring to beauty. All literature, of course, must be built from the base of the previous body of writing. Pointed instances of allusion may have a number of functions, among them to vault the new text into the realm of art (in intention at least), to indicate universality, to decorate (either aesthetically or intellectually), to compress information, to thicken the meaning of all poetry, and ironic or other troping on the earlier text. This series from Horace to Dowson to Porter illustrates the importance and yet the subtle complexity and variety of allusive references, a figure of speech that requires the audience’s competent familiarity with the pre-existing tradition.



1. The Windflowers of Asklepiades and The Poems of Poseidippos, translated by Edward Storer; from The Poet’s Translation Series, Second Set, No. 5; London: The Egoist Press, 1920; pp. 3-17. The translations are also viewable on line at http://elfinspell.com/ClassicalTexts/Poetry/Asklepiades-Poseidippos/Storer-Asklepiades.html.

2. Biographical critics will identify her with Adelaide "Missie" Foltinowicz, the restauranteur’s daughter and sometime waitress with whom he had been smitten when she was eleven. When she was fifteen, he proposed to her and was rejected.

3. I will not trouble myself over the terminology of rhetorical figures which have been classified also as tropes and schemata and analyzed into figures of thought, of speech, of sound, and of syntax, For the present purpose a rhetorical figure is any usage by which a written passage conveys meaning beyond the direct literal signification.