High style

This is the fourth and (?)last in a short run of postmortem devlogs following the release of CWKB. I offer these in case they're useful!

Most people, in most places and at most times, have one or more high styles in writing and speech. This is particularly true for verse: the norm, around the world, is a shift in word-choice, order, and delivery.

For much of its history, English sustained high style. In the centuries that left evidence, Old English poetry, for instance, marshals a vocabulary of extra words apparently restricted to verse; it is also prone to far more parallel variation than Old English prose. If it had ever been instinctual, by the time of the manuscripts which preserve most of it, it was a cultivated skill: some literate English writers learned it only imperfectly.

Though English remained in written use through the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, it may not often have risen to high style. Lawman (Laȝamon) seems to construct something of the sort in his Brut, but I suspect that for a writer like Thomas of Hales, high style was a matter for Latin and perhaps French.

In the later Middle Ages, high style again becomes an option in English. England at this point fosters several ways of writing poetry with grandeur. Some later-medieval alliterative verse seems relatively demotic: Piers Plowman varies a great deal in style and incorporates the colloquial as well as (say) the biblical and homiletic and even, in the harrowing of hell, something like epic. But other alliterative-verse poems do seem consistently aspirational. Erkenwald and the Alliterative Morte Arthur, for instance, build for themselves ambitious speechworlds full of faux-archaism and high things, sometimes risking bathos (or, I'm tempted to say, cringe).

Yet in the same period other high styles were available. The fifteenth century’s enthusiastic adoption of Chaucer’s five-beat line—pentameter, if you insist—produced some determinedly high-flying poetry. Whether or not we like it, we must acknowledge the (over?)reach of aureate Scots verse or much of Lydgate's corpus. In time, these post-Chaucerian high styles would survive and bring forth descendants, while the continuous tradition of alliterating poetry in half-lines would wither. But the variety is significant.

From the later sixteenth century on, readers can more easily trace high style in English because people start writing about how to do it. In the early modern period, as before, it’s notable that the styles with aspirational sheen shift about and vary from poet to poet. Paradise Lost famously comes with a note on the barbarousness of rhyme, while The Civill Warre uses rhyming couplets. I think Paradise Lost succeeds more, but we know Abraham Cowley was aiming high. In the eighteenth century, heroic couplets quite like Cowley’s would bear high style, though they would not themselves be high style. You can be earthy, or funny, or amorous, et cetera, in heroic couplets, as you can in most forms.

Overall formal choices don't control style, then, or at least don't control it alone. We think of Old English alliterative verse as grand and serious in part because Beowulf has rather more fame than some of the verse riddles. But alliterating half-lines can sound colloquial: 

Selling trim trainers | and tryna eat,
no cash just miskeen, | cold in the streetlight.

We might also note that high style is often (always?) imagined, constructed, usually with desirous attention to the past. Old English poetry uses some words that were apparently dead outside of verse. No one in the fourteenth century spoke with the elegance of Chaucer’s Criseyde in her most poised moments. In different ways, Milton and the Augustans strove for something that’d echo Greek and Latin hexameters, but—whatever the virtues of their work—wrote nothing truly like those models, because English’s another kind of tongue. In the late nineteenth century, Swinburne wrote a mock-medieval stanzaic romance, The Tale of Balen, but his source book in Malory is prose. The effect recalls the Victorian institutions which knocked down insufficiently medieval medieval buildings to replace them with a revived hypergothic.

All constructions. But imagined doesn’t mean unreal. France is imaginary; France also has prisons and nukes. High style exists, true enough, even if it’s always made-up.

My little history hadn't reached the present. High style hasn’t vanished, but it has dwindled, and it has lost prominence. Traditional literary history would say it went out with… maybe the death of Yeats? It’s hard to have high style when novelistic prose has won opinion’s commanding heights. This may help to explain the appeal of Tolkien and the more literate kind of fantasy writer to their different and often larger audiences.

If you’ve read this far you won’t be surprised when I say I’m fond of high style, and I feel we could stand to write more in it—in its various imagined, mocked-up forms, pointing in various directions. Kin-Bright doesn’t rely on high style throughout. At points it even dips into the very informal (‘smicker-smatch’!). But the poem does contain a great deal of it.

I don’t offer high style as a prescription for poetry in general. Poets fall prey so easily to the vice of manifestoes. All poetry should never be doing just one thing. Nor would I want even all formed poetry to focus on high style: The Call-Out (say) shows some of the possibilities for the contemporary verse novel of formal verse that rarely reaches high. Novelistic possibilities; perhaps it’s no coincidence that CWKB is not a novel.

All poetry should never be doing just one thing. I worry much more about the narrowing of options than about the relative merits of different options. That forms one big reason why CWKB is the way it is, however lumbering, gusty, bombastic—cringe—that makes it. Not everyone will approve. But feedback from readers suggest that the poem’s experiments in high style played a big role in its appeal.

What about reactionary formalism? Well, some formalists are also reactionaries. I’m not so sure, though, that forms carry that much force themselves. Aesthetic choices don’t stand wholly sealed off from politics—‘everything is political’ is trivially true—but the two don’t wholly merge, either. Those who think otherwise will one day wrench their aesthetics for their politics (embarrassing) or their politics for their aesthetics (fatal). And if you’d place yourself on the left, or even with the lukewarm liberals, do you really want to cede grandeur to reaction?

Previous postmortem entries:

• You can just write what you want
• Starting at the start
  
• Austerity and maximalism